Re: Phonetics vs. Phonemics (was: apparently bizarre 'A's)

Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
[snip]

> R A Brown skrev:
>
>>>> But your scheme is doomed to failure on both sides of the Pond with all
>>>> those 'furrin' diacritics!
>
>
> What ìs it with anglophones that they have diacritophobia?
You're generalizing.

[snip]

> In fact English and Latin are the only languages written in
> the Roman alphabet that don't use diacritics,
This simply is not true. AFAIK Swahili, Xhosa, Zulu and a whole lot of
other languages do not use diacritics with their Roman alphabet
orthographies.

> Roman alphabet.  Think of it, Ray: what would you think of
> Greek or Welsh, or French, without diacritics?
Greek does not use the Roman alphabet! Also of course the ancient
Greeks _did_ write without using any diacritics.

The breathings, accents and other diacritics were the invention of
Alexandrian grammarians of the Hellenistic period and were intended to
help non-Greek speakers pronounce the language properly (much as acutes
are used in Russian texts for learners). The Modern Greeks have
dispensed with all except the acute.

But I never said that *I* was adverse to diacritics - merely making the
observation that their use would simply not catch on in the anglophone
world. Newspapers never print the things on foreign words or names;
they are happy to write 'facade' even tho it's pronounced /f@'sAd/.

I'm merely stating what is a fact - whether you or I like it is
irrelevant. Spelling reforms have been proposed at least since the 19th
century - there's no shortage of proposals. But none have been
successful so far; but IME adding diacritics to such a proposed reform
will only make it more certain it is ignored.

I don't think there's any _phobia_ about the use of diacritics. Ignoring
them is due to laziness or indifference (depending upon your point of
view).

[snip]
>>> Yeah, diacritics are a no-no.  But what got me was the odd choice of
>>> digraph in the basic Roman version of ʒ - cg?  gj?
>>
>> Yes - 'cg' denoted a sound similar to [dZ] in Old English IIRC and
>> 'gj' would suggest something similar to me also.
>
> In fact my ʒ - cg  gj *does* denote /dZ/ and not /Z/.
Right - but re-introducing _cg_ from Old English, I think, is not the
best idea. Very few users of modern English have any idea about the
spelling conventions of Old English. _gj_ might work - in fact I have
used it in reform schemes of my own - but writing 'judge' as _gjygj_
seems a tad untidy   ;)


--
Ray
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