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

From:Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>
Date:Sunday, April 28, 2002, 17:03
Jesse Bangs wrote:
>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.
Still, the iota is rather a sign of length than of highness, isn't it?
> > 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|.
I assume that you assume you'd know that one of the graphs signigies [e] and the other [E]? If I saw |e| and |ei| in some language's orthography, I'd assume them to be [e]/[E] (leaving length aside) and [ei]/[Ei] respectively.
> 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.
Is there any language which's normally written in the Latin alphabet and uses |ei|=[e] and |e|=[E]? It does feel a very exotic convention to me, if logical (Then |bh|=[v] would be very logical compared to values we frequently denote as |ph th dh kh gh|, and yet I'm inclined to think that it's what pops up when you see |bh| in a foregin word). Andreas _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com