A phonemic orthography is an orthography in which the graphemes correspond consistently to the language's phonemes, or more generally to the language's diaphonemes.[1] Phonemic orthographies have the highest possible level of orthographic depth, as they have exact grapheme to phoneme correspondence.
For a systemic analysis of the phoneme/grapheme correspondence, Petr Sgall distinguishes two conditions, both of which are to be satisfied for a phonemic orthography:[2]
in any context, a given grapheme is pronounced as the same phoneme ("uniqueness of pronunciation")
in any context, a given phoneme is written with the same grapheme ("uniqueness of spelling")
On the other hand, Morris Swadesh defined "phonetic orthography" or "phonetic alphabet" as a writing system to make a phonetic record using symbols for "selected characteristic points in the total range of possible speech sounds",[1]:365 this is more commonly referred to as "phonetic transcription".
