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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, and Thai, among others. By contrast, some writing systems have been periodically respelled in accordance with changed pronunciation, such as Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Irish, and Japanese hiragana. Note that all of these languages indeed have long literary histories but have simply evolved where others did not.
=== Non-Latin scripts ===
A broadly defective script is the [[Arabic abjad]].<ref name="DB">{{cite book|author1=Peter T. Daniels|author2=William Bright|title=The World's Writing Systems|year=1996|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-507993-7|url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780195079937}}</ref>{{rp|561-3}} The modern script does not normally write short vowels or [[Gemination|geminate]] (double) consonants, and for the first few centuries of the [[Islam]]ic era, long ''ā'' was also not consistently 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 [[phoneme]]s than Arabic, but several originally distinct Aramaic letters had conflated (become indistinguishable in shape), so that in the early Arabic writings, 28 consonant phonemes were represented by only 18 letters—and in the middle of words, only 15 were distinct. For example, medial {{angbr|{{lang|ar|ـٮـ}}}} represented {{IPA|/b, t, θ, n, j/}}, and {{angbr|{{lang|ar|ح}}}} represented {{IPA|/d͡ʒ, ħ, x/}}. A system of [[diacritic]] marks, or ''pointing'', was later developed to resolve the ambiguities, and over the centuries became nearly universal. However, even today, unpointed texts of a style called ''{{transl|ar|DIN|mašq}}'' are found, wherein these consonants are not distinguished.<ref>{{cite book|author1=Richard Bell|author2=William Montgomery Watt|title=Bell's Introduction to the Qur'ān|year=1970|publisher=University Press|___location=Edinburgh|isbn=978-0-85224-171-4}}</ref>
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