Re: English notation

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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