Re: USAGE: Fänyläjikyl Inglyx

Don:

Exactly what I wanted to say, said better than I said it or could
possibly have said it.  Thanks.

Ed

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                       edheil@postmark.net
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Don Blaheta wrote:

> Quoth Roland Hoensch:
> > And thus we touch at the heart of the matter.
> > The common writing system for Chinese is their... I do not
> > even know what it is called.  A part phonetic, part semantic
> > system of (and I use the term loosely) "picture writing".
> >=20
> > Whereas English is using an alphabet.  An alphabet that has
> > distinct letters for vowels and consonants.  An alphabet whose
> > great achievement was a largely phonetic representation of
> > speech.
>=20
> Why?  What if we just treat words as logographic units, with 26
> different stroke types arranged linearly (more types and non-linear
> arrangements in other languages)?  Just because we use an alphabet
> doesn't necessarily mean that it *has* to be phonetic.
>=20
> > If the speech of various speakers differ that widely, why are they
> > all writing the same?  I feel the alphabet is not being made full
> > use of.
>=20
> They're all writing the same because they have *different mappings*
> between the written and spoken form.  There's a fairly good paper
> explaining this, you should be able to find it in your local university
> library:
>=20
> Emerson, Ralph H.  ``English Spelling and its Relation to Sound''.
> _American Speech_ 72:3, 1997.
>=20
> Although it is in the journal _American Speech_, it does have mention o=
f
> a few other English dialects.  Here is the quick summary: we take
> English spelling as *literemic*, i.e. comprised of a sequence of
> *literemes*.  The level of abstraction from letters to literemes is for
> the most part a null or simple translation, but there are a few
> high-frequency words for which they differ (e.g. "one", "who").  From
> the literemic representation, we can derive the slightly more concrete
> *graphophonemic* representation.  This transformation is universal to
> all English dialects, and includes things like <<sh>> going to //S//,
> <<x>> going to either //ks// or //gz//, etc.  From this graphophonemic
> representation, *then* we apply dialectal rules to derive a true
> phonemic representation.  For instance, in British English the
> graphophonemic //djuk// becomes either /djuk/ or /dZuk/, while the
> American goes to /duk/.  This is also where a number of context rules
> are applied.  One line from table 9:
>=20
>                                 BrE       AmE
>                1    2    3     1 2 3     1 2 3
> <<=E0>>  //&//  hat marry far    & & A     & E A
>=20
> shows that the literemic "short a" turns into the graphophonemic "ash"
> sound, and thence in different contexts and dialects into one of three
> phonemic forms.
>=20
> My point here is that for me, there are a bunch of rules I have in my
> head by which I can go about pronouncing a word I've never seen before.
> For you, there's a *different* set of rules, that would give you a
> different pronunciation more in accord with your dialect.  This *does
> not* mean that we have to spell things differently in order to both hav=
e
> a good letter-to-sound representation.
>=20
> > And yes, I do apologize, saying English is no more a language than
> > the Romance tongue is a bit of a stretch... a lot actually.  But I am
> > rather certain that English is going exactly the same way the Romance
> > tongues went.
>=20
> And you want to hurry it along?  Sure, English will split up,
> eventually.  I fail to see why we need to act specially to do so....
>=20
>=20
> By the way, for those of you following along, my .sig is always randoml=
y
> picked from a file of quotes I keep.  Have I mentioned it has an uncann=
y
> ability to be relevant?
>=20
> --=20
> -=3D-Don Blaheta-=3D-=3D-dpb@cs.brown.edu-=3D-=3D-<http://www.cs.brown.=
edu/~dpb/>-=3D-
> A British fellow was touring an orchard in America, and the tour guide
> was explaining what they did with all the fruit. "We eat what we can,
> and what we can't we can."=20
>   =20
> The British fellow thought that this was just so amusing that he had to
> go and tell his friends about it first thing when he got home. "You see=
,
> they eat what they can," he told them, "and what they can't, they put u=
p!"