Re: My new project - comments appreciated

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 09:22:32 +0100, Joe <joe@...> wrote:
>
> Incidentally, about the phonology:
>
> If a sound regularly changes in one language to another, the language in
> which the sound is kept distinct gets the orthography, and the
> 'official' pronunciation.  So, as an example - 'th'.  Dutch, 'd', Scots
> 'th', Frisian 'd'.  While it's a tie, Dutch(and Frisian) confuses the
> sound with plain 'd',  so, while that may be a dialectal feature of
> Dutch, it will be written 'th'.  And soforth.
Sounds a bit like Interlingua again :)

IIRC their rules about forms of words include something along the
lines of "If language X regularly changes letter A into letter B [e.g.
representing regular sound change], then this language-specific change
shall not be used to infer a spelling; rather, the underlying spelling
shall be used". That is, spelling idiosyncrasies belonging to a given
language are not taken into account.

Or were you going purely by majority, rather than what the
"underlying" sound is? For example, if sound P split into Q and R in
two of the four languages, would you prefer the "Q" and "R" spellings
for those words in which the sound occurs, on the basis of
"distinctiveness rules", or the "P" spelling, on the basis of the
splitting being language idiosyncrasy?

Interlingua also uses cognates which keep a given spelling do
determine whether a given morpheme would be recognisable - for
example, English has "father" but also words such as "patriarchal",
indicating that a morpheme along the lines of "patr-" would be
recognise and needn't contain initial |f|.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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