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

Mark J. Reed skrev:
> On 5/28/06, caeruleancentaur <caeruleancentaur@...> wrote:
>
>> >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.)
>>
>> Why two f's?
>
>
> Presumably because the doubled letter indicates that the vowel should
> be short.   I mean, no Anglophone would look at <laf> and say /lejf/;
> they might say /laf/ instead of /l&f/, but then half the world says
> /laf/ for <laugh> anyway, as Philip said.  So the doubled letter is
> not really necessary in <laff>. However, it has more utility in
> <enuff>, since I could definitely see someone reading <enuf> with a
> /-nuf/ or /-nUf/, vel sim.
>
> English spelling is, after all, approximately phonemic, despite the
> many rules and their many exceptions.  A fluent reader will make
> certain assumptions about the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word, and
> one goal of a gradual spelling reform such as John seems to be
> undertaking - as opposed to the big bang proposals - is to make those
> assumptions correct more often than they currently are, rather than to
> violate them for the sake of rigorous adherence to some new standard.
I have found long ago that the only fair way to treat the distinction
between 'short' /&/ and 'broad' /A/ in a spelling reform would be to
ignore it, due to the distributional cruxes.  And what then with the
'tense' [E@]--[I@] that is splitting of from /&/ in America, and which
has no counterpart elsewhere!

The same goes for /u/ vs. /U/, and J.C. Wells has even argued that all
three of /u/--/U/--/V/ may be left undistinguished in a spelling reform,
since not all accents distinguish them and the functional load of the
distinction(s) is low in those accents that do.  Clearly omission of
distinctions is often the most democratic thing to do in a spelling
reform that wants to be panlectal.  In consonants /N/--/Ng/ and
/T/--/D/ are clearly such cases too.

In a few cases regionally differentiated spellings would probably
be the best thing: thus Americans would probably want to spell
/fADr/ as _fother_ (supposing that the LOT set is spelled |o|
and /T/--/D/ as |th|...)

--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    "Maybe" is a strange word.  When mum or dad says it
    it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
    means "no"!

                            (Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)