Re: USAGE: Adapting non-Latin scripts

On 24/05/06, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> wrote:
> On 5/24/06, Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > >From: Michael Adams <abrigon@...>
> > >
> > >Is the Latin characters really that good for English?
>
> Nah, not that great. One problem is that English has far more phonemic
> vowels than Latin, for starters. (It could be worse -- try fitting
> Arabic to English, for example, with only three vowel signs.)
I'm not really sure that's a *problem* though. It's certainly not why
the English orthography is a bit difficult to work with. As long as
the rules were regular with how to spell sounds, it doesn't matter if
we spelt /æ/ as "a", "ä", "æ" or "ae" and /ei/ as "ai", "aa" or "é".
If we just picked one and stuck to it, we'd be laughing. The Finns are
(hopefully not at us ;), and they have more vowels than we do.
Consider how well we get on with "sh", despite not having a single
letter for the sound...

The difficulties with the English orthography, I think, are purely in
the implementation, and not with the underlying script. Fact is, if we
had an orthography designed to be most perfect for Middle English,
with a single symbol for each of the ME vowel phonemes, with the ME
distribution, our orthography would *still* be byzantine (not to be
confused with "Byzantine"). We'd *still* put the same character in
"grass" and "warrant" and "back" despite the vowels being completely
different (IMD; YMMV; E&OE etc).

So yeah: Latin alphabet --- more than adequate for English. English
orthography --- could easily be improved upon (but then you have to
choose who to exclude).

--
Tristan.

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