Re: English diglossia (was Re: retroflex consonants)

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'.)

>MHO: Wijk goes a bit far in a few places (he introduces "dh" in non-initial
>position to little gain; he sorts out long "a" into "a" and "aa"; he
>changes "s" to "z" when pronounced /z/ except in the grammatical
>ending -s), but as reformed (not revolutionized) spellings so, RI is
>a Great Thing.
>
Did he use a database with -ise or -ize, (lice)nce or (lice)nse? Using
<z> for /z/ looks un-English; and anyway, <s> represents /z/ an awful
lot to be transformed.

Tristan.

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