Re: Co-ordinated spelling

>From: "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...>
>Subject: Re: Co-ordinated spelling
>Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 08:38:42 -0400
>Well, I don't know how much this relates to what you're interested in, but
>if you think about it, written Chinese basically does the same thing.
>Chinese "dialects" are so different that they might as well be considered
>different languages (in fact, they are quite mutually incomprehensible).
>However, the writing system is consistent across dialects (barring a few
>rare exceptions), so that the speaker of one dialect can write a note and
>be understood by a speaker of another dialect, but if he spoke to the
>other person, the other person would have absolutely no clue what he was
>talking about.
Yes, I have experience with this. This is, not surprisingly, the origin of
this idea. I was an exchange student in Hong Kong, so I am well familiar
with Chinese writing. Its compatibility across "dialects" is marvelous. It's
also helpful for learning the languages. Having learnt Cantonese, I made
quick progress in Mandarin, simply by seeing the pinyin phonetisazion of the
characters I already knew; that way I quickly spotted the pattern and am now
able to "guess" a Mandarin word that I may not know, through my Cantonese.
  I define this system as 'relative spelling'. Most Western writing systems
would then be 'absolute', with a few instances of 'relative spelling', e.g.
Faroese. So what I'm trying to do is, respell Germanic  in a 'relative'
fashion (I also have designs on Romance, with French being the black sheep).

Oskar
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