Re: English notation

Tristan wrote:


>Earlier, you said 'English' reffering to 'American Enlish'. That's all I
>was whinging about.
No, I didn't. Christian posted the original spelling system. I modified it
so that the long vowels and diphthongs were rendered by digraphs already in
use in English to represent those sounds, and innocently remarked that I
though English speekers would find it easier to recognize "ee" for long E,
"ai" for long A, and so on. My transcription, like Christian's, admittedly
presumed an American accent, but that was *not* the feature of it that I
thought would be "easier for English speakers"--that phrase was just a
reference to using digraphs that are already commonplace in English, rather
than contriving new ones.


>I don't think i expressed myself clearly enough. All I meant was put as
>many distinction in as is feasible, and then when people learn to read,
>they simply have to collapse the ones they don't distinguish between
>when reading. I'd ignore diffs between <or> and <aw> (for exapmle), and
>people who rhymed 'mass' and 'pass' between (say) <a> and <aa> (or <ass>
>  (that's not a full word! only the end of one!) and <as> (mass would be
><mass> and pass <pas> is what i mean there)*).
OK, I understand you now, but still disagree. Such a system could be
helpful for someone who wanted to understand or speak a different dialect,
because distinctions would be there in writing, and one would just have to
shift pronunciations. I doubt that it would be helpful to youngsters or
non-native speakers learning the language for the first time, or help
people to remember correct spellings. For those purposes, I think the best
approach is to respect traditional orthography, but reduce the amount of
variation and irregularity. The "Regularized Inglish" approach seems
near-optimal to me.

>I apoligise if i have offended anyone. That was never my intention;
Thanks for the gracious response. For myself, I'm wouldn't think of
apologising, but will indeed apologiZe if I got a little testy.

Good will and conlanging fun to all,

Tom

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