Re: English diglossia (was Re: retroflex consonants)

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".

The underlying principle of RI is that every spelling shall correspond to
at most a few sounds, preferably only one; multiple spellings for a single
sound, however, are tolerated.  Thus "ough" is kept for "bough", but not
for "rough", "through", "plough", "hiccough", "hough", or "borough".
In this particular case, this allows us to preserve a RI rule that says
"'gh' has no effect on the pronunciation".

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.

--
Only do what only you can do.           John Cowan <jcowan@...>
  --Edsger W. Dijkstra,                 http://www.reutershealth.com
    deceased 6 August 2002              http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

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