Re: English notation

Shreyas Sampat wrote:
>
> Actually, this scheme looks markedly more painful, at least to my eye -
> those doubled <o>s and V<y> combinations look juvenile (which may be an
> intention, but sweet lord, trigraphs?)
Heh, it does look kinda weird, but I agree with Tom that it looks more
like English is supposed to look.  I do have problems with certain
propositions (like <uh> for /V/ and <yoo> for /ju:/).  For example, I'd
propose <ue> for /ju:/.


> Some things you may not want to violate are inflection patterns, like the
> plural/3rd person -s.
True.  In fact, /z/ and /s/ could always be written as <s> except where
it isn't defined by the neighboring consonants (as in scarce vs scares --
that could be written skairz vs skairs).


> I might suggest also things like alternate final vowel spellings; <æniwei>
> (besides the anomalous æ) is rather counterintuitive - <eniway> abuses the
> current conventions less.
That plays into Tom's scheme of keeping traditional forms.  Not a bad thing
per se.


> (Actually, Chris, you use æ in a lot of
> situations where I'd use /E/.)
Generally, I IPAize sounds written as <a> with /æ/ rather than /E/.  I
don't make much of a distinction in speech (my /æ/ doesn't sound as open
as in British, in fact more like /E/).  This might be an American
influence.  As I said, I don't want to start these dead boring bickering
wars about phonetic details in English again.  *rolleyes*


> Practically any vowel can be laxed to /@/ in the proper conditions - one
> might want to build in a condition for that.
And sometimes <e> is laxed to /I/, and sometimes <i> is spoken as /@/ --
it's hard to define rules for those.


> The /T/ /D/ distinction can possibly discarded except in the case of minimal
> pairs - the spelling of function-words should be preserved when possible.
> (dhis, dhæt, dhe look foreign again).
Hmmmmm.  I never liked this, but I agree that dh looks unEnglish.


-- Christian Thalmann

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