Re: Part 2 Why my con langs SUCK!!!

On Thu, 22 Jan 2004 jcowan@REUTERSHEALTH.COM wrote:

> Roger Mills scripsit:
>
> > Which is exactly what written English does.  I've suggested in that past
> > that the _underlying_ phonology of _all_ Engl. dialects (the standard-ish
> > one, at any rate) does have /r/ in all the positions where it is written.
>
> I think you are right, but there are difficulties.  What about ARSE, for
> example?  The universal North American pronunciation is [&:s]; does this have
> underlying /r/ or not?  Surely you don't want to claim that BASS, the fish,
> is underlyingly /bars/ or /b&rs/ (OE "baers").
*where it is written*. No-one spells 'bass' with an <r> to my knowledge.

<Arse> I think is pronounced with its /r/ in rhotic British dialects. My
opinion is that there should be two revised spellings: <ars> and <aas>,
<ars> used by rhotic Brits and <aas> used by rhotic Americans, with
non-rhotics that have lengthened a before s chosing whichever they prefer.
We currently survive happily enough with <mum> vs <mom> or <oestrogen>
/i:/ vs <estrogen> /E/ (as I understand it, even though it's part of a
more generic change).

> > Intervocalic and final-prevocalic /r/ are almost always retained.
> > Pre-consonantal /r/ is the problem:
>
> Final /r/ mostly patterns like pre-consonantal /r/, but what are we to
> do with "intrusive r" in non-rhotic dialects, where unhistorical r's
> appear in external sandhi by analogy to the historically lost ones?
Not a problem at all. When I see 'data is', I read /da:t@rIz/ just fine
with the current orthography. You only get a real problem with
'withdrawal', where an /r/ crops up in a word where there shouldn't be
one (drawing etc. have a clearer morpheme boundary).

There are other problems, though. Australian English, at least, is
somewhat haphazard with the pronunciation of <au> as /O/ or /o:/
especially (not exclusively!) before <r>+vowel; there are dialects which
have <au> realised as their equivalent of /o:/ and never /O/ wherever it
shows up (irregularities etc. excepted). 'Gone' would need a special
orthography unhad by any other words if you're going for maximal
distinction, because it's the only word with the phoneme /O:/ IMD, and
this isn't just ideolectal.

It also wouldn't surprise me if some Americans had a phonemic distinction
between the short a of 'bat' and the short a of 'bad', which would be
different from the distinction in 'claas' and different again from the
distinction in Australian short a of 'bat'/'bad' (as in different words
have the altered form in Australian vs American, not different phonetic
rendition). Though it might not be phonemic in any American dialect, but
I've seen things suggesting it is sometimes.

While there are many things that can easily be taken back to a neutral
orthography (like r as a diacritic indicating length vs letter unto itself
before consonants/EOW), there are cases when you'd get absurd
orthographies if you tried doing it everywhere. The only revised spellings
that get accepted are those that spontaneously crop up and aren't
necessarily compatible between dialects, though, so as far as I'm
concerned the issue is moot.

--
Tristan