Re: OT: Conlangea Dreaming

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
> On Tue, 10 Oct 2000, Robert Hailman wrote:
<snip>

> > That seems like an awful lot of sound changes for one generation, but I
> > suppose it could happen.
>
> I think it must have been a gradual thing, just most noticeable when it
> hit my generation.
That would explain it. Or perhaps, and I may just be showing my
ignorance as far as Korean goes, your generation adopted one of the
regional dialects as it's standard language, as opposed to the standard
languages of generations past.

> > > They've also gradually made some of the spelling more modern and sensible
> > > to modern pronunciation.
> >
> > Do you mean to match up with sound changes, or in the Romanization?
>
> Spelling in Korean.  I have no idea what they're doing in the
> Romanization, though the Romanization is actually more phonetic than the
> alphabet, so it probably wouldn't make a different.  (The examples I
> remember her showing me had to do with picky-alities of mutations and so on.)
Ah. I find it odd that speakers of languages such as Korean would accept
these spelling reforms, but when a spelling reform is proposed for
English, it's laughed at. I happen to like the current English spelling,
it's kind of like a code that only native English speakers can decipher.
:o)

I find that I read English kind of like people who are fluent in Hebrew
tell me that they usually end up reading Hebrew: Rather than looking at
each letter, the just look at the overall shape of the word. It's more
important to have that skill for Hebrew, because you don't have the
vowels in most circumstances, but the English spelling system provides
so little insight into the pronounciation of some words that I find a
handy skill to have.

--
Robert