Re: E and e (was: A break in the evils of English (or, Sturnan is beautiful))

On Wed, 1 May 2002 19:04:18 -0400, Roger Mills <romilly@...> wrote:

>Jeff Jones wrote:
>>There's a whole mess of newer phonology theories. Dirk and some others
>>here are experts on those.
>>As I understand it, Phonemics is not so much a scientific theory ...
>Ah well, the Founding Fathers, in their hubris,  thought they were being
>scientific, even perhaps finding a "universally valid" method for
>describing languages.
>
>>as an "engineering tool" used in developing practical orthographies for
>>languages that don't have any.
>That was an important, though essentially ancillary, benefit.
>
>>It doesn't have to be perfect, since extralinguistic factors tend to
>>interfere anyway.
>It strove for perfection, even if untidy areas remained.  As Sapir said,
>"all grammars leak".  Subsequent newer theories also claim perfection, but
>even so have (different, or as yet undiscovered) untidy areas.  There's
>just no way to achieve perfection when describing an essentially imperfect
>thing, like language. The Gods see to it that we humans never quite
>achieve perfection.
Well, you'd know better than I. But my understanding comes mainly from
_Phonemics: A Technique For Reducing Languages To Writing_ by Kenneth L.
Pike (1947).

Jeff J.