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

Quoting R A Brown <ray@...>:

> Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
> >> - we would better applying our creative talents to conlanging (Er -
> >> isn't that what the list is supposed to be about?)
> >
> >
> > Well, isn't devising con-orthographies a form of conlanging?
>
> 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.
I once tried to spell my conlang Tairezazh in Greek letters, but gave up on the
project because it seemed impossible to arrive at a system that adequately
represented the sounds of the language while not driving insane those
accustomed to the Greek values of the latters.

As I read your lines above, however, I realized that psi and ksi could provide
the core of the needed fourth stop/fric series. A pitty they didn't supply a
tsi letter, but maybe that sigma-tau digraph could be pressganged into that
role?

> > The problem is that spelling prescriptiveness is used as tool of
> > social oppression, and this is possible mostly because spelling
> > is so much divorced from pronunciation.
>
> Eh? IME kids from privileged backgrounds find our spelling just as
> troublesome as kids from deprived backgrounds - and I've found in all
> social classes kids who pick up spelling quite easily.
FWIW, my experience is that the parents' educational level is a decent predictor
of the children's spelling prowess. Of course there's exceptions - both my
parents have tertiary education, and I was an exceptionally slow learner of
spelling.

                                                  Andreas