Re: USAGE: di"f"thong (was: Tetraphthongs, Triphthongs, Dipht..)

On 5/29/06, Tristan Alexander McLeay <conlang@...> wrote:
> On 29/05/06, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> wrote:
> > On 5/28/06, John Vertical <johnvertical@...> wrote:
> > > (You may have also noticed me using
> > > spellings such as "laff" or "enuff", which I hope everyone can agree to be
> > > improvements.)
> >
> > Not for people with "broad A" -- assuming the first word is "laugh", I
> > pronounce it "lahf" rather than "laff".
>
> That was my first reaction, but there's still words like "path" and
> "after" and "fast"
I'm not sure what your point is?

> and although I can't think of one OTTOMH that ends
> in -aff,
"Chaff" and "staff" have "broad A" for me, for starters.

And greeping through /usr/share/dict/words on my Cygwin installation,
it only comes up with the two above plus three proper nouns and the
words "distaff" and "quaff". The second rhymes with "cough" for me and
the first I haven't heard in speech but would probably pronounce to
rhyme with "staff" and "laugh" and "barf".

> unless we plan on creating two spellings for a fairly large
> collection of words, "laff" is the most sensible spelling.
I think you've hit one of the problems with spelling reform!

I'd rather say that unless we plan on creating two spellings for a
fairly large collection of words, _"laugh"_ is the most sensible
spelling, because it's what people are already used to.

Current spelling is approximately phonemic; it might not be great but
it serves its purpose more or less. It also blurs some distinctions
(or underspecifies the sound), letting people with different accents
each read their own vowel sound into the word.

However, once you start trying to be _more_ phonemic, you run up
against the problem that people have different distributions of
phonemes! It's not just a case that phoneme /X/ is pronounced [Y] in
North America and [Z] in Australia, but it's quite possible that it's
not 1:1 but m:n! For example, "crass", "grass", and "palm" have two
different phonemes between them for me, and two different phonemes
between them for some speakers of Northern English -- but for me, the
last two words share one phoneme while for them, the first two words
share one phoneme.

So the more phonemic you want to be, the more you're forced to pick a
particular accent which you want to represent, otherwise you'll either
force people to make distinctions that are not in their own variety
(which is not much better than current spelling, where you often have
to choose between several possible ways of representing a given
phoneme, only one of which is usually deemed correct), or you force
people to give up phoneme distinctions that exist in their own
variety. (And if you spell for the lowest common denominator of
phoneme distinctions that _all_ varieties reliably agreed on, you
might be back to five vowel letters or something....)

See also http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/accents_spellingreform.htm
: J.C. Wells on "English accents and their implications for spelling
reform".

In short, it seems to me that either you have to "plan on creating two
[or three, or four] spellings for a fairly large collection of words",
you have to pick an accent of English and settle on spelling only that
accent phonemically (and leave speakers of other varieties to come up
with their own schemes or continue to use traditional orthography), or
you stick with traditional orthography in the first place.

I think that varieties are too diverse for you to be able to make a
completely phonemic orthography for English, and I'm not sure how much
headway would be gained by making minimal changes that would make some
bits more phonemic _for everyone_.

Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

Reply