Re: Conspelling

> From:    Oskar Gudlaugsson <hr_oskar@...>
> Subject: Conspelling
>
> Does this list contain spelling reform fans?
It contains me, which is close enough ;)

> I think the term "spelling reform" will most often conjure images of "a
bold
> attack on the English orthography monster", yielding something like "dhiz
iz
> en egzampul uv mai greit nu erthugraffi". Which is unfortunately not a
very
> good image.
Indeedly.

> But what interests me most in this is the term "aesthetics"; the spelling
> must look nice (unlike the one above). But what are people's ideas of
> "nice"? Aha, very interesting indeed....;)
My idea (well, other than the dictatorial "alphabet reform") is that a
reformed English spelling should at least try to *look* English (as opposed
to Dutch or Spanish or Klingon...).  It could do that by building on the
actual _current_ spelling rules of English.  (The biggest problem with a new
spelling is that to the old spelling, so much is spelled wrong!)

Anyway, based on this what I've studied so far, I probably would not call
'aile' for 'aisle' "regular" English, because the normal sound of 'ai' is
"long-A":  maim, mail, fail, quail, rail, rain, main, stain, Spain,
maize...[2] That is, even 'aile' is irregularly spelled (even though it
doesn't look it if you think of the Romance-vowel-value of 'ai').[1]

> Basically, we could call this 'conorthography' or 'conspelling'. Do people
> here have some cool conspellings they'd like to share?
>
> A conspelling I'd like to share is one I made for French. I can't present
it
> right now, as I have to revise it a bit. The basic point in it was of
course
> to make an easier spelling for the language, which would still be familiar
> and appealing. One objective was to manage without any diacritics or
special
> characters at all.
I had several attempted conorthographies for English so far... one more
phonetickish, with a new extended alphabet and no diacritics, except an
accent mark to show.. accent [drawbacks: the letters are spread all over
Unicode and impossible in plain text]; one very similar but less
phoneticky-picky with the regular alphabet and a slew of diacritics (which I
seem to have misplaced); and one somewhat like this--several digraphs
accounted for with one sound each, a few diacritics (macron for
unotherwisemarked "long" vowel, grave for "weak" vowel, acute for /u/),
thorn, and "otherwise normal" spelling:

   It looked sòmeþing like this: "Thè quick brown fox jumped ôver thè lâzy
dog."  Î wàs rather proud of how it almôst looked normàl, iff à bit _matres
lectionis_.  Î'm still working on mî study òf _rêal_ Ênglish spelling so Î
càn dó better.
(Nòne òf those books y'all recòmmendèd mê are in thè lîbrairy...)  Î will gô
thróugh thè dicshònairy and then take pôlls on "rêal pêaple."  Fòr fun and
not fòr scîènce! <manic laffter>

(Yes, I'll quit now.  I _will_ do better later, I promise.  I already have,
almost--that up there is old.  I felt like Charlie Gordon...)
It's 5:40 am, so I am hereby going to bed for work in the morning.

Oh, wait, obConlang:
I have been remaking my Hadwan languages on more sound linguistic principles
than before (which isn't saying much, the old ones were practically Esp--er,
I won't say it.)  Its alphabet is a consonantal script based on a Semitic
model[3] which I found to be actually pretty useful for the large-scale kind
of vowel-switching the languages do.  I found that for the most part the
spellings from earlier stages of the language can continue to the present
("Middle") stage.  There are interesting irregularities though, like some of
the behavior of 'guj' (< yod) where sometimes it's /g/ and sometimes it's
/j/ and sometimes neither (it's in <jú>, "time",  for example).  I haven't
decided whether the Middle stage would have fixed or traditional spellings
yet (fixing it would be an interesting problem..), although certainly the
Late stage would have to change (they switch to the Roman alphabet).  Ffft.
I have the language's sound changes planned, its alphabet, its nominal decle
nsions... and _no_ work done on the verbs or the grammar or...

Well, it's 6:00 am.  I _am_ going to bed now.

     *Muke! (who keeps wanting to [bracket] things for [links] since he
found Everything2...)

[1] One other thing I was going to study was how people tried to pronounce
foreign words or words that looked foreign (and what made them look
foreign).  That, and a bunch of other things.
[2] 'Air' is different though, closer to "short-E": air, stair, fair, bairn,
chair... This might be because "long-A" and "R" tend to appear at syllable
breaks and not together.  player, mayor, etc.  Not sure though.
[3] An image is at
http://ns.southern.edu/~alrivera//beta/conlangs/hadwan_alphabet.gif ...It
has the letters of the alphabet spelled out, except for 'fe' which I forgot
(look at the end of the first word for a 'fe'). It still has vowels in it
because I hadn't made my mind up on it yet.  Yes, I know it looks Hebroid.
That was an accident, though it _was_ based on a sample of Nabatean, which
looked nothing like this.  It reads left-to-right, even though it probably
should be rtl.  Were Semitic langs always rtl, or were they atime boustr.,
or what?