Scrabble?! DEFECTIVES

Definitions of DEFECTIVES in various dictionaries:

A defective script is a writing system that does not represent all the phonemic distinctions of a language. For example, Italian has seven vowels, but the Italian alphabet has only five vowel letters to represent them; in general, the difference between close /e, o/ and open /ɛ, ɔ/ is simply ignored, though stress marks, if used, may distinguish them. Among the consonants, both /s/ and /z/ are written ⟨s⟩, and both /ts/ and /dz/ are written ⟨z⟩, though not many words are distinguished by the latter. Stress and hiatus are not reliably distinguished.Such shortcomings are not uncommon. The Greek alphabet was defective during its early history. Ancient Greek had distinctive vowel length: five short vowels, /i e a o u/, and seven long vowels, /iː eː ɛː aː ɔː oː uː/. When the Phoenician alphabet was adapted to Greek, the names of five letters were pronounced by the Greeks with initial consonants made silent, and were then used acrophonically to represent vowels. These were alpha, e (later called e psilon), iota, o (later called o micron), and u (later called u psilon) – <α, ε, ι, ο, υ> – five letters for twelve vowel sounds. Later the [h] dropped from the Eastern Greek dialects, and the letter heta (now pronounced eta) became available; it was used for /ɛː/. About the same time the Greeks created an additional letter, o mega, probably by writing o micron with an underline, that was used for /ɔː/. Digraphs ei and ou were adopted for /eː/ and /oː/. Thus Greek entered its classical era with seven letters and two digraphs – <α, ε, ι, ο, υ, η, ω, ει, ου> – for twelve vowel sounds. Long /iː aː uː/ were never distinguished from short /i a u/, even though the distinction was meaningful. Although the Greek alphabet was a good match to the consonants of the language, it was defective when it came to some vowels.Other ancient scripts were also defective. Egyptian hieroglyphs had no vowel representation at all, while the cuneiform script frequently failed to distinguish among a consonant triad like /t/, /d/ and /t'/ (emphatic /t/), or between the vowels /e/ and /i/. Languages with a long literary history have a tendency to freeze spelling at an early stage, leaving subsequent pronunciation shifts unrecorded. Such is the case with English, French, Greek, Hebrew, Persian, and Thai, among others. By contrast, some writing systems have been periodically respelled in accordance with changed pronunciation, such as Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Irish Gaelic, and Japanese hiragana. A broadly defective script is the Arabic abjad. The modern script does not normally write short vowels, but for the first few centuries of the Islamic era, long vowels were not written and many consonant letters were ambiguous as well. The Arabic script derives from the Aramaic, and not only did the Aramaic language have fewer phonemes than Arabic, but several originally distinct Aramaic letters had conflated (become indisting...