🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <13863@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> eager@ringworld.Eng.Sun.COM (Michael J. Eager) writes:
   >In any case, I believe most dialects of English already have more
   >vowels than any of the languages you mention (certainly more than
   >Spanish). English has somewhere around 14 vowels.

   Doesn't it sort of muddy the waters to mix phonemes into a discussion
   of fonts and orthography?
   [...]
   English may have fourteen vowel sounds (I'd really guess at a higher 
   number if you include pronounciations from New England, Manchester, Texas, 
   etc.) but it has 5 (perhaps as many as 7) orthographic vowels: a, e, i, o, u
   and occasionally y and w.  

Please quote in a meaningful context. The poster that I responded to
essentially said: "These languages have many more 'vowels' [vowel
sounds] than English and therefore need diacritical marks to
distinguish them." All I did was point out that among those
languages using the Roman alphabet, English probably has close to the
largest number of 'vowels' (sounds, phonemes), and yet, English seems to
get by fine without diacritical marks.

   German has umlauts; it also has standard orthographic substitutions for them
   which do not use the dots: ae, oe, ue.  

   Sch, ch, au, mentioned above, are not orthographic substitutions;
   they _are_ the orthography.

Yes, and I am suggesting that "ae", "oe", "ue", and "sz" be restored to
their original status as _being_ the orthograpy, rather than being
substitutions.

						Thomas.