Re: USAGE: Shavian: was Re: USAGE: Con-graphies

On 11/06/06, Yahya Abdal-Aziz <yahya@...> wrote:
...
> But what's even worse, from my point of view,
> is that English now has so many different
> phonemic realisations (languages?; if Cantonese
> and Hokkien are Chinese dialects, then these
> are English dialects; otherwise, they're languages
> ...) that we can either have a phonemic spelling or
> a standardised one.
Whilst I acknowledge that the pronunciation used in some dialects of
English can be quite difficulty to understand, I think you exaggerate.
I gather than the Chinese dialects are as far apart as the
Scandivanian North Germanic languages, if not the Romance languages. I
think mutual intelligibility is based on an education in Mandarin. But
then, I do tend to put a lot of weight on social factors when
determining language boundaries, so perhaps that's sufficient to call
them one in my books...

(OTOH, it seems to me based on Benct's and Andreas's comments that
perhaps the Scandinavian langs are just a series of dialects with four
points (Swedish, Danish, New Norwegian, Bokmål-Norwegian) at which
there is a standard. Perhaps a Scandinavian is reading this, and can
say whether the differences between dialects of one lang. or another
are comparable to the differences within? I hear Danish is particu'ly
hard for some Swedes to understand: But maybe there's some northern
rural Swedish dialect that southern Swedes find hard to understand,
too?)

(At about this point, Joe observes that English is relatively
homogenous compared to some langs like German or Italian; but how does
English fare when compared to languages that have had more similar
histories?---perhaps Spanish or Portugese are examples? Russian? maybe
something from further afield? As I see it, English is very diverse
phonemically, phonetically and phonologically generally (and this is
where most difficulties in understanding occur); and there is some
limited variation in lexicon; but there is almost nothing in terms of
grammar: little more than a curiosity here, and generalisation there.)

> Still, most of us DO manage to learn to spell
> correctly most of the time - and almost all of us
> learn to read even those words we habitually
> misspell.  So I guess I'd opt for the standardised
> spelling.
It's still funny when words you regu'ly hear but almost never see
spelt you see spelt (hm, I've never seen that word before --- oh wait
a second, it's just ------): And the other way too, I can't count the
number of times I've guessed the pronunciation of a word, only to find
out that I was almost incomprehensibly wrong (I think I hear "I don't
know how it's pronounced" more often that "I don't know how it's
spelt"; people frequently take a stab at the latter).  Still, the time
to split the spelling is once the dialects have split into
irreconcilably different languages; and the time to respell the
language is when we split the spellings.

> All this stuff on Yet Another English Spelling
> Thread (well, it's not *only* YAEPT, is it?) has
> made me ponder yet again the factors influencing
> the rate of language change.  And I don't mean
> vocabulary churn, but syntactic and semantic
> change.
>
> I think it a fair conclusion, from the examples of
> English, Greek and Latin, that any language that
and Chinese and Arabic.

> achieves wide usage across a number of different
> cultures will find its phonemes, eventually, bent so
> far out of shape as to be unrecognisable.  And its
> only the prestige of an interlingua that drives
> people from those other cultures to try to perfect
> their usage of a particular - to be precise, a
> prestige, dialect.  Without that prestige, the
> language will spawn many a bastard child on other
> cultures.  Or some other mechanism must operate
Hmm... English has no single prestige dialect; it does not even have
two. Amongst foreign learners of the language, perhaps most want to
learn either proper British or proper American; but no self-respecting
Australian would say we should not speak Australian English the way we
do any more than they would complain about any other aspect of
Australia.

> to conserve the ubiquitous parent; perhaps the
> extreme conservatism of many Muslim societies
> partly accounts for the long-term preservation of
> classical Arabic.  I also seem to remember an
> argument that the widespread use of printing has
> helped to fossilise and stabilise many languages.
>
> Hmmm, I seem to've found three ... what other
> factors affect the rate of language change?
Education & literacy I'm sure should. They don't halt change, but they
will change its nature and bring back apparently deviant
pronunciations to a certain starting point. (e.g. many Australians
will pronounce "bald" and "bold" differently because of the spellings,
in spite of the fact that they put the same vowel in "bold" and
"fault" and "malt". This of course brings some parts of Australian
English closer to the norm of British and American.)

Interdialect communication.

Possibly related to the issue of prestige dialects would be a sense of
nationalism. Kiwi English & the English of Australian states have had
the same length of time to separate; but while Kiwi English is now
notably different, there are only two systematic regional distinctions
in pronunciation I am aware of, and one of those has I think has been
spreading (being retracted /u\:/->[u:] before /l/, used in SAu and
Victoria and elsewhere; the other is /e/->[&] before /l/, used to my
knowledge only in Victoria). Considering both SAu and NZ were (I
think) settled largely by non-Australians and later, there's no reason
one should be more different that the other.

--
Tristan.

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