Re: YAEPT: Enuf is Enuf: Some Peepl Thru with Dificult Spelingz

On 7/12/06, Tristan Alexander McLeay <conlang@...> wrote:
> I'm not sure in what sense this "Er." is meant, but I was referring to
> reading IPA of American accents, or eye-dialect spellings, spelling
> reforms designed only to suit AmE, or the like.
I know.  I was just taken aback because I thought it was dialect-neutral. :)

> One option is not to give unstressed vowels a defined spelling
> (potentially even where it's actually clear what it is), and allow all
> possible options (so "uthr, uthar, uther, uthir, uthor, uthur" etc.
> are all valid spellings). It'd make spell checkers a lot more fun, but
> would make spelling a lot easier and wouldn't significantly impede
> spelling.
Neat trick that. :)  (I assume you meant "wouldn't significantly
impede reading", of course.)


> Yeah... I kinda knew that, but I think I got so court up in reacting
> against "krrent" which is so completely counter-intuitive &
> american-centric that it's not funny.
Sorry.  I sometimes forget these things.  It was in any case an
orthography I cooked up on the spur of the moment as I was typing the
email.

> [*]: It's not so much the fact that Americans don't distinguish the
> qualities in "curry" and "furry" that doesn't cease to suprise me:
> it's the fact that they don't distinguish the lengths. Are you sure
> it's not something like [kr=i] vs [fr=ri]?
I assume you're kidding, but trust me: there is absolutely no
distinction.  It would never have occurred to me for any reason not to
make those words a perfect rhyme.  Even since discovering that such is
not the case universally, I still can never remember which words go
with which pronunciation over there; asking which of "curry" and
"furry" has the "longer vowel" is exactly as meaningful as asking the
same question between "cat" and "fat", or "cought" and "fought", or
"clock" and "flock", or . . .  if I had a microphone on this computer
I'd fire up Praat and show you spectograms of my "curry" and "furry",
but really, they're quite identical.


> I think /Z/ is better unified with /z(j)/ than /S/, with which it
> alternates: /pr@Zu\:m/ vs /pr@zamS@n/, and I can't think of any
> minimal pairs.)
I assume that's "presume", which has an ordinary [z] for me - but even
if it were [Z], it's not /Z/ but /zj/, where the /j/ comes from the
/ju/.

Aside from the usual set of "-easure" words and the occasional French
borrowing, I can't think of anywhere I have a phonemic /Z/.


> > And while I'm heartily opposed to any analysis of English that
> > seriously tries to unify /N/ and /h/ into a single phoneme, I would
> > not automatically be opposed to a spelling that used the same symbol
> > for both just on that basis.  I would be opposed, however, because of
> > the medial cases where ambiguity arises.
>
> Umm.... that last sentence seemes to be in contradiction with the
> whole pat-pot merger thing of your orthography.
Yes, but I was also trying to make it not *too* counterintuitive, at
least for folks who have encountered any Roman orthographies besides
modern English's.


> I think it's just a "what have we got left" thing. In terms of your
> original specification (similarity with continental readings), the
> reading of "u" is also counterintuitive.
Eh.  Reading <u> as /U/ has precedent in Classical Latin and Arabic,
at the very least.

> Hm, I was of the understanding that that ell was long dead. And I've
> heard "bomb" and "calm" (& sim.) rhymed by Americans before.
They don't rhyme for me.

>  Do you also revive the l's in "salmon" and "almond", and if so, how are those
> words pronounced (phonemically & phonetically)? I've got /s&m@n/ and
> /a:m@nd/ and essentially equivalent phonetics.
"Salmon" is /'s&mn=/, but the "l" in "almond" is alive and well, thank
you.  It sounds just like the word "all" followed by /mn=d/.

> > That is, of course, the key question which must be addressed by any
> > spelling form that attempts to be phonemic.  As I said, I'd personally
> > rather have ambiguous symbols than seemingly arbitrary distinctions.
>
> Simplifying the task of reading & difficulting the task of writing.
I'd say it's the other way around.  Only one symbol to remember for
e.g. the two sounds /a/ and /&/.  But then when I see an unfamiliar
word written with an <a> I don't immediately know how to pronounce it.

> But how far down the path of ambiguity do you go before you stop? Are
> non-rhotic spellings fine? (thus making "surprise" or "data" easier to
> spell right for non-rhotics, but harder to read for rhotics).
Much.  "suprise" would be easy enough, but "dater" looks like the
agentive of "to date"...

... which wouldn't matter to you non-rhotic types, I suppose, since I
guess those are homophonous for you? :)  It's amazing how hard it is
to think panlectically, even when one is aware of the issues.

Anyway, such spellings as "dater" for "data"  would also appear to
convey a common low-prestige pronunciation over here which one might
characterize as hyper-rhotic, in which e.g. "tomato" is actually
pronounced [t_ho'meidr\=] or [t_h@'meidr\=] - hence the character in
the new Pixar movie "Cars" who is a tow truck named "Mater":
tow-Mater.  The liasing [r] that shows up in non-rhotic speech also
sounds to us like that set of dialects.

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

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