Re: Orthography help needed

On Friday, April 9, 2004, at 07:09 PM, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 09, 2004 at 06:49:56PM +0100, Ray Brown wrote:
>> Eh? 'with' /wID/ seems _very_ common and usual to me. /wIT/ I've
>> encountered only in Scots English.
>
> I'm pretty sure <with> is /wIT/ in GAE.  The <-th> is certainly
> voiceless around here (Atlanta).  In fact that syllable has a voiceless
> [T] even in words like "wherewithal", where one might expect
> voicing due to the intervocalic position.
Not only does one expect, one hears it. In my 65+ I've only ever hear it
pronounced with /D/. I

>> Certainly in southern England & Wales it's /wiD/
>
> Well, if it's really /i/, then that doesn't violate the "no /D/ after a
> short vowel" rule, does it? ;)
{sigh} That was of course typo. It's /wID/ and, judging from replies,
seems fairly common in other anglophone areas besides England & Wales.
================================================

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|.

> and |dh| is an innovation we may use to
> get around this.
Why? Why does this one word need this innovation when others apparently
don't? If you're proposing a spelling reform whereby English /D/ is
spelled |dh| that's another matter.

> 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.
Albanian does - so does Cornish in both the Unified & Kemyn variants. It's
also used in Swahili, tho admittedly only for Arabic borrowings where it's
often pronounced [z] rather than [D]. There are probably some others.

The phoneme is common enough in Welsh, but there it's spelled |dd|. When I
lived there, I did from time to time, have it suggested that English would
be improved if we did the same!

> |dh| is often used
> to transliterate Icelandic edh and Arabic dhaal.
Quite so - |dh| suggests "foreign word".

> Of course |edh| can be mispronounced; as you say, a linguistically
> naive reader is almost certain to pronounce it /Ed/.
Most certainly they are.

> But I don't see
> any reason to prefer /ET/ over /Ed/, if they're going to mispronounce
> it.
Quite so - so why all the fuss about spelling it as |edh|? If _both_ are
likely to be mispronounced, what's so bad about Unicode's |eth|?

> It's qute likely that anyone with cause to know the word will
> work it out, either way.
Again, quite so. I know it's [ED] whether you write it as |eth| or |edh|
or, for that matter, |edd|. So why the big fuss?

> 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.
This is very true. So basically you want to mark out Ð as a foreign letter.
  Fair enough (tho it was once native to us English when it denoted both [T]
  and [D], variants in those days of a single phoneme).

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.

We might just as well argue, like the people of Lilliput, about which is
the 'correct' end to break open a boiled egg.
It's obviously the big end.   :)))

Ray
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