Re: CHAT: Measurements (was: Re: CHAT: browsers)

I wrote:
>
>Tristan wrote:
>>Andreas Johansson wrote:
>>
>>>Do you want to get me started on the irregular parts?
>>
>>Yes please.
>
>To be perfectly honest, it probably isn't as bad as Maggel.
>
>Still, there are outrageous spellings like _graentz_ /grans/ "mountain
>range", where both the "e" and the "t" are silent without any
>justification.
>
>What's truly bad about this orthography is that manages to cause massive
>ambiguity while mapping 22 phonemes onto 25 letters* plus a couple of dozen
>digraphs. The really unforgiveable part is, of course, the aforementioned
>unsystematic indication of /e/. It doesn't even avoid identical spellings
>where it could; city name _Mrd_ /mr=d/ and _mrd_ /merede/ "rivercourse in
>delta".
See that asterisk? I was intending to list the phonemes and their regular
spellings. So, here it goes:

/i/        i
/y/        y, ü
/e/        e, h, zero
/a/        a, ah
/o/        o, oo
/u/        u, uu

/j/        j, y

/p/        p
/b/        b, bh
/t/        t, tt, th
/d/        d
/k/        k, c
/g/        g, gh

/f/        f
/v/        v, w
/s/        s, ss, z, zz, sz, zh, zzh, zhz
/S/        ch
/h/        h

/m/        m
/n/        nn

/r/        r, rr, rrh
/l/        l, ll

The doublings that occur in the list above are the common ones - other
letters are sporadically doubled. Similarly, a large number of polygraphs
involving "h" occurs in the list above - a not inconsiderable number of
other silent "h"s are also floating around.

                                                    Andreas

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