Re: French reform (Re: C.Thalmann, & #1)

Hi!

Peter Kolb <peterwlkolb@...> writes:
>...
> An example from the book is Parlez Français /pahr-lay fraN-sai/ could be
> changed to Parlae Fransai /pahr-lay frahN-sai/.
Erm, sorry, but I don't know what this /pahr-lay.../ means.  Looks
like an anglocentric way of phonetic spelling.  Is that what your
book(s) use?  It seems to be quite inaccurate.

It would be much easier for most of us if you used some phonetic spelling
that is well-defined, like X-Sampa or, better, the Conlang X-Sampa usually
used here.  You can find a table here:

   http://www.theiling.de/ipa/

> Notes: /ay/ A in gAte, /ah/ A in fAther with r-colour, /ee/ EE in sEE.
Please not YAEPT because of these! :-)))

Anyway, I pronounce the |a| in |gate| as [EI] or sometimes [eI], but
the |ez| in French |parlez| as [e]...

> English is a irredeemable shambles that cannot be readily reformed because
> of the origins of so many of its words makes for a mish mash of spellings
> and sounds.
Any language's irregular spelling can be reformed. :-) If the reform
is radical enough, loans are just words like all the others.  However,
as I understand the English native speakers and linguists here,
English's spelling is hard to reform due to the large number of
different dialects so that finding phonemes or any
grapheme->phone/phoneme mapping is very hard, so basically, the
irregular spelling is a good spelling because it is irregular to all
of the dialects, but still unites them, while any more regular
spelling is expected to miss pronunciation details of some dialects.

**Henrik