Re: CHAT letter names (was: CHAT Etruscana etc)

 --- John Cowan <cowan@...> wrote: > Tristan
McLeay scripsit:
>
> > It's not as if h-dropping dialects say aich and
> > h-keeping ones say haich, so it can't be ignored
> in
> > the same way that /Ar/ vs /a:/ is.*
>
> The reason for aich's popularity, though, is that
> the dominant dialect
> (back when we had such a thing) used to be
> h-dropping, and still is,
> though it is no longer dominant.  Haich is surely
> derived from other
> dialects that were not h-dropping.
But that wouldn't explain its relatively recent
popularisation, would it? In Australia the people who
use it are people who would be hard pressed to look to
England for a linguistic standard. I think the
simplest explanation not for its origination, nor for
its not dying, but for its recent popularity in
Australia is that it has the sound of the letter in
its name, and someone else did it.

> > * Another change to letter names is that it's
> become
> > quite common to say [a:r] even when there isn't a
> > conveniently placed vowel after the letter.
>
> People will do very odd things in the name of
> disambiguation.
[a:] is not (presently) ambiguous. The nearest letters
are [Ai] and [&i] (and Australians don't have any
desire to turn [Ai] into [A:], nor is short O ever
pronounced like it). And this has become popular
amongst a similar group to the above (though I don't
do this; I say haich because of my Catholic education
I think).

> > Bah. Silly E-o. Only fools give letters such
> similar
> > names. What happens what tso, tSo, so and So merge
> > word initially but remain distinct word-finally?
> (I
> > guess we get haich, don't we?)
>
> Lojban is even uglier:  the consonant letter names
> are [b@] [S@] [d@] etc.
Oh, how logical.

--
Tristan.

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