Re: German with Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja?

Hi!

Tristan McLeay writes:
>...
> I'm currently throwing up a few ideas with myself for Hanzi for
> English. My starting-point for it is that it irritates me when people
> pronounce words as they're spelt because they're spelt like that, so a
> phonetic spelling reform probably isn't really what I want to do
> anyway. ...
I know exactly what you mean.  I never liked the pronunciation
/rEnti:6/ for 'Rentier' and /valnUs/ for 'Walnuß', but many people
pronounce the first vowel long now.  But then, maybe it's just me who
has a bad pronunciation there. :-/


>...
> Basically, for umlaut/ablaut/etc, you would simply use the root symbol,
> with the appropriate inflexional symbol, and voila! you get a word that
> could as easily be regular as irregular:
>
>     [dog]  -> [dog][pl.]
>     [foot] -> [foot][pl.]
>
> Applying this to your German examples, you'd have something like:
>
>     [Hund] -> [Hund][pl.]
>     [Haus] -> [Haus][pl.]
>     [koch] ->
>         [koch][inf.]
>         [koch][3ps]
>         [koch][past]
>         [koch][pp]
>...
Well, this requires conscious knowledge about grammar that L1 speakers
might not have.  My idea of doing something like this (disregarding
the stem changes for a moment) would be a mixture of morphology and
phonology.  E.g. conflate all inflectional endings in -e into the same
character, regardless of their function.

Such an ending would not be used to write phonetically (e.g. names),
but only for inflectional endings that are -e.  By this, I'd probably
be able to cut down the required endings for German to about 10 or so:
the vowel would be -e- /@/ anyway (which is dropped frequently when
the stem permits it) and then there are only a handful of consonants
used in endings: -e, -(e)t, -(e)n, -(e)r, -(e)m, -(e)s.  They are then
used for a vast number of different things, of course.

    Häuser ->  [haus](r)
    gehen  ->  [geh](n)
    gibt   ->  [geb](t)
    läuft  ->  [lauf](t)

And then, there are pairs of stem mutations *only*:

    lief   ->  [lauf]   ??

Hmmm.  Well, that's one problem with this approach that yours would
not suffer.

In German dictionaries, umlaut is sometimes indicated as a diaresis
above a dash, e.g. (approximating):

    Haus, pl. -"er. house.

Doesn't solve my ablaut problem, of course.  (Well, you solved it by
ignoring it. :-)) The mixed system could be to have ablaut suffixes or
indeed a few(!) morphological suffixes like yours in a few cases:

    lief   -> [lauf]{past}
    liefen -> [lauf]{past}(n)

Something like this, maybe?  Would probably be needed for umlauts,
too: sg.Mutter - pl.Mütter.

Or for plural, we could have a plural suffix as you mentioned, as that
would probably not be too much to ask for form L1 speakers.  But, say,
case markers when the case ending is zero most of the time would
probably not be acceptable.

**Henrik

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