Garshunography

Concept

George Kiraz identifies two sociolinguistic conditions for garshunography: "the source language is associated with a script that is perceived to be its own" and "there exists readership which is either unfamiliar with the script of the source language or prefers ... to use the target script." The adoption and adaptation of an existing script designed for one language for use by another is not garshunographic if the source language lacks a script that can be considered its own. The use of Chinese characters to write Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese cannot be considered garshunography because the languages "had no indigenous writing system prior to contact with sinography".

Likewise, for Kiraz, writing can transition from garshunographic to nongarshunographic over time if the adopted script becomes dominant. Both transitions are apparent in the history of Anatolian Turkish, which first adopted a variety of Arabic script and then transitioned to a variety of Latin script. Other scholars may draw a distinction between allography in a broad sense, which excludes writing in "the usual script", and allography in a strict sense, which excludes only writing systems "created ad hoc" or "heavily evolved or reworked". Although in both senses, "allography is more common than might be assumed at first", in the strict sense it covers Old Nubian writing, which used only a lightly modified form of the Greek alphabet, and even modern English orthography, which makes use of the Latin alphabet.

Garshunography should be distinguished from alloglottography, which is the practice of writing text in one language and reading it in another, and transliteration, since garshunography need not involve approximate letter-for-letter conversion.