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

From:Jeff Jones <jeffsjones@...>
Date:Thursday, May 2, 2002, 13:21
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.