Re: tlhn'ks't, ngghlyam'ft, and other scary words

Tristan scripsit:

> > Technically, "hough" and "lough" are also separate cases, since some
> > pronounce "lough" with [x], whereas AFAIK no one does that with
> > "hough".  I'm not sure what RI does with "lough"; changing it to
> > "lock" would cause a serious semantic collision.
>
> When you talk of a serious semantic collision, do you mean making
> homographs(?) of homophones?
The trouble is that "lock" has a sense (device for changing water levels)
that is in the same general meaning-area as "lough", and so serious
confusions could arise if "lough" and "lock" were spelled alike.

As a general principle, RI tries wherever possible not to create new
homonyms.  For example, the spelling of "bear" has to be changed, because
the trigraph "ear" in RI has the sound of the word "ear".  In principle,
it would be possible to change "bear" to "bare", but that would create
a homonym where there was none before, so the RI spelling is "bair".
(It would be possible to split "bear" into "bayr", the animal, and "bair",
the verb, or some such -- but this is not done, because existing homonymy
is left alone.)

OTOH, the past tense of "read", which is homographous but not homophonous
with the present tense, is changed to "red", creating a new homonym
collision, but there is really no decent alternative here.

--
"May the hair on your toes never fall out!"     John Cowan
        --Thorin Oakenshield (to Bilbo)         jcowan@reutershealth.com

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