Re: USAGE: Fänyläjikyl Inglyx

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.
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.

> 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.
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:

Emerson, Ralph H.  ``English Spelling and its Relation to Sound''.
_American Speech_ 72:3, 1997.

Although it is in the journal _American Speech_, it does have mention of
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:

                                BrE       AmE
               1    2    3     1 2 3     1 2 3
<<=E0>>  //&//  hat marry far    & & A     & E A

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.

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 have
a good letter-to-sound representation.

> 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.
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....


By the way, for those of you following along, my .sig is always randomly
picked from a file of quotes I keep.  Have I mentioned it has an uncanny
ability to be relevant?

--=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 up!"=
=20