Re: USAGE: Adapting non-Latin scripts

On 5/25/06, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:

> IMHO: Phonetic alphabets are excellent tools for
> writing down dialects and accents but are entirely the
> wrong tool for writing down a language. They are far
> more precise than they need to be for common usage,
....
> Leave IPA to the people who study language. The people
> who simply use it have no use for IPA and, in fact,
> are far better off without phonetic spelling.
Because of dialect variation, e.g.?  For a group of
mutually comprehensible dialects or languages,
it is advantageous to have one common written
language - thus a writing system that
is approximately phonemic, but glosses over
the differences between dialects, and thus
is not perfectly phonemic for any one dialect.
I reckon the same principle could be applied
to a syllabary; and the Chinese writing system
glosses over dialect (or language) differences at
an even higher level.

Of course this commonalty goes beyond just
the sound-symbol correspondences in the
writing system -- part of it is how we learn
in school to avoid the grammatical and lexical
peculiarities of our native dialect when doing
formal writing, and probably learn to use some
words or grammatical structures that aren't
part of our native dialect, in writing.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry