''guess'' and ''guess - page 3

Erratum:
When I was going on about /3/ above, I meant /4/.

I hope you can make sense of all my ramblings.

To put it succinctly: for me /4/ can be an allophone of the phoneme /t/ or of the phoneme /d/. For me, "writer" and "rider" use the same sound /3/, but different phonemes - /t/ and /d/.

Argh, I referred to /4/ as /3/ again!

The main thing is here, at least, [?] is another allophone of /t/, and [d_}] is another one of /d/, and both are likely to be assimilated to adjacent consonants, especially /n/ and /n=/, and each other (/dt/ --> [t], /td/ --> [d] or [d_}]), or simply elided, such as /nt/ --> [n] when the /t/ does not end up starting a stresse dsyllable, and like.

Here's my suggestion:

Stop fretting about English spelling and just accept it. As daffy as it is, it really doesn't hold back our language in any way.

Spelling reform is a futile cause with no real benefit to the language.

JJM, the thing though is that it is fun to fret about English spelling, even if there is no reasonable likelihood of any significant spelling reform proposal getting accepted on any large scale.

Just so on one is left wondering, I figure that I might as well fully explicate my English orthography scheme, so that it can be fully compared/contrasted with that of Lazar's.

Anyways, it has no diacritics that are intrinsic to it, besides the diaeresis, which is used for vowel disambiguation and breaking up what would otherwise be diphthongs, the use of which, when applicable, is mandatory, and the very optional usage of acute and grave diacritics to mark primary and secondary stress in multisyllabic words, respectively. Instead, it relies purely on digraphs/trigraphs (it does have two trigraphs, <stj> and theoretically <zdj>), doubling of vowels and consonants, and the environment in which vowels which have multiple phonemes per symbol, to get around the matter that there are more phonemes than characters available, and far more vowel phonemes than vowel characters available.

Vowels

Monophthongs

Monophthongs are split into two different groups, paired and unpaired monophthongs. Paired monophthongs are only single characters, which are each assigned to a lax/tense pair of vowels. The vowels specified by the use of these characters in an undoubled fashion are always the tense item in the pair, if preceding another vowel, if in a word-final position, unless followed by <h>, which in this case does not mark the phoneme /h/, or if preceding a undoubled consonant which may be doubled which is followed immedately by another vowel. Otherwise, the vowels specified by the use of these characters, when not doubled, are always lax, or when doubled, are always tense. On the other hand, unpaired monophthongs are either a single character or a digraph, which always refers to the same single phoneme, no matter what environment they are in.

Paired

<e> = /e/, /E/
<i> = /i/, /I/
<o> = /o/, /O/
<u> = /u/, /U/

Unpaired

<a> = /@/
<aa> = /A/
<ae> = /{/
<yr> = /r=/
<yl> = /l=/
<yn> = /n=/
<ym> = /m=/

Diphthongs

All diphthongs are simply digraphs, and are not treated as two vowels next to each other.

<ai> = /aI/
<au> = /aU/
<oi> = /oI/

Consonants

Consonants are broken up into two groups, doubling, and nondoubling. Doubling consonants are normally single characters, but may be doubled, when preceded by a paired vowel, and followed by another vowel, to make said paired vowel by lax rather than tense. Nondoubling consonants are either single characters, digraphs, or trigraphs, and for the purposes of paired vowels preceding them, are always treated as being doubled.

Doubling

<p> = /p/
<t> = /t/
<k> = /k/
<b> = /b/
<d> = /d/
<g> = /g/
<f> = /f/
<s> = /s/
<z> = /z/
<h> = /h/
<n> = /n/
<m> = /m/
<r> = /r/
<l> = /l/
<j> = /j/

Nondoubling

<th> = /T/
<dh> = /D/
<sj> = /S/
<zj> = /Z/
<tj> = /tS/
<dj> = /dZ/
<stj> = /StS/
<zdj> = /ZdZ/
<ng> = /N/
<ngg> = /Ng/
<nk> = /Nk/
<v> = /v/
<w> = /w/
<hw> = /W/
<ch> = /x/ (note that this is reserved, as while it is not native to the dialect for which this is designed, it may still be used for names and loanwords)

Disambiguation is carried out through two different manners. For the disambiguation of vowels, diaeresises are used. Vowel characters on which diaeresises are placed cannot be part of any digraphs except those which start with them, and thus can be kept from forming digraphs with preceding characters. For the disambiguation of consonants, apostrophes are used to separate consonant characters that would otherwise form digraphs; note that apostrophes are not used in this orthography to mark the elision of phonemes, and thus are available for this purpose.

The use of acute and grave diacritics for marking primary and secondary stress respectively would primarily only be used in things like dictionary entries and in cases where two words are distinguished only by their stress patterns, and the differences between them are not discernable by context, which should be relatively rare as a whole. Anyways, though, for marking the stress of a syllable, whether primary or secondary, the appropriate diacritics are placed on the (first) vowel of the syllable with the requisite stress; if the vowel is indicated by a digraph, both characters of the digraph receive the diacritic in question, except if one of the characters is what would normally be a consonant character, as in the cases of <yr>, <yl>, <yn>, and <ym>. In that case, the consonant character in the digraph does not receive said diacritic, but the vowel character still does receive such.

Schoonmaker and Webster, a pigeon pair.

Schoonmaker doesn't understand English spelling that's why he wants to change it.

Well, it's more that the logic of English spelling is that there isn't much logic to it, to the point that the spellings themselves are practically irrelevant to how anyone speaks it, and hence it really more represents lexemes and morphemes rather than phonemes, with the actual spelling itself only acting as a mnemonic for how words are to be pronounced. In addition, as dialects only continue to diverge (at least in the US, they most definitely are, the spread of Estuary English in the UK being a special case), this situation will become only harder to resolve.

The English orthography issue's becoming harder to resolve is due to the simple reason that when designing an orthography, you will either have to design it for a specific dialect/register, which has the problem of forcing one to choose a dialect/register to use, and the divergence of dialects will make choosing an acceptable dialect/register to use more difficult, or you will have to design it to accomodate a range of dialects, by not making it purely phonemic, but rather attempting to represent historical phonemes or like, which the divering of dialects only make more difficult. English orthography is in no fashion "good" or "logical", it's just that we are stuck in a situation where there is no good way to choose a scheme, that will be widely acceptable, to replace it with, and such is only becoming worse, and the very lack of logic or consistency behind the current orthography happens to incidentally make it actually more acceptable for many, by detaching it from how *anyone* speaks English.

''Schoonmaker doesn't understand English spelling that's why he wants to change it.''

Yeah, I agree. But, is he write or wrong that a word spelled ''guess'' ought to be pronounced like ''goose'' and that a word spelled ''guest'' ought to be pronounced like ''goosed'', which is his argument for reforming them to ''gess'' and ''gest''.

''is he write''

TYPO

''is he right or wrong''.

Jim,

How much do you think the likelihood is that even one of Schoonmaker's proposed respellings will be accepted and adopted in place of the original spelling?

How much change does the English language have to go through before a spelling reform (I mean come on, it's only been 650 years!)?