Re: English diglossia (was Re: retroflex consonants)

On Wednesday 29 January 2003 4:17 pm, Tristan wrote:
> John Cowan wrote:
> >Joe scripsit:
> >>I hope so.  The English spelling system needs some of it's Maggelity
> >> ironed out of it.
> >
> >It's been done.  Axel Wijk's Regularized Inglish is a massive multi-decade
> >job of analyzing practically every word in the language, figuring out what
> >the (etabnannimous) spelling system really is, and identifying all the
> >maggelitous words and proposing properly etabnannimous spellings for them.
> >"English", e.g. is maggelitous in its first vowel only, and so it becomes
> >"Inglish".
>
> As I've said in the Germaniconlang mailing list: you respell English,
> you put up with what you get. And you won't like it if you want
> inter-dialectal homogeneity. The only rules you can have that'll be as
> valid in one area as another are the present ones, full-stop. (And yeah,
> they aren't homogenous, but they're close enough to make no difference.)
>
> (I also decided a new Interlang should be created, which is a fossilised
> standardised Modern English (perhaps with pre-GVS pronunciation,
> suggested by B. P. Jonsson), and the dialects of it should be encouraged
> to go their separate ways, something like Latin and its Romance langs
> (with pre-GVS pronunciation, it'd be even more like Latin with a Vulgar
> (i.e. shifted) form and a Classical (unshifted) one. This levels the
> playingfield for English a bit because no-one will know it natively, and
> means that no-one has to worry about the confusing differences between
> 'saw' and 'sore' or 'father' and 'bother'.)
>
>
My current project is an English in which the Orthography(Standard Modern) is
completely divorced from the grammar and pronounciation.  This gives rise the
the Njuuspel, which is actaully catching on in a big way.