Re: Just a Little Taste of Judean (Part 2)

On Sun, 11 Apr 1999, Tom Wier wrote:

> Well, I wouldn't be surprised, but still the literacy levels would (a)
> still be far below what would probably be required for spelling
> pronunciations to start being introduced, and (b) they would be in
> the wrong language ;-) .  Only the extraordinarily educated individuals
> of society would have had been literate in multiple languages (and, as so
> many languages had no literary histories to begin with, the unliklihood
> is all the greater)
FWIW, in many different local Chinese dialects there are (or were) largish
numbers of 'spelling pronunciations', although the literacy rates in the
speech communities in question were probably not much more than 5%, and
possibly often much lower.  'Literary' phrases and pronunciations
penetrated way way down the social ladder in premodern China.

Kenji