Re: Optimum number of symbols

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
>Here again someone who doesn't understand the basic logic behind the
>presence
>of the so-called "silent" letters of French. Actually, more than 95% of the
>French orthography can be justified in terms not only of morphemic value
>but of
>*phonemic* value! Have you ever heard of the phenomenon of liaison which is
>so
>important to spoken French? (incorrect liaisons are extremely bad practice,
>they can even create misunderstandings) Those "inflections long since
>disappeared from speech" have the nasty habit to reappear strongly in cases
>of
>liaison (that's to say when the word is followed by a word beginning with a
>vowel) in non-obvious ways, which would make writing a nightmare if you had
>to
>have a phonemic system (how would you write with a phonemic system a word
>like "grand": tall, which can appear in masculine singular as [gRa~],
>[gRa~t]
>or [gRa~d], in masculine plural as [gRa~nz], in feminine singular as
>[gRa~d]
>and in feminine plural as [gRa~d], [gRa~d@] or [gRa~dz] without making it a
>nightmare for the learner, especially since he wouldn't have many other
>words
>that work the same way, and that the rules for the appearance of each form
>are
>nothing simple?). The system of 'silent' letters may be imperfect, but it
>has
>major advantages:
>- it unifies somehow the different forms according to their functions
>(making
>it easier to recognise a plural, a feminine, a conjugated form, even if it
>appears in a context where the ending won't actually be pronounced),
>- it hints at the presence of a possible liaison and at its pronunciation
>(in
>an imperfect way, but liaison is too complicated a phenomenon to hope to
>render
>it accurately with the tools provided by us with the alphabet),
>- it makes a same form written always the same way in all environments,
>which
>is a big help for the reader and the learner. Along with the first
>advantage,
>it allows to learn only a few rules and forms which can then be used with
>nearly all words of the same category, the exceptions being usually
>recognisable by their orthography. Beleive me, a purely phonemic
>orthography
>for French would be impractical and unlearnable. One would not even be able
>to
>put word boundaries!
My impression is that many/most of those silent |e|'s and |s|'s,
phonemically speaking, are still around. Can you give me a good reason to
believe that, say, "grand" does not contain an underlaying /d/ that gets
realized as [t] or [d] in certain circumstances? If not, your criticism
above would apply to a phonetic orthography, but not, generally, to a
phonemic one.

And no, I don't know French. I'm only pointing out what looks like a hole in
your description above.

                                                 Andreas


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