USAGE: YAEPT:Re: Shavian: was Re: USAGE: Con-graphies

Yahya Abdal-Aziz wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>On Fri, 9 Jun 2006, Gary Shannon wrote:
><snip>
>
>
>>Ultimately, the reason I lost interest in Shavian is
>>that it doesn't record "the language", but records a
>>particular spoken dialect of the language. Spelling
>>can be either standardized OR phonetic, but it can
>>never be both, and given that choice I think I would
>>opt for standardized non-phonetic over phonetic but
>>non-standardized every time. It's just so much easier
>>to read, fluently, a standardized spelling than to get
>>bogged down puzzling over what some word might be
>>because the writer, a native German living in Boston
>>spelled it with his own idiosyncratic blend of German
>>and Bostonian accents.
>>
>>A pox on phonetic spelling!
>>
>>
>
>
>Seconded, Gary!
>
>But what's even worse, from my point of view,
>is that English now has so many different
>phonemic realisations (languages?; if Cantonese
>and Hokkien are Chinese dialects, then these
>are English dialects; otherwise, they're languages
>...) that we can either have a phonemic spelling or
>a standardised one.
>
Hokkien and Cantonese are far more different from one another than your
average English dialect.  English is a surprisingly monolithic language,
actually, compared to Arabic and Chinese, or even German or Italian.

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