🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1989May10.211236.19705@utpsych.toronto.edu>, raymond@utpsych.toronto.edu (Raymond Shaw) writes:
> The thing to remember about all of this nonsense about reforming orthography
> is that English is comprised of words from many other languages, and the
> spelling of many of the words remains little changed from the original.
> The beauty of this is that intelligent people (go ahead, flame me on this
> one, I'm looking forward to it), that's right, I said it, INTELLIGENT people
> can look at a word they don't know, and make logical guesses about the meaning
> of the word, because of its spelling, which reflects the original language.

True, perhaps, but if English had a standard phonemic spelling system that
was similar to other European languages, then we'd not only be able to guess
the meanings, but we'd be able to pronounce it in a way that foreigners would
easily understand.  We'd also find it easier to recognize the word when it
was spoken in another language.  The garbled, nonstandard semi-system of 
English spelling has the result of English pronunciations that are often 
wildly different from the original language (and others which have borrowed 
the same word).
 
> Finally, if you want to change spelling so that it matches pronunciation,
> on whose pronunciation would you base it?  The Queen, or the people of
> Queens (NY)?  Ok, so that's extreme... here in Canada, the last syllable
> of Nissan (the car company) rhymes with "man," not "on."

This is an easy strawman.  No language (of which I'm aware) has a truly
phonetic spelling system that reflects exactly the pronunciation of some
standard dialect.  That would be too messy.  Rather, standards are usually
phonemic, and use a generic, average pronunciation.  This would be just 
as easy in English as in any other language.

Thus, my native dialect (USA West Coast) has merged the vowels in "cot"
and "caught", while most dialects preserve the distinction.  On the other
hand, I pronounce "wh" different from "w", unlike many dialects.  These
are easy to handle.  A standard English phonemic writing system would
distinguish the cot/caught vowels, and texts would simply note that some
dialects merge them into a single intermediate sound.  The standard would
spell "wh" as "hw", and texts would note that many dialects omit such
initial [h] sounds (and indeed, some dialects omit any initial [h]).

Similarly, a standard phonemic English would have many distinct vowel
symbols in unstressed syllables, and texts would note that many dialects
reduce unstressed vowels to one or two weak vowels.  Such a system is
quite useful, since it tends to minimize the differences in spellings
in different environments.  Thus the words "systematic" and "systematize"
should start with the same letters as "system", though the vowels are
pronounced differently in all three words (in most dialects).  

The proper term for such a spelling system is "morphophonemic", and it's
actually the way most spelling systems work.  Thus, in German, the word
"Tag" (day) has a final 'g', although it is pronounced [tak].  Adding
any suffix that starts with a vowel produces a [g], however, as in such
words as "Tagenbuch" (diary).  Rather than having two spellings of a
root, it's easier to spell it the same everywhere, and have phonetic 
pronunciation rules. ("Final consonants are devoiced.") 

Such an approach would work quite well in English, despite the large
number of dialects.  English isn't really any worse off in this regard
than German or Spanish, after all, and they do pretty well with their
standardized "phonetic" spelling systems.  In fact, we do a lot of it
right now (e.g., the "-s" and "-d" endings); it's just not systematic.

-- 
John Chambers <{adelie,ima,mit-eddie}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393)

[Any errors in the above are due to failures in the logic of the keyboard,
not in the fingers that did the typing.]