Morphologically motivated spellings in English are usually thought to be restricted to cases like 〈electric – electrician – electricity〉, where the stem final letter 〈c〉 is kept constant in spelling although the corresponding phoneme varies in spoken language. However, there are many more – and fundamentally different – spellings that refer to morphological information. We will show this by systematically going through the three major parts of morphology: inflection, derivation, and compounding. In each area, we will identify spellings that can best be explained with reference to morphology. As a result, we will present an overview of formal and functional means of morphological spellings which goes far beyond the ubiquitous example cited above. Keywords: English; spelling; writing system; morphology; stem constancy

Minuscules of the Roman alphabet can be subcategorized into graphemes with length (for example 〈b〉) and graphemes without length (for example 〈o〉). While plosives, which correspond to graphemes with length, occur at the syllable edge, vowels, corresponding to graphemes without length, constitute the syllable core. Based on these observations, a length hierarchy is established in which the feature ‘length’ becomes scalar. This hierarchy operates on graphematic grounds exclusively, thus being independent of phonological properties. Still alength sequencing principleas the ordering principle of the graphematic syllable can be formulated analogous to the phonologicalsonority sequencing principle. The length sequencing principle may be considered a typological feature to serve further descriptions of different graphematic systems based on the Roman alphabet. Data from German and English will be discussed. Keywords:graphematic syllable; graphotactics; length sequencing principle; length hierarchy; letter shape; sonority

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Besides some well-established forms like autoritär ‘authoritarian’; humanitär ‘humanitarian’; new coinages ending with -itär can be found in German. These adjectives are closely related to nouns ending with -ität. From an etymological point of view; these formations are morphologically transparent. Not only are the adjectives new; but -itär emerges as a new suffix.