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

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.