Re: Why my conlangs SUCK!!!

E fésto Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...>:
> Ok, does that cover it?  Nope.  Along comes "come"
> where the silent 'E' doesn't do a damn thing!
You pronounce 'come' and 'com' identically?

> And if I made up a word like "Manderine" (a Manderine orange tangerine)
> how come we know to pronounce it "Mandereen"?
Actually it could have a long i, on analogy with "Madeline".
But the real answer would be something along the lines of "it looks
French".

> So from the conlanger's persepctive, is English
> spelling something broken that needs to be fixed?
Not really.  English, due to its history as a nonphonetically-spelled
language, and a long time holding foreign-language (i.e., French)
spellings in prestige, and through such things as dictionaries and
trans-dialect prescriptivism, has enshrined a concept of "proper
spelling".  Because of this, any recognizably-borrowed foreign word will
retain its original spelling (or as much of it fits in our alphabet:
diacritics are the first thing to go, except in really haut words like
"résumé").

This feature is probably not a bug.

Most conlangs have a tendency to start out phonetically spelled, and to
resist borrowings, and lack extensive dialexy, so the conditions that give
birth to nonphonetic orthographies just dont occur as often.


If I ever get around to working on Ibran, though, that one may end up
being too complicated to spell phonetically, and may acquire wrinkles as
bad as English, if not worse.  :p

        *Muke!
--
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