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

Rushing late to my defense:

> > French (and English) can *not* be used as examples of normal
> > orthography!
>
> What is "normal" may I ask? Language features can only be judged as if
> they are naturalistic or not, i.e. used in natlangs or not. Orthography
> is the same. I never ever saw a language that uses |ei| for [e] and |e|
> for [E], but I have examples of the contrary. Shouldn't that mean
> something?
How about English:

wet [wEt]
weight [weit]

fret [frEt]
freight [freit]

And Greek used to have |epsilon|=[E] (or something similar) and
|epsilon-iota|=[e:] as a general rule.  Neither of these are perfect
examples, but I don't know a very large language sample, either.

> But the problem is that nobody uses it that way, so there must be a
> reason. In my opinion, [e] is more "simple" than [E]. I think that if we
> did a frequency survey on the use of [e] and [E], we would find that [e]
> is used much more often than [E], even in languages that have both. And
> I don't know of any language that has [E] without [e], while I do know
> the contrary. And my opinion is also that a more frequent sound should
> be written down simpler than a less frequent sound. Languages tend to
> agree with me, even if it's for other reasons. Even the IPA uses |e| for
> [e] and not for [E]!
You've misunderstood my argument.  I wholly agree that |e| by itself is
most likely [e].  However, given two different graphs |e| and |ei|, I
would always always ALWAYS assume that |ei| was higher than |e|.  This is
because |ei| includes |i|, which symbolizes a high vowel.  To make |ei| be
a *lower* vowel than |e| is very counterintuitive.


> > Please don't write to inform me that language XYZ does something
> > different.  I *know* that already.  The above phonetic values are ones
> > that are general and universal, or nearly so.
>
> Of single letters yes. Not of the digraph |ei| which I have absolutely never
> seen used for [e], but did see used for [E]. So spare me with your "logic",
> when it makes spellings that will be confusing for nearly everyone!
Of course, by "nearly everyone" you mean "Frenchies."  For the rest of the
world, I think you're wrong, for the reasons outlined above.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu

"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are
perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in
frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
--G.K. Chesterton

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