My ideas on respelling a few words. - page 7
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T : sorry for this <œ> instead of <æ> in <Atlanta>. I haven't been speaking English
for ages and my sound memory is approximative !
Travis, I find your stuff very interesting. But there's a big problem. For non-native English-(would-be)speakers - as myself and most European Francophones I reckon - your phonemic (rather than strictly phonetic, or the reverse ? I might mix the terms) approach would be puzzling, were it to be adopted as spelling reform. The / /-system works with natives because the underlying [ ]-structure is inherent to their mind-frames. For instance it's no use wasting time to render the specific qualities of English vowels (none of them is cardinal, most of them are diphthonguised). For non-natives, the very 'essence' of oral English is precisely this lack of vowel cardinality and this propension to diphthonguise 'everything'. That's why I think IPA is a winner here : IPA would be 'close' to perfection. This is why I find <lo> very consistent for natives and absolutely misleading for non-natives. Similarly, some North American consonants, written <t> as in <Atlanta> (final syllable) or <Cincinnati>, are actually 'closer' to [n] in the former city name and [d] in the latter. Same with <butter> etc. I understand /t/ could be [t] in the UK and [n] or [d] in the US (in the cases mentioned). In short, the / /-approach is intellectually elegant, but the [ ]-system is more pragmatic (even if it is really harsh when people learn it for the first time). |
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One important reason to go with a phonemic orthography for English, at least North
American English, is that all vowels have either short or long length, and are nasalized
or not, but these are always predictable based on the phonemes surrounding any given
vowel. In a phonetic transcription, one would have to separately mark these, and
marking this would either require the use of diacritics, or the use of rather complex
digraphs and like. However, contrasts with respect to such things alone do not distinguish
meaning alone, except when they are results of adjacent meaning-distinguishing consonant
phonemes that have been subsequently elided or made equal in actual sound value to
some other phoneme in its position.
Hence, at a meaning level, there is no point in marking vowel length and nasality individually at the vowel level, as long as one marks adjacent consonants phonemically. This, of course, has the consequence of significantly simplifying writing, and making it so that one is less concerned with the specific of how something actually spoken while writing, with the caveat of that, of course, one must remember how consonant environment changes various vowels and like. Due to the limited number of symbols available for writing, diacritics aside (as diacritics other than the diaeresis, which is just for disambiguation, won't be in use in the first place), this also generally cleans up the writing system in usage, by making it so that does not need to use various symbols, digraphs, and like, for marking differences in vowel and consonant quality which are purely predictable overall. Hence, a phonemic orthography will be much simpler than a phonetic orthography from a writing standpoint becaue it will basically get out of the way the technical matters involved in the actual speaking of English which have little to relevance to the simple distinguishing of meaning on a textual level. |
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| Don't forget the logical progression from this though. For similar reasons a morphemic spelling system would be better than a strictly phonemic one. |
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The main thing is that the specific transformation from any phonemic transcription
to the sounds involved is rather mechanical, and basically just involves the phonological
rules already in place, in the case of native speakers. On the other hand, for a
spelling system that is morphemic or morphophonemic, there is not necessarily a clear
path from such to the underlying phonemes (and thus to the underlying phones as well),
and one will have to basically create specific rules for how each morpheme operates
in context (as not every morpheme will have the same presentation in any given environment).
However, while one may say that one would have to do this with phonemes as well, the difference between phonemes and morphemes is that the set of phonemes is basically a closed set, whereas that of morphemes is a basically open set in most cases, and hence while the set of rules for transforming any given sequence of phonemes into phones is limited, the set of rules necessary for transforming any given sequence of morphemes into phonemes is not. Hence, one would basically end up having to introduce new rules into the writing system itself for any new morpheme that may show up in any given place, in any given dialect, the ruleset for transforming phonemes into phones is basically fixed in size, unless the underlying phonological system itself changes for whatever reason. |
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| It comes down then to "What is writing for?" Is it a means of recording the sound of speach or is it a means of conveying meaning? It seems to me that it's the latter. |
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| Of course it's a bit of both but mainly the latter in my book. Oh, so much to discuss and so little time. I'll not be around to continue this topic at least not for a couple of weeks. However, I hope to pick up the threads when I get a chance. |
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The problem, though, with morphemic writing systems is just how exactly does one
write down /morphemes/ in text in a fashion which is not completely arbitrary. While
one may not need to know how exactly any given morpheme is pronounced while writing
it, one will still need some symbolic system of some sort when writing such, and
if such isn't tied to the phonemes used when writing said morphemes, then one will
have to use basically arbitrary symbols (for example, like Chinese characters) or
a haphazard mixture of different historical orthography systems (for example, like
the current English orthography) or like for writing such. Due to the arbitrariness
of such systems, when someone is learning a language that has to use such systems,
they have to be effectively learned separately from the language itself, since they're
not tied to how the language itself is spoken in /any given particular combination
of dialect and register/.
On the other hand, phonemic writing systems, while they may seem like the add some unnecessary syntactic and semantic level complexities while writing with them, the have the advantage in that they don't need to be learned /separately/ from the specific dialect and register for which they are designed, the mechanical aspects of representing the given phonemic system in text aside. Furthermore, they are more flexible at the language level than morphemic writing systems, in that they can represent words, grammatical constructs, and like, for which a given morphemic writing system was not designed, as long as they use the same overall phonemic system as that which the dialect for which the phonemic orthography in question was designed for uses. As as result, they help avoid the use of various ad hoc methods to attempt to represent things for which a writing system was not designed to represent, which can be seen today in the informal writing of English, and the heavy perfusion of apostrophes and informal-but-not-phonemic spellings that are comon in such, because one can still write the given phonemes in question, one way or another. |
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knight-nite
night-nite How would these be differentiated in written form? ghost-goest host-hoest post-poest most-moest This would turn all these words to two syllables two-tuw To me this would be pronounced similar to "tuh" gnome-nome straight-strait what-wot These are already in use with different meanings. school-skhool this is often used in jokes "I'm really good at skhool" neighbor-naber This would result in a short a. nayber maybe? eight-eit whiskey-whisky These both exist already, and will be spelled dfferently on the bottle depending on the country. Whiskey- Irish and American Whisky- Scotch and Canadian There seems to be lots of peole complaining about English spelling. Well, pretty much every language that uses the Roman alphabet has things like silent and redundant letters, hard or soft k, c, ch or q or strange spellings/pronunciations. I say we leave things as they are. |
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| Those are rather superficial attempts to "fix" things, rather than trying to create a whole new self-consistent and self-contained orthographic system as a whole... |
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| Stupidity on stilts. |
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Here are Schoonmaker's ideas about the spellings of and respelling ''cook'', ''kook''
and ''wander''. What do you think about them?
Quote-''As for kook/cook, again, OO is an ambiguous spelling in T.O. Brits would object to "kuek" or "kuke" as implying a YU. I suppose we could propose "kooke", but some people would see that as a reform for "cookie" or "kooky". I don't see an ideal solution.'' Quote-''-"A" by itself represents various sounds: father, pal, fall, for starters. "Wahnder" will look to many people like a pronunciation key rather than an actual spelling for general use. Of course, the spelling SHOULD be "wonder", but that's taken, and only people who initially learn "wunder" as distinct from "wonder" will NOT be left 'wundering' which word is meant on first seeing "wonder". The OW digraph in "brown" is a spelling convention in very wide use. AH is not, and the H is of course silent. It's not said at all, whereas the W in "brown" constitutes the second part of a diphthong. The A in "ah" is a single pure sound to itself, not a complex sound like OU/OW. I'm not going to propose "wahnder". There are 1,093 words on the future-words list as it is, only 2 short of three full years' worth of words. "Wander"'s not one of them, because it raises problems for the people I'm trying to appeal to.'' |
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| Steve, things like that are why I'm for creating a whole new orthography from scratch, rather than trying to mess around with trying to create something that at least somewhat works which is based on the current orthography. One can circumvent problems such as these by creating a whole new orthography from the ground up, as one is /defining/ what various spellings are pronounced like in the first place then. |
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Maybe some of the advantages of a phonemic-based writing system seem all the more
obvious as the term ‘English’ is used to describe various realities actually growing
different.
This makes me think about the transformation of Low Latin into Romance languages, somewhere between 300 and 800. Had Late-Antiquity linguists sanctioned phonemics as legitimate spelling system, their decision would have led such words as Fr <lieu> [ljØ], Sp <luego> [lwego] and It <luogo> [lwogo] to be currently written */lowko/ or else */lwogi/ since all 3 derived from Latin <locus, loci> [lokus, loki] (provided the ‘official’ Late-Antiquity phonemic transcription had remained unchanged until now). That example was far-fetched, although it hints how a once judicious phonemic spelling would resist the pangs of time. If I understand the points made earlier, writing phonemically implies that sound dialectalisation may be overcome by bypassing predictable phonological rules. All this presupposes that sound differentiation is a stable phenomenon operating within the limits of a certain language. Whether English is merely undergoing slight differentiation or likely to break up into new, dissimilar languages is a question open to debate. |
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Well, yes, a highly conservative phonemic spelling system may be to some extent resistant
to phonological changes in dialects, as long as such phonologically changed forms
in various dialects are more-or-less predictable from the conservative phonological
system represented by the phonemic orthography in question. However, such ceases
to be a truly *phonemic* orthography as soon as the underlying phonemes that speakers
of various given dialects in question cease to be those used in said orthography.
Once dialects start reorganizing their phonemic system overall, for example completely
losing distinctions between phonemes so that they no longer distinguish meaning,
or creating new phonemes altogether, they really do not have this particular historical
phonemic system. Yet at the same time, one could say that if the new phonemes used
in a given dialect are predictable from this conservative phonemic system being used
for an orthography, it is still applicable, even if it doesn't intuitively represent
how most people speak directly.
However, at the same time, a rather conservative phonemic system may be an advantage if people still think in terms of it, even if the actual sounds that people speak are very different from what would be superficially implied by said phonemic system, if said phonemic system explains in a regular fashion phonological systems which are not explainable in a regular fashion at a purely sound-oriented level. Examples of such include alternation between [aI] and [@I], and vowel length differences, in various. North American English dialects, which may happen even though, besides such, the differences between phonemes which cause such alternation may be completely lost in the actual speech sounds generated. Due to such, viewing phonemes from a conservative perspective, and thus maintaining distinctions that may not superficially seem to be present in various positions in actual speech, may be very useful in cases, as it still may have underlying connections to the overall phonology of the dialects in question, which may not be immediately obvious. As for English breaking up, I doubt that it would actually occur on a purely regional level throughout the whole of the language. Rather, what I would expect is for informal forms to differentiate much more heavily than formal forms and the literary language, which for the most part I would expect to remain as one. Differentiation would occur along with most likely the development of diglossia, with informal forms becoming more distant overall from formal English, possibly moreso than even from each other. Because informal forms are not tied to a literary language, and do not serve a lingua franca role, they are not nearly as anchored in place as formal/literary forms are, and hence are thus far more likely to undergo far faster change as a whole. However, as formal forms will not move along with them, or at least move with them nearly as quickly, significant gaps are very likely to develop between formal and informal forms, analogous with those that developed between classical and vulgar Latin. At the same, due to not being associated with a literary language or any lingua franca role, informal forms are not as likely to stay close to each other, either, and hence are far more likely to differentiate by dialect, in addition to by register, than formal forms. Thus, it is most likely inevitable that English will go the way of Latin, sooner or later, with a highly conservative formal literary language that is in a lingua franca position on a global level, and a slew of dialects of varying intelligability strewn about the world, which most people actually speak, and which are moving at some speed or another towards acting as languages separate from English, even though for such to actually happen would likely take centuries, in the least. |
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| If anything, this is what will doom /any/ efforts at spelling reform with respect to written English, because the current literary English allows people to communicate in writing who could very well have difficulty understanding each other in speech, using their native dialects (without codeswitching into some formal English variety), and this will only be increasingly so as time progresses. Because literary English as written has very little connection to how anyone actually pronounces anything, especially with respect to what vowels people use, changes in actual pronunciation in various dialects is a nonfactor, and because it uses a rather conservative and somewhat artificial grammar as well in the first place, it will, for the most part, stay insulated from grammatical changes in various individual English dialects as well. Modern literary English represents no one's native dialect, and hence has no particular spoken variety to /move along with/. Hence, as English dialects move apart from each other, in various manners, it will only increasingly be useful as a communication form, due to its being unaffected by such, precisely due to its artficialness and arbitrariness, while being common amongst English-dialect-speakers in general. |