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

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

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