Re: English notation

Tom Tadfor Little wrote:

> This is unfair, and I'd appreciate a little attention to context before
> escalating the animosity. When I said "more readable", I was referring
> only
> to my substitution of already-in-use English digraphs for Christian's
> rather foreign-looking ones; it had nothing to do with any thought that a
> phonetic rendering of my American accent was more readable for English
> speakers everywhere than a phonetic rendering of British English would
> be--this interpretation must surely be the result of coming in in the
> middle of the conversation and deciding to take offense without paying
> attention to who was saying what, or why.

I didn't actually jump in, I'd followed the thread from the start, but
missed your point - you were talking about the actual choice of letters
to represent sounds, not any other thing.

> My point was this: If one is to make the error (as we both see it) or
> regularizing English by some kind of phonetically-based system, then
> one is
> forced to take a particular accent and use it as a model. Parochial and
> political matters entirely aside, American English is a choice defensible
> in terms of number of speakers and prevalence in media (not to mention a
> fairly high degree of internal uniformity)--it is a choice a hypothetical
> "extraterrestrial" charged with the task might well select. I noted this
> fact only because Tristan seemed to be advocating a phonetic
> transcription
> of one of the British accents as a superior alternative, and I felt
> *that*
> was parochial.
No, actually I wasn't ever advocating one like that. I simply said I'd
designed one, and gave an example of it purely to show why giving
preference to any dialect is a Bad Thing(tm), although think I missed
saying it. And anyways, its all a moot point as there isn't ever going
to be a mark'ed spelling reform anywhere, although Commonwealth
countries may adopt Amercian spellings as official (or at least some of
them).

Tristan

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