Re: Optimum number of symbols

Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...> wrote:
>
>Well, wait just a minute here.  English has hundreds (if not
>thousands) of pairs of words that, though morphologically
>related, have become phonologically differentiated on the
>surface due to the Great Vowel Shift.  E.g., "divide : division",
>"explain : explanation", "opaque : opacity", etc., etc.
>This kind of morphophonological alternation is genuinely
>problematic for purely phonemic representations of what comes
>out of our mouths.  These things are, like the German final
>devoicing, inherent in the language...
It's only problematic I think if you consider it very important
to encode morphemic information in addition to, and on top of,
the phonemic information.  If morphemic coding starts getting
too complex, I feel it's always a viable option to back off
and go totally phonemic.  If different morphemes are not
distinguished in the speech, or if the same morpheme
alternates, why should we fret so much when the same thing
occurs in writing?

One did thing I did agree with Raymond Brown on is that it's
more important that writing represent speech rather than
meaning.


>>  I personally think both of these
>> systems are atrocious, and this atrociousness stems from their
>> *non*phonemic charcteristics that, on balance, are not
>> enhancements in the least.
>
>... that having been said, there a plenty spellings which have
>been retained (1) because they helped a student population
>which was assumed to know Latin forwards and backwards learn
>and retain latinate English vocabulary well, or (2) sheer
>chance.  Much as I advocate Classical educations, the number
>of educated speakers literate in both English and Latin today
>is vanishingly small by the standards of yesteryear, and chance
>misalligned spellings is not a reason to do nothing.
There is much in English orthography that is simply inexcusable,
and should be repaired, but that simply won't happen because
of the huge momentum behind the current conventions--mainly the
existing corpus, the population's current training, and general
conservative sentiment (it seems that this last item especially
happens to occur with regards to French).

Incidentally, I did contrive a plan to reform English orthography
that was pretty conservative in the sense of being highly
readable (not immediately writable without training of course)
and highly morphemic, and yet gave every word a totally phonemic
pronunciation (the reverse was not true -- you couldn't automatically
guess the spelling from the pronunciation.  If I find my notes
I'll post it on the list if that sounds interesting to anyone.


Regards

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