Re: Advanced English to become official!

I thought I should give a response to this because Pascal
can't just go on stating falsehoods about the English
language and linguistics in general without some response.
However, as most of us are already aware, Pascal seems
incapable of critical reception to his work without launching
into vitriolic ad hominem attacks, as evidenced today by
his attack on Joe, and thus any response of his to this
I will not honor with a counterresponse.

Pascal wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Apr 2005 17:43:30 -0800, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:
> >I was just looking over your page. A couple questions:
> >
> >-How would AE differentiate between the [dZ] in a word like
> >"language" and the "dg" in a made-up word like "midguard"?
>
> You could use a hyphen (mid-guard) or an apostrophe (mid'guard).
This could work, and has been done in some languages.  The
question of whether it is esthetically appealing to one (and
to me it is not) is probably undecidable on any objective
grounds.  I always prefer as close a mapping of graphemes
to phonemes as possible.

> > -Same goes for something like "missionary" and "vishnu",
> > the first with a reduced vowel between the [S] and [n], and
> > the latter without?
>
> Why would you want to write vowels which are not pronounced in the
> first place? Ideally, you don't, so I left them out as much as possible.
That's correct, but in this case, the vowel is not being left
out:  actual English speakers (including all fluent nonnative
English speakers) include the vowel in /mIS@nEri/, as opposed
to /vISnu/. Unlike, say, "button", the /n/ is not syllabic,
so the vowel should be represented somehow.

> >-Curious: Why did you use "ae" for schwa, rather than "a",
> > when you use "a" for carrot [V]?
>
> I chose this to distinct between normal a and schwa. The carrot
> [V] is just a short a, so I wrote it as such.
In most dialects of English, including the English spoken by most
nonnative speakers whose use you value so highly, there is no
phonemic distinction the carrot [V] and the schwa [@].

> > -According to your chart, you use "a" for [V] and [A]/[Q].
> > Does this mean "cot" and "cut" would be spelled the same?
>
> Since [Q] is closer to a than to o, I chose to write it with a.
> Even if I had chosen "o", there would be some other words with
> then identical spelling.
In what sense is [Q] closer to a than to o?  [Q] is a rounded
vowel accoustically and articulatorily much more similar to [o]
than to [a] or [A].

> >-Not familiar with British pronunciation. Does the "i" in
> >"technique" rhyme with the "i" in "bit" or the "ee" in "beet"?
>
> It's a French word. The i is long, as in beet.
This is true, and that vowel is [i] rather than [I], but the
fact that it was borrowed from French has precious little to
do with that.

> >-Curious: Why no consonant for the (inter)dental fricatives?
> >There are lots of minimal pairs: dare/there/their; die/thy;
> > tie/thigh; >tin/thin, etc.
>
> You'll have to take into consideration the vast amount of non-native
> speakers, which now outnumber the native speakers. Most of them don't
> have a th, so I thought it better to axe it.
Do you see how inconsistent this is?  On the one hand, you are
not abolishing all voicing contrasts:  you're keeping /v/ and
/Z/, the latter historically quite recent, and you're keeping
/f/, /s/, /S/.  On the other hand, you're getting rid of a
contrast that many, many languages of the world make.  (The fact
that this just happens to largely match the German inventory is
purely an accident, of course.)  Basically, if you had decided to use
typological reasoning to decide which to keep and which to get
rid of, you would not have come up with the system you have here.

> > -Also, "s" is *always* voiced before a vowel? So "sue" and "zoo"
> > are pronounced the same: [zu]?
>
> Basically yes. A distinction would be unneccessary here. Everyone
> should be able to understand "Sue goes to the zoo" regardless is the
> s is voiced or not.
Again, it is totally unclear why this is the case.  In any event,
the fact that humans are capable of reconstructing another
person's speech is emphatically NOT an indication that the
other person spoke grammatically.  There was a great example
of this on the LanguageLog the other day:  "This is the station
that you really makes a difference to you" (heard on an NPR
station when one of the announcers asking for public contributions
got their syntax twisted up).  We can reconstruct what this
sentence means, but every English speaker knows that this is
not a sentence of English, and it isn't one of any other
language, either.  The systems that we create to represent spoken
language in written form (including rules of spelling and of
stylistics) should be able to rule out ungrammatical forms like
this.  The writing system you propose would strike English speakers,
native and nonnative alike, as wrong in its phonology as that
sentence is wrong in syntax.

> >-Oh, interesting. Do you pronounce "v" and "w" the same?
>
> Yes. The difference is too small to warrant separate letters,
> so get rid of a superfluent letter :D
Note that in English we say "superfluous", not "superfluent".
The latter means someone who is exceptionally gifted in
speaking a given language, not an excessive amount of something.

Anyways, this logic is begging the question.  Where do you get
the authority to decide what is a sufficiently large difference
between phones to represent them in the orthography? What are
your criteria?  We've already determined that it's not linguistic
typology; if it were, you'd've gotten rid of almost all the
fricatives, save perhaps /s/, and perhaps also collapsed the
distinction between voiced and voiceless stops.  That, at least,
would be a reasonable proposal based on a rational understanding
of human languages.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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