Re: Orthography help needed

Ray Brown wrote at 2004-04-10 18:31:29 (+0100)

 > On Saturday, April 10, 2004, at 03:15 AM, Tim May wrote:
 > [snip]
 > > 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,
 >
 > It does, it's |th|.
 >
 > What English doesn't have is any way of distinguishing between [T]
 > and [D] in _any position_, whether initial, medial or final. Both
 > sounds are spelled |th|.

Finally I think you can make a distinction with silent "e", as Amanda
pointed out, but that's not possible in this case.  There's only one
other final /D/ after a short vowel in the language, that I'm aware
of; the question then is whether the spelling of "with" should be
considered regular or irregular.  I don't think there's any
indisputably correct answer to this question.

 > A proverb about mountains & molehills comes to mind.
 >
 > Can't we just let this thread be? If someone wants to write |eth| and
 > another wants |edh|, what's the big deal? My dictionary gives both
 > spellings.

I quite agree.  I have no objection to people using "eth";  I only
brought up my reasons for preferring "edh" because Joe objected to
it.  I wouldn't want to give the impression that I think it's a
particularly important issue.