Re: Language changes, spelling reform (was Conlangea Dreaming)

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> I'm told that Chaucer's English (sorry--I'm not too clear on the history
> of English) was, indeed, phonetic.
Not quite.  It was closer than Modern English, but not completely
phonemic.  There were some phonemes that weren't distinguished, can't
remember examples exactly, but I think /A/ and /A:/ were one?

> Chevraqis is phonetic
The Kassí syllabry is semi-morphophonemic.  It cannot distinguish /tj/
from /tS/, for instance, or /ti/ from /tSi/, among other failures.  It
also uses diacritics for codas, and often syllabifies on morphemic, not
phonemic, grounds.  For example, "swords" is pifaftúi, syllabified as
PIf-Af-TÚ-I (lower case indicates diacritics), because pif- is gender 7
plural prefix.  Also -i (plural) is *always* written seperate, so that
sukKassíi (Kassí, epecine plural) would be SU*-KA*-SÍ-I, not using the
long vowel suffix.  Asterisks indicate the diacritic for "following
consonant geminated".