Re: p^ho'nemIts) 'englIS

Marcos wrote:

"Over the years there have been many proposals for improving the spelling of
English by making it more phonetic, or at least phonemic.  The objections to
such schemes are many, and usually center on the loss of etymological
information and/or the impossibility of representing in one system the many
different ways English is pronounced.

That's still a problem here. Looking at the phonemic inventory, I notice
it's biased. People will have to get used to saying things like:
[br\ItaIn] instead of [br\I?n=]
[november\] instead of [n@U)vEmb@]
[home] instead of [?@U)m]
[lIbrari] instead of [laIbEr\i].

"So my suggestion is to go the other way - keep the spelling the same and
change how everyone pronounces English!  Simple!

I disagree. People won't want to change how they speak, and will find it
extremely difficult (if not impossible) to say 'difficult' as [dI'fIkult] or
'impossible' as [Impo'sIble] because they're so used to saying, e.g.,
['dIf@kl=t], [ImpOs@bl=], and this'll r'ly slow them down. Just my opinion,
anyway.

I like the idea of Yingzi, described here:
<http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm>.

"Devise a new one-to-one letter/sound pairing system for English and begin
to use it. For instance:

"a=/a/  b=/b/ c=/ts)/ d=/d/ e=/e/ f=/f/ g=/g/ i=/I/ j=/dZ)/ k=/k/ l=/l/
m=/m/ n=/n/ o=/o/ p=/p/ q=/k^w/ r=/r\/ s=/s/ t=/t/ u=/u/ v=/v/ w=/w/ x=/x/
y=/i/ z=/z/

"ch=/tS)/ gh=/G/ kh=/k^h/ ph=/p^h/ sh=/S/ th=/D/ wh=/W/ zh=/Z/

Seeing as how English is the Terran auxlang...
/x/ and /G/ might be too difficult to pronounce. Maybe /ks)/ and /g_h/?
Many languages lack /D/, so maybe /d_h/ would be better?
Many languages lack /I/, so maybe making <i> /i/ and <y> /@/ would be
better?
Maybe we should allow epenthetic schwas in words like 'science' [sts)Iense]
and 'strength' [str\engD]?
To me, pronouncing words like 'banana' as [ba'nana] (or 'cupboard' as
['kupboar\d], for that matter) seem unnatural; I don't want to have to start
making an effort to pronounce all the vowels purely. Cf. [I dont want tu hav
tu star\t making an efort tu prono.unts)e al De vowels pur\eli]. Replacing
/@/ with a pure vowel seems very unnatural to me. If we adopted this system
of pronunciation I wouldn't understand barely a word of my own native
language!

"h outside of the above digraphs = /h/

How about permitting people who don't have /h/ in their 'lect to insert /?/
instead?

"Tonic stress always on the penult.

This would make words not stressed on the penult sound unnatural, cf.
'select' ['selekt], 'waterfall' [wa'ter\fal]. Or would compound words be
handled dif'rently?

T

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