Re: Orthography help needed

Tristan McLeay wrote at 2004-04-10 09:09:49 (+1000)
 >  --- Tim May <butsuri@...> wrote:
 >
 > > Precisely.  That's what I meant by "short vowel" and "these
 > > situations"; |ethe| surely produces /D/ but not /E/.  (Here, at
 > > least, it would have the added disadvantage that it could be
 > > analysed as a foreign or archaic form, and pronounced as a
 > > disyllable.  And that it's a neologism, whereas at least some
 > > people already use |edh|.)
 >
 > Problem with <edh> is it's at least as likely to generate /d/ as
 > /D/. Probably more. I can't think of a single word with <dh>=/D/
 > (apart from your <edh>).
 >

Certainly it's not transparent - I'm not claiming that |dh| indicates
/D/ in English, but rather that the English orthography has no way to
express /D/ in this situation, and |dh| is an innovation we may use to
get around this.

Using |dh| for /D/ is a natural extension of |th| for /T/, and has
seen considerable use in linguistics.  I'm not aware of any language
in which /D/ is consistently represented by |dh| in the standard
orthography, but then it's a pretty rare phoneme.  |dh| is often used
to transliterate Icelandic edh and Arabic dhaal.  (My dictionary says
the name eth/edh comes from Danish _edh_, so it appears Danish may use
it in some cases.)

Of course |edh| can be mispronounced; as you say, a linguistically
naive reader is almost certain to pronounce it /Ed/.  But I don't see
any reason to prefer /ET/ over /Ed/, if they're going to mispronounce
it.  It's qute likely that anyone with cause to know the word will
work it out, either way.

As Joe pointed out in his original objection, there aren't any |dh|
digraphs in English at all, natively.  You only find |dh| at a
morpheme boundary, or in the occasional foreign loan.