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Re: English notation

From:Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Saturday, June 30, 2001, 11:49
At 5:17 pm -0400 29/6/01, John Cowan wrote:
>Christian Thalmann wrote: > >> Raymond Brown wrote: >> >>>æ = /E/ in _æni_, /{/ in _ænd_ and _dhæt_. >>> >>>The phoneme /E/ is spelled {æ} in _æni_, but as {e} in _dhem_. >> Isn't [E] just a phonetic realization of the phoneme /æ/ in this context? > > >Plainly no: "any" is /Eni/ and "Annie" is /&ni/. "Any" is now an > >irregular spelling.
Oh yes - I've understood _any_ and _many_ as irregular spellings for /Eni/ and /mEni/. We're quite capable of saying /{ni/ (Kirshenbaum: /&ni/), as in _Annie_ above, and _canny_, _Danny_, _nanny_ (female goat).
>> Spelling reforms in general feel "imperial" to any established English >> speaker.
Eh? I've found neither Axel Wijk's 'Regularized English' or the 'Initial Teaching Alphabet' (ITA) system which was popular in this country a few decades ago, nor the Shavian alphabet reform to be "imperialistic". But I would find an overtly Americanized form to be so, just as I would consider an overtly British form to be so.
>>It won't happen in this century, just as the metric system >> won't be made official in the US in this century, for the same reason. > > >Gak, I hope metrication is not *that* far off!
I think the days when the metric system was evidence of French imperialism are long, long gone! Surely, in its SI form at least, the system is as non-imperial & international as one could get.
> >>>In words like _curry_ and _hurry_ we have [V]. >>>But I'm afraid that by adopting a _phonetic_ approach to spelling reform, >> >> Did I? Now I'm confused.
Well, it certainly came across that way.
> >The problem with Christian's system is not that it is not phonemic >(so Raymond), but that it is insufficiently cross-dialectal. This is >a hard problem.
It is, but not, I think, insuperable.
>Axel Wijk (the Regularized Inglish creator) was >careful to use both Longmans and Kenyon & Knott, and even he had >to allow that some words will be spelled differently across the >Pond: e.g. "paath" vs. "path".
Only in some parts across the pond here. "path" is used in more Brit dialects than "paath"; the thing is, I suppose, that "paath" is used in the south-east which is the most heavily populated part of Britain. But during my life-time, [A:] has been giving ground to [{]. Very few people now say "plaastic", "elaastic" or "draastic", tho these were common 50 years back when I was a youngster. My own feeling is the [A:] pronunciation in words like 'path', 'grass' etc will disappear, only to be retained in 'non-standard' dialects in the way that, e.g. some Londoners still say [O:f] where the rest of us Brits say [Qf] for "off". --------------------------------------------------------------- At 10:24 pm +0200 29/6/01, Christian Thalmann wrote: [snip]
> >The word "some" is officially pronounced /sVm/, not /sOm/. The proposed >spelling of /V/ in my system was <a>. > >It's an irregular pronunciation.
No, it's an irregular spelling. It's part of the package bequeathed to us by the Normans when they respelled English :=( They spelled /u/ as {o} if it came before {m}, {n} or {u} (= /v/), to make reading easier as in the handwriting of the time {um}, e.g. could get easily confused. Thus _some_ originally represented /sum@/ which has, through regular development, become /sVm/.
>.......It isn't that apparent in American >English, where /V/ and /O/ are usually merged to some degree or another, >but a Brit would pronounce "some" clearly like "sum" rather than "Tom".
Yep, exactly like "sum". I thought _some_ and _sum_ were homophones everywhere. [snip]
> >> Indeed, _kerent_ threw me completely on the first read; it suggested >> *kerrent /"kErn=t/ to me. > >Which would be <kærent> in my system.
So how would *["k{rn=t] be written? The second syllable of the following words are all pronounced differently in most (all?) varieties of English: apparent, deterrent, concurrent. [snip]
> >There's nothing like a healthy dose of righteous European culture >chauvinism. ):-D
Maybe - but I find all chauvism abhorrent (OK - I noticed the smiley; but I really do abhor chauvinism). My point was that any reform of English orthography should IMO respect all mainstream varieties and aim to be international.
> >> The trouble is that English is not only still spoken in little old England >> (and the rest of Britain as either L1 or L2), but is also spoken in >> Australia, New Zealand, much of Africa & the Indian subcontinent. Any >> spelling reform, to be be successful, has to be acceptable to all >> anglophones (except diehards). > >Which is why we should transliterate *phonemes* rather than phonetic >realizations,
Yes, that is what I've said many times.
>even if those realizations sound like the realizations of >other phonemes in the same language.
I don't follow. Surely the point of phonemes is that they are contrastive, i.e. [snip]
> >> In words like _curry_ and _hurry_ we have [V]. >> But I'm afraid that by adopting a _phonetic_ approach to spelling reform, > >Did I? Now I'm confused.
Well, as I said, it came across that way - probably because your transcription, on your own admission, reflected American English.
>> IMHO the only successful way for a wholesale reform of English (rather than >> regularizing present spelling) is to adopt a _phonemic_ approach which >> accommodates all mainstream varieties of English. > >Agreed.
Good. Ray. ========================================= A mind which thinks at its own expense will always interfere with language. [J.G. Hamann 1760] =========================================

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John Cowan <cowan@...>