It is often said that some difference between spoken language and written language is rendered inevitable because so many decisive features of speech are not transferred to writing […] Writing, with print as its ideal form, is a set of discrete visible symbols, each corresponding some discrete audible unit of speech, and anything that is not discrete will be sacrified in the transfer. There is a large measure of truth in it: in the last analysis, many of the feature that differentiate written style from spoken style can be traced back to a need, in writing, to compensate for the loss of suprasegmental and individual elements of speech.
- Martinet (1962), a pag.122-123