Re: English notation

Christian wrote:

>Heh, it does look kinda weird, but I agree with Tom that it looks more
>like English is supposed to look.

This has turned into kind of an interesting discussion; it really seems to
hinge on what one is trying to achieve--something close to a phonetic
transcription of English speech, a reform of a small number of particularly
egregious spelling irregularities, or something in between. I think English
would lose its reputation for being orthographically difficult with just a
couple changes: (1) removal of silent letters, and (2) standardized
(perhaps with a few easy vaiants) modes for representing the long vowels
and diphthongs.

There's an interesting conlang angle here, too. English spelling is the way
it is in large part because of the great vowel shift, and the fact that
English generally retains both the foreign spelling and (crudely speaking)
foreign pronunciation of borrowings from languages that use the Latin
alphabet. Most conlangs I've seen tend to approach orthography logically
rather than evolutionarily. Define the sounds, and think of ways to write
them--usually one-to-one or nearly so. We're probably a bit complacent
about this approach because many of the languages one finds in linguistics
books have an orthography invented by field linguists--they either have no
long history of writing, or else employ a writing system that is not worth
the trouble to incorporate into a typeset book that is not intended to
teach the writing system.

If your language goes with a conculture that has a long history of writing
and contact with other languages, especially spanning a period of sound
change, an orthography that even approaches a phonetic ideal may be quite
unrealistic.

Wouldn't it be fun to make a conlang with a long history of orhographic
woes--perhaps an early, half-successful attempt at spelling reform, partly
obliterated by a later sound change, and further complicated by substantial
borrowings from a foreign tongue with epoch-dependent transcription rules!

I'm toying with this a bit in my own present project. The Iltâr were the
originators of alphabetic writing in the Thekashi millieu, so their own
language has remained nearly phonetic (with just a few quirks)...sort of a
Thekashi Latin. But their alphabet was adapted by speakers of other
languages with widely different phonologies. Borrowings between these
languages take different forms. Borrowings popular among the more literate
segments of society tend to respect the orthography of the foreign
language, even at the expense of phonetic accuracy, while borrowings that
live in the spoken language for a generation or two before working their
way into literature look more like phonetic transcriptions, or
transcriptions of distortions! When the Iltâr borrow words from other
Thekashi languages, they routinely alter both the spelling and phonology to
conform with the restrictions of their own language. Because of the status
of Iltârer among the Thekashi literati, indigenous and "Iltârized" forms of
words may exist side by side, something like the way Latinate technical
terms exist in English along with recognizably cognate French borrowings
that see more general use ("governor" and "gubernatorial" pops into mind,
although there must certainly be better examples), but with the added quirk
that most such words come from the speaker's native language to begin with,
not from Iltârer! A bit as if English words like "water" got mapped into
"vates, vateris", so that the literati start saying things like "the
drought has caused a vaterial crisis".

I'm being a good boy, though, and forcing myself to get Iltârer in some
stable form before moving on to this mass of chaos.

Cheers, Tom




~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tom Tadfor Little               tom@telp.com
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Telperion Productions           www.telp.com
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