Re: German with Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja?

There doesn't necessarily have to be explicit notation for ablaut/umlaut!
Japanese copes very well with its very common irregular verb, "kuru" meaning
"to come".
来る KU-ru
来ます、来て、来た KI-masu, KI-te, KI-ta
来ない KO-nai

Where the capitalised parts are the pronunciations of the kanji 来 in each
case. The different reading becomes sort of second nature. Japanese also has
the following pair, for reference:

行った I-tta, past tense of iku "to go"
行った OKONA-tta, past tense of okonau "to hold (an event)"

As with all natlangs, context is everything. It provides sufficiently
distinctive cues that lexing or vocabularising in isolation overlooks.

So you could probably have simply [lauf] for "lief", with or without
inflectional particles. Personally, I think the phonetic adjuncts are more
useful than morphological adjuncts. People can infer the morphological
purpose themselves given the pronunciation and sufficient familiarity with
the language. Having to learn arcane names for grammar terms will probably
be counter-productive.

All for [geh](n) having the same suffix as... er, [tanz](n)? I'm not good
with German vocabulary. Haha. :p

Eugene

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 11:19 PM, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>wrote:

> 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
>

Reply