Writing both difference and similarity : towards a more unifying and adequate orthography for the newly written languages of Ethiopia : the case of Wolaitta , Gamo , Gofa and Dawuro

Among the most important linguistic developments in Ethiopia since 1991, the development of written forms for many languages that did not have orthographies before has been one. By far the most diverse region in terms of the number of languages spoken is the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Regional State (SNNPRS). This paper deals with the pan-dialectal orthography designed for Wolaitta, Gamo, Gofa and Dawuro (WOGAGODA here after), closely related speech varieties spoken in a contiguous territory within the SNNPRS. The orthography has been designed by a team of local experts who comprises of the four groups and has been put to use since February, 2003. The orthography follows the Alphabetic writing system and makes use of an extended version of the Latin script. Among the various limitations the orthography exhibits, over-representation and under-representation of the phonemic inventory of WOGAGODA is one. The main objective of this study is, therefore, to examine the orthography under concern particularly from the point of phoneme-grapheme relationship, irregularity in symbolizing phonemic features and problems associated with diagraphs, etc. Further, the study tries to look at reading difficulties arising from the interference of readers’ knowledge of the English orthography in using the WOGAGODA orthography and vice versa. The two languages use the same writing system but not always the same conventions of sound-grapheme relationship. The paper suggests ways of developing a simpler, more systematic, and unified alphabet that is also more harmonious with the English Alphabet.

not language of literacy.Since 1991, however, the country has undergone major political changes that had farreaching implications for language policy and language use.Among other things, regional governments that were mostly organized along ethnic lines have been set up and empowered to govern their respective regions and work towards the development of local cultures, including the development of local languages.
The education and training policy (1994) promotes the use of regional and local languages basically for both pedagogical and ideological reasons.It endorses the idea that learning in the mother tongue has clear pedagogical advantages for the child, who feels comfortable and reassured by their ability to understand and analyse information in their own language.The new policy further endorses the claim that the use of local languages in education accords with the rights of nationalities to selfexpression that are enshrined in the constitution of Ethiopia.
The Ethiopian education system aims to produce equity and provide primary education to an increasing proportion of children in the state.This includes, providing education in children's mother tongue languages, and thereby making education more accessible.The Ethiopian education system aims to produce equity and provide primary education to an increasing proportion of children in the state.This includes, providing education in children's mother tongue languages, and thereby making education more accessible.(Cohen, 2007:2) Wolaitta, Gamo, Dawuro and Gofa are spoken in a contiguous territory in the southern nations, nationalities and people's regional state (SNNPRS), in an area previously known as "North Omo Zone".Recently, following a decision to have a restructuring of the administration zone, the "North Omo Zone" has been further split into three smaller administrative zones, namely, Gamo-Gofa, Wolaitta and Dawuro-Konta zones.Genetically, the four dialects are classified as members of the North Ometo sub-group within the Ometo group of the Omotic language family.The North Ometo subgroup is one of the four subgroups of the Ometo group comprising several related languages and dialects (Fleming 1976).
The four speech varieties are mutually intelligible, sharing a significant portion of their vocabulary and grammatical features.The cognates shared by the dialects extend beyond 80% and a slightly greater distance exists between Gamo and Dawuro, which share 79% cognates.The four varieties have also a large amount of phonological and grammatical shared features to be considered as dialect variants rather than separate languages (Bender 1976, 2000, Fleming 1976).This is in keeping with the criteria employed in characterizing various regional dialects of other major languages of the country.In fact, the closeness between the dialects is such that one could expect that an orthography developed for one of them could as well serve the other three with little or no modification.However, things on the ground are more complicated than what the purely linguistic data tends to suggest.The major source of complication is the fact that similarity in the speech forms does not reflect itself in the form of shared sense of identity among the speakers of the dialects.Elites in each of the four communities tend to assert their distinctiveness vis-à-vis the rest and see little commonality of culture or other forms of affinity.This stands in strong contrast to the situation among some major linguistic communities in the country, most notably among the Oromo who, in spite of considerable differences of culture and dialect all identify themselves as Oromo and share a strong sense of affinity.
For most local people, there are only the Wolaitta, Gamo, Dawro and Gofa languages, cultures and identities, each independent of the other and recognizing nothing beyond mere contiguity of territory by way of commonalities that binds it to the others.This sense of difference is doubtless exaggerated by the noticeable phonological, lexical and grammatical variations which serve as dialectal markers.Adding more complication to the matter is the fact that Gamo, one of the variants, has multiple dialects of its own such as D'aacetstso, diitatstso, Dookkotstso and K'ucatstso, Baltatstso, Garbansatstso, Ochollo, etc (Hirut 2007a: 214).
In the process of implementing mother tongue education, successive attempts have been made to find one common language/dialect that can serve as a medium of instruction for all the major groups in the locality used to be known as "North Omo Zone".First, Wolattia was selected by the local administration among the others to serve as a common language for all.When that was not accepted by the other groups, Wolaitta was maintained only for the respective group.Then, DAGOGA (Dawuro- Gofa-Gamo), a hybrid or composite language was created by merging linguistic elements from Gamo, Gofa and Dawuro to serve as a language of textbook that can be used by all the three concerned groups.Again, another composite medium of instruction and a text book language known as WOGAGODA was created by a team of local experts out of the linguistic elements of Wolaitta, Gamo, Gofa and Dawuro.Note that, DAGOGA and WOGAGODA are not "languages, they are simply local convenient acronymic labeling conventions used by the local administration for referring to pan-dialectal linguistic identities.Some informants argue that the reason is a political one not to recognize each dialect as an independent linguistic group.However, all attempts by the local administration to form a common composite dialect have failed as the consecutive endeavors were rejected by the people.At last, the local administration has accepted the people's proposal to use its respective individual dialect as a medium of instruction and a language of textbook in its particular locality (Hirut, 2007b).However, the orthography designed for the pandialectal composite linguistic forms is still under use by all the four groups.The orthography, which is the main issue in this study, has been design by local experts in the area.The orthography involves a set of pan-dialectal unified conventions with, apparently, some minor concessions for each dialect.It adopts the alphabetic writing system and makes use of an extended version of the Latin script.The script follows its own spelling conventions and sound-symbol mapping that is different from English and other languages using the same script.The main objectives of this paper were to examine this orthography against the phonemic inventories of the dialects, identify its shortcomings, and suggest ways of improving it.Before getting down to the results and analysis, it would be necessary to give a brief overview of the phonemic accounts of the four dialects first.

Consonants
Wolaitta, Gamo, Gofa and Dawuro share the greatest majority of their consonant inventories.Consonants in the four dialects can be categorized into six categories: stops, fricatives, affricates, nasals, approximants and semi-vowels.In addition, in all the four variations there is a three-way distinction between voiceless, voiced and ejective consonants for stops, fricatives and affricates in several places of articulation.On the other hand, the phonemic inventories of the four dialects do show certain differences both in terms of number and type.The following chart presents the consonant phonemes in Wolaitta, Gamo, Gofa and Dawuro (Adams (1983) for Wolaitta and Samuel (2004) for Gamo; Moreno (1938) for Gofa; Bender (1976) for Dawuro).Peculiarities to each dialect are indicated in brackets; Wo stands for Wolaitta, Ga stands for Gamo, Go stands for Gofa and Da stands for Dawuro (Table 1).
As displayed in the chart, Gamo has twenty-six consonant phonemes while Dawuro, Wolaitta and Gofa have twenty-five phonemes each.Gamo has one peculiar consonant, /dz/, which is absent from the others.The orthography developed for the four dialects does not include a symbol for this consonant.This has been perceived as negatively by many speakers of Gamo who believe that the unique consonant of their dialect is under-represented by the orthography and in a way that disfavors the group.There is no linguistic ground, however, to disregard this phoneme from being represented in the script.Phonemic inventories of the four dialects also show variation with respect to the consonants /t'/ and /s'/.Wolaitta has /t'/ while the other three have /s'/ instead.The consonants /t'/ and /s'/ variably occur in the cognates of the four dialects as illustrated below in table 2.

Vowels
The vocalic inventory is the same for all the four dialects.

Tone-accent
From the studies made so far, the dialects under consideration are recognized as tone-accent languages (cf.Azeb (1996) for Wolaitta, Hayward (1994) for Gamo).In such dialects, a change in tone pattern of a word may result in change in the word's meaning.The following minimal pairs from Gamo illustrate this point.With this basic information on the phonemic inventories of the dialects under investigation, we shall now proceed to an examination of the orthography designed for them.

MATERIALS AND METHODOLOGY
The study was conducted based on data collected from teachers who were involved in mother tongue education in the concerned localities.Local experts who were engaged in mother tongue education, designing the orthography and preparation of the textbooks serve as informants.Qualitative research methodology was employed to collect the necessary data on the problems associated with the practical use of the orthography.The data was collected by the researcher herself through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires.Amharic, the language serving as a lingua franca in Ethiopia, was used as a medium of communication with the informants.The authors' critical investigation of the orthography against the phonological inventories of the four dialects has been accounted in the study.The research, however, has a limitation.It failed to employ a method of testing the students' practical challenges that arise out of the shortcomings of the orthography.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
The Orthography of WOGAGODA and its problems The orthography formulated for Wolaitta, Gamo, Gofa and Dawuro employs the Alphabetic Writing System with an extended version of the Latin Script.It incorporates its own system of spelling, different sound-symbol mapping and punctuation conventions.
The orthography under concern consists of 34 letters.Every letter has two forms, one capital and one small, so that the overall number of symbols in the orthography is 68.The four dialects contain certain orthographically important consonants for which the Latin letters do not offer equivalents.This is what necessitated diagraphs.
Though the orthography appears to be phonemic, it does not ensure a one-to-one correspondence between the graphemes (letters) and the phonemes of the dialects in such a way that each phoneme would be represented by its corresponding grapheme.There are cases of overrepresentation and under-representation of phonemes of the four dialects in the orthography.There are also circumstances in which the spelling of a word would not fully or unambiguously represent the phonemes.The orthography displays a number of deviations from what can be called the phonemic ideal orthography.To begin with, an exact one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and a grapheme/letter does not exist because there is a case of under-representation of some of the phonemes in the script.Conversely, the script shows an over-representation as it comprises graphemes for which no phoneme counterpart exists in the dialects.
Moreover, phonemic features represented by a diagraph do not follow regularity, which means that there is no an algorithm for predicting the pronunciation from the spelling and vice versa.There are also irregularities that arise from conventional spelling of certain words in ways that does not accord with the representation of sounds in the orthography.
The orthography also exhibits the use of a diagraph, a sequence of characters combined together to represent one phoneme.Such a situation has been creating ambiguity in reading.This happens because of the fact that the pair of letters does not correspond to the sum total of the readings of the each character as presented later in this section.
Below, table 4 presents chart of the WOGAGODA alphabet with the phonemic representation given in italic symbols).
Below we shall look at each of the issues raised in some detail.However, it might be useful to note that, in all cases, the yardstick on the basis of which the orthography is deemed to fall short is based on the widely acknowledged connection between clear and unambiguous system of writing and facility of reading and learning.As Grace (2006:1) puts it: "the orthography that facilitates the mapping of speech sounds in the language with the symbols representing them facilitates the reading skills and cognitive capacity of the students".Research on phoneme awareness indicates that early instruction linking speech sounds to alphabetic symbols strengthens phonemic awareness, decoding skills, spelling and word reading (see also Henry (2004), Hooper and Moats (2010), Cheung and Chen (2004).

Problems of under-representation
The orthography under study fails to represent certain

WOGAGODA alphabet and phonemic representation
important consonant phonemes of the four linguistic variants.One such a phoneme is /d z /, the voiced alveolar affricate consonant, that appears in words like kond z a 'a cup made up of clay', wond z a 'accumulated milk in the breast', zind z o 'cockroach' and band z o 'danger'.In fact, the consonant /d z / in Gamo has a phonemic status and brings a meaning change in a minimal pair as in below.

heeza
'like this' heed z a 'three' edo 'chorus' ed z o 'an instrument of music' pidd z o 'a kind of short used by men' piddo 'outspread (for cloth)' The fact that d z is missing from the script chart has consequences for Gamo since it is a distinct phoneme and cannot be represented even by characters of related consonants such as /z/ or /d/.
Apart from the practical problem, omission of this consonant from the orthography seems to have created negative impressions among the speakers of Gamo towards the orthography.Teachers who participated in the development of the orthography and interviewed in Arbaminch by the author confirmed that there has been an ongoing complaint by the Gamo to the effect that an important sound of their language has been made to disappear from the script.Indeed, a Gamo-speaking member of the Orthography developing taskforce is held responsible by them for this crucial omission, or rather exclusion.An explanation from the script developers is that consonant dz was excluded from the script because it is not a common feature of all the four linguistic variants, that it is a distinct feature of only one variant.Some members of the Gamo group has reflected regretfully on this issue that the script should have been loyal to the phonemic inventory of each one of the linguistic varieties, without exception, all the more so since each one is functioning as a distinct written language in its respective locality.However, this might have been taken as a strategy to promote a unified pan-dialectal orthography and a medium of instruction that would encourage ethnic harmony and integration.As mentioned earlier, the orthography was initially designed to write WOGAGODA, a composite language that was designed to serve as a medium of instruction for all the four groups.
Another consonant which has not been properly incurporated in the orthography is the glottal stop.This consonant has a phonemic status in all the four dialects (see, for instance, Hampo 1990, Samuel 2004, Bender, 1976and Adams 1983).Strangely, the glottal stop is inserted in the orthography by way of an endnote in the script list, that merely states that states: "Notice: '7' is a symbol used to write and read vowels that are altered into consonants."This note fails to recognize the true nature of the consonant that it mistakenly consi-ders the sound segment primarily as a vowel that has changed into a consonant.Among the Ometo varieties, glottal stop is observed occurring frequently as a distinct consonantal phoneme.In general, the script has failed to consider it as one of the important consonant phonemes.
The other point that has to be raised here is the case of tone-accent.As shown earlier, tone-accent can determine the meaning of a word in the four dialects.It is therefore essential that it is represented in the orthography.To use the words of Pike, (1947:210), "… where tone and stress are phonemic and affect the meanings of words they should be symbolized….These symbols should be used to distinguish words where the tone is the only distinctive characteristic."It should be noted that underrepresentation of phonemes and phonemic features is a far more serious problem for learners than overrepresentation.

Problem of over-representation
In contrast to missing out exiting sounds, the orthography under consideration comprises three letters representing speech sounds that do not exist in the phonemic system of any of the four dialects.These are: V/v that stands for voiced labio-dental fricative [v], NY/ny [Ƞ] voiced palatal nasal and NH/nh, which has no consonantal representation but stands for nasalization according to my informants.The implication here is that it is a noncontrastive phonological processs of an element that is otherwise oral and it has a low functional load.It is not clear at all why this symbol is needed in the list since nasalization is not an important phonological feature in the dialects (see for instance Samuel 2004).
Further research is needed as to why and how the decision was made to have this character included in the orthography.As shown above (in table 1), the phonemic inventory of the Wolaitta, Gamo, Gofa and Dawuro dialects does not include the consonants /v/ and / Ƞ /.
Evidently, the fact that the orthography contains unnecessary symbols means that it has elements that affect the learning process negatively.It unnecessarily adds to the number of symbols in the orthography and, therefore, to the burden of the learners.This is against one of the principles of a practical orthography to the effect that there should be no more symbols than there are phonemes (Pike 1947: 208).A good orthography should represent and reflect only the phonemes that exist in the language.

Not accounting the interference from/to English reading
The language policy in the SPNNR dictates that English will be thought as a subject starting from grade one and used as a medium of instruction starting from grade five.In fact, English plays a big role in the educational system of Ethiopia in general.Though both English as well as the local languages under discussion are alphabet based, it so happens that certain symbols represent different sounds across the languages.It is now well accepted that performance on phonological-awareness is important for learning to read.The reader understanding of how the writing system of a language encodes the spoken form and how each grapheme represents a sound is a very good predictor of reading ability in children (Lyon, 1998).
When a student encounters sound-grapheme relationships in the local languages that are inconsistent with English, it can be said that a situation that negatively affects the reading process has occurred.It would have been a great advantage to the learner if the value of the letters in the orthography of the local languages corresponds to their value in English.It is now an established fact that the orthography of first language (L1) has an effect on second language (L2) reading and reading skills acquired from learning to read a first language.Orthographic structure of a reader's L1 has been shown to affect the way that they recognize words in their L2.L1 orthographic properties systematically affect L2 word recognition as the L1 word recognition is transferred to L2 word recognition (Miller, 2011: 79-80).The orthography under discussion does not seem to take this reality into consideration.Consequently, as the information from the teachers confirms it, the situation creates confusion among the learners who are shifting back and forth between English and the mother tongue, the two languages using the same writing system but differently.It was also indicated that the condition affects students' English reading proficiency.Very often, students misread English lessons with an interference of the orthographic conventions from the mother tongue.
This happens because cross-linguistic influences interfere with their efforts to establish clear sound-symbol correspondences and work in ways that carry over sounds from the mother tongue to English.According to interviews with the teachers, who were using Gamo as a medium of instruction, students often try to establish a three way relationship among soundsymbol-teacher to overcome the recognition problem associated with different readings of a single letter in different languages, that is, in English and the local language.They say, for instance, letter c represents k (the voiceless velar stop consonant) for English language teacher while it represents č' (the palatal affricate ejective consonant) for all other teachers using the mother tongue as a medium of instruction.It has been attested that in self-contained classes where a single teacher teaches both English and the mother tongue, the problem is even more severe as the sound-letter relationship cannot be associated with different teachers.There are students who consider their teachers as 'inconsistent'.According to interviews with the teachers, students often complain that their teachers are misleading them, teaching them contradictory lessons in English and the mother-tonguebased subjects.The interviewed teachers agreed that this makes reading difficult for the little children, making them commit reading errors in both English as well as mother tongue by affecting spelling predictability which is of course based on the orthographic convention of sound/ symbol correspondences.According to an English teacher in Arbaminch1 schools, the following are some examples of English words which are frequently misinterpreted or misread by the students.As shown in table 5.
Similarly, x, which stands for ks in English is associated with the ejective consonants s'/ t' in the mother tongue.This results in making reading errors as in ( 5) below: The above instances show that properties of the orthography for Wolaitta, Gamo, Dawuro and Gofa affect how students recognize words in English due to the cross-orthographic influence.According to the teachers who were participating in the interview, the situation affects students' word recognition processes by creating uncertainty about the kinds of sound-symbol association they employ in different school subjects.The use of one symbol to generate different sounds in different subjects is obviously complicating.Cross-linguistic studies of word recognition have shown that orthographic features of a reader's first language affect second language word recognition (Akamatsu 2003 andMiller 2011).As long as the two languages that the student deals with share the same system of letters, the advantages of assigning the same sound value to the same symbol in both languages is thus only too apparent.

Problems associated with diagraphs
A diagraph is a compound letter, a sequence of two characters representing a single phoneme.As shown above (in table 1), the orthography under examination comprises eight diagraphs.These are NY/ny, NH/nh, SH/sh, TH/th, ZH/zh, CH/ch and DH/dh.The use of compound letters to represent sounds which do not exist in the Latin script is not a problem by itself.The problem is that, in some cases a component of a compound letter, when it occurs in isolation, represents a different sound from what it represents within the compound.In other words, the sound represented by a compound letter differs from the sounds represented by each componential member.That means, a compound letter is associated with two possible readings that creates ambiguity.
The following table shows the compound letters with their two readings, that is, as a unit and a sequence (Table 6).

Lack of Uniformity in representing ejective consonants
If a phonemic feature gets represented regularly by a diacritic marker one can easily predict the pronunciation from the form, and vice versa.In the process of learning to read, students need to establish relationships between phonemes (that is, the sounds they hear) in a word and the graphemes (or the letters that represent those sounds).Students may face difficulties transferring their phonological awareness to writing if a script is not prepared in ways that enables them to learn mapping words while diagramming the letter/sound relationship (Grace 2006, Hooper andMoats 2010).

Each has a non-glottal counterpart:
p, s/t, c and k.
It would have been ideal to capture the glottalization by adding some kind of diacritic mark uniformly on the respective non-glottal consonant.This would have reduced the memory burden of the learners, as the sounds and their representative symbols have a systematic relationship.The orthography under discussion, however, lacks uniformity in symbolizing the ejective consonants.As shown above, there is actually no formal relationship between the non-ejective and ejective consonant counterparts: The suggestion here is that ejective consonants have to be formed from their respective non-ejective ones by adding a common diacritic mark in such a way that students can have memory correspondences between the two sets; that is, highly likely to facilitate learning.As shown in Table 7.

Problem of using numerals as letters
In the orthography under examination, there are three letters which have forms identical to Arabic numerals.These are: 1 which represents a voiced lateral stop as well as, of As presented in Table 4, the glottal stop is represented by number 7 and is introduced in the form of a footnote in the orthography with a notice that states: "Notice: '7' is a symbol used to write and read vowels that are altered into consonants." The use of the symbol '7' stands for two readings as a glottal stop and as numeral seven the situation creates ambiguities of reading.In this case, the reader would be left to make his or her own decision as to which of the representations were meant.
According to teacher-informants, when these letters occur consecutively, students often get confused as to whether they should read them as numerals or as letters.For instance, students often read the word for 'beautiful/good', '10770', as 'ten thousand seven hundred and seventy'.The two are written the same way.

CONCLUSIONS
This paper has aimed at examining the orthography of WOGAGODA to identify its shortcomings, and suggest ways of improving it.Accordingly, it has unraveled that the orthography exhibits problems that arise from omission of phonemes that might be crucially important for one or another of the speech varieties and the use of symbols that create ambiguities.As the paper argued, these shortcomings would negatively affect learning among school children and most likely inhibit possibilities for ethnic harmony and integration.Therefore, to avoid these problems it needs to develop a simpler, more practical, and unified alphabet for all the four dialects.To this end, as an option, the researcher has forwarded the following recommendations based on Pike (1947:208).

RECOMMENDATIONS
Avoiding unnecessary letters: Extra and unnecessary symbols that do not represent phonemes of the dialects Woldemariam 51 should be excluded from the script.Thus, symbol V/v that represents consonant [v], symbol NY/ny that represents consonant [ň] and symbol NH/nh that represents a nasalized vowel that actually does not have a phonological value in the dialects under consideration may better be excluded from the script.As indicated earlier (section 2 above), these consonants are not part of the phonemic inventory of the dialects.

Recognizing existing phonemes:
The orthography needs to be equally loyal to all the dialects that it represents.Thus, the phoneme /dz / of Gamo has to be represented in the orthography.One possible way to represent this complex consonant in the script may be by using a compound letter dz.
Similarly, the glottal stop, which is a distinct phoneme in the four dialects, has to be represented in the orthography.Instead of being introduced in a footnote as it is currently, it should appear with the other letters in the script.The glottal stop can be represented by using a question mark without the lower dot as used in the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) or an apostrophe (').The use of the symbol 7 is not at all recommended because it confuses the reader with the symbol for the Arabic numeral '7'.
The glottalalized consonants: As mentioned earlier, the orthography under study contains symbols ph, x, c and Q, which are used to represent the ejective consonants p', t'/s', c' and k' respectively.As indicated earlier, the ejective consonants in the four dialects have non-glottal counterparts.It would be pedagogically helpful if a set of sounds which share a common special phonetic feature like glottalization exhibit a certain degree of regularity in their form.All the ejective consonants in these dialects can, therefore, be represented uniformly by using an apostrophe mark next to their respective non-glottal counterparts as shown below.This can make learning easier and faster.The use of apostrophe to mark the ejective property of a consonant is also common in the phonetic alphabet The extended function of apostrophe, which was already recommended to represent the glottal stop, to symbolize the secondary phonetic feature of glottalization, would strengthen the principle of regularity of mapping between sound and symbol.
The diagraph symbolizing the alveolar implosive consonant: Implosive sounds are consonants of plosive nature formed by a sucking in of the air.Generally, glottal closure accompanies an implosive consonant.To

Grapheme representation
represent the peculiar character of this sound and at the same time to show its similarity with d, the ordinary letter d followed by an apostrophe is recommended.As discussed earlier, the use of a compound letter DH/dh to represent the alveolar implosive consonant causes a reading problem because the combination can also be read as [dh], following the readings of the two consonants d and h .It is therefore proposed that the letter d followed by an apostrophe mark should be used to represent this consonant, thus: The use of apostrophe not only for symbolizing ejective consonants but also for representing the implosive consonant might look standing against the principle of regularity.However, since both consonant categories share some level of complexity in articulation, an extended use of the apostrophe diacritic mark to symbolize implosive consonant might still be recommendable than the use of a different diacritic mark or a diagraph.

Similarity of sounds in English and the local dialect:
As mentioned earlier, English is given as a subject as early as grade one for students in Wolaitta, Gamo, Gofa and Dawuro areas.Currently, sounds which are commonly found in English and the local languages are represented by different symbols in the two scripts, even though the languages use the same alphabet.In order to enable the students to have an easy transfer from the vernacular alphabet to the alphabet of English and vice versa, it is suggested that sounds of Wolaitta, Gamo, Gofa and Dawuro that also exist in English be represented by similar symbols and read the same way.
Once they learn to read their language, the students can utilize that knowledge in the easiest way for obtaining knowledge of reading English or vice versa.Thus, the use of c to symbolize the ejective palatal affricate /c'/ and the use of x to represent alveolar ejective s'/t' need to be reviewed.As mentioned above (recommendation 3), the symbols c' and s'/t' can be used instead of c and x respectively.
The compound letter th/TH: The letter th/TH that stands for voiceless alveolar affricate /t s / may better be replaced by ts because the sound represented by this letter is a combination of t and s but not t and h and that tend making the relation between spelling and pronunciation more complex, affecting its predictability.It is not unusual for a phoneme to be represented by a diagraph sequence of letters rather than by a single letter as in the case of the diagraph ch in English and French, and the trigraph sch in German.This is often due to the use of an alphabet that was originally used for a different language and thus does not have single letters available for all phonemes in the language currently being written although some orthographies use devices such as diacritics to increase the number of available letters.However, such a use fails to retain predictability as the complex letter can be broken down into smaller units, and there is no way to distinguish between "th" and "t" + "h".The use of another devise such as a deictic mark would solve the problem.
Tone-accent: Tone-accent should be marked when it has a grammatical function, or when it serves to distinguish words.It might be a better solution to mark either the high or the low tone feature.An accent above a vowel is recommended to mark tone-accent.For instance, high tone can be marked as á and a low tone can be marked as à.However, it may be sometimes omitted when the context makes it quite clear which word is intended.
Finally, based on the arguments presented so far, the following revised form of the existing orthography is recommended: As shown in Table 8.It is obvious to see that these recommendations advocate modification in the interest of improvement rather than radical alteration or abandonment of the existing orthography.As such it is hoped that they would be given positive consideration on the part of policy makers as well as all stakeholders.A more meaningful and practical orthography for Wolaitta, Gamo, Gofa and Dawuro is obviously in the interest of all.

Table 2 .
The /t'/ and /s'/ consonant correspondence in the cognates of the four dialects

Table 4 .
The WOGAGODA alphabet with phonemic representations given in bracket

Table 5 .
The WOGAGODA alphabet and its negative impact on the students' English reading

Table 6 .
Compound letters and their sound representation

Table 7 .
Representation of non-ejective and ejective consonants

Table 8 .
Recommended revised Orthography with graphemephoneme representation