Re: USAGE: Diversity and uniformity AND No rants! (USAGE: di"f"thong) -- responses to Andreas and Ray.

On 6/2/06, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
> _draft_ is gradually gaining ground
> in the UK. In fact, in current British usage, both spellings occur with,
> theoretically, different meanings - but there is a grey area where in
> practice there is hesitation between the two spellings.
Also true in the US, but there isn't much hesitation/overlap.  The
"draught" spelling is these days only used for the sense of "on tap",
while a slight wind leaking through a crack, or an involuntary
induction into the armed forces, is spelled "draft".

And I don't need to know how you pronounce "grass" to know what you
mean by it, but I nevertheless find it interesting that you pronounce
it differently from me.  Hey, I'm human. And thus the YAEPT's.

[Quoting Benct]
> > Yes, those who are aware of the differences may feel annoyment at
> > seing them discussed, but what annoys me is that those who engage
> > in those discussions seem annoyed or at least surprised by the fact
> > that these differences exist.
NO, NO, NO, a thousand times NO.  Never annoyed.  Speaking as one of
the most consistent contributors and readers of YAEPT's, I have never
once expressed any sort of annoyance, irritation, or displeasure over
the different pronunciations.  Why on Earth would I fell such a thing?

Surprised?  On occasion, yes.  When we hear someone speaking in a
different "accent", many of the phonetic differences get swept under
the phonemic rug, and we don't actually hear them.  Seeing them
written out phonetically is another matter entirely, and I have
occasionally been surprised by this or that difference.  But I fail to
see surprise as inherently negative, which you seem to do.  Some
people enjoy surprise parties, even!

What I feel about YAEPT's is fascination at the different paths taken
by sounds that started out the same.  Isn't that basically the story
of language in a nutshell?

[Back to Ray]
> This seems, in part at least, to contradict what you seem to be saying
> above. But, as far as I am aware, no one has suggested making the
> transcription of one accent the norm to serve for everybody. If there
> were to be a reform of English spelling on a phonemic basis, one would
> need to establish the abstract English phonemic 'archetype', independent
> of regional or national variation.
Aye, and there's the rub.


> The trouble is that most Anglophones don't see it as a huge problem -
> specially now we've got spell-checkers    :)
Amen.  English spelling is idiosyncratic.  Stipulated.  But by the
time we have the knowledge needed to fix it, we've become
indoctrinated into it.  So there's no real motivation for reform.

> Marginally - but spelling English or Swedish in Arabic characters, or
> Tengwar or whatever might be fun, but it's hardly as creative, surely,
> as devizing something like Quenya, Klingon, Brihenig etc,. etc.
Oh, I'm sorry, are we assigning relative degrees of creativity now?
Surely you would also agree that romlangs are nowhere near as creative
as a-priori conlangs?  And that a-priori conlangs with only Roman
transcriptions are less creative than those with a native written
form?  And that alphabetic native written forms are less creative than
other varieties?  And...

Everyone on this list shares the hobby of conlanging.  We enjoy
creating our own languages and/or reading about languages created by
others.  Some of us may only enjoy one end of those activities.  But
by dint of that interest, wherever precisely it lies, we are all of us
more interested in language (period) than most other folks.  As such
it seems like a perfectly reasonable forum for all sorts of linguistic
and metalinguistic discussions, as long as they are marked in such a
way that they can be ignored by those who care not.

It's not like we've been hitting the global list limit on messages by
clogging it with messages allegedly not of interest to the majority of
subscribers... so I don't see a problem.

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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