Re: USAGE: No rants! (USAGE: di"f"thong)

On 6/1/06, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...> wrote:
 > Of course the subject has spewed the inevitable YAEPT  :=(
>
> Again if spelling wasn't so rigid maybe people wouldn't
> be so unaware and surprised about how speech differs!
> IMNSHO what makes these YAEPTs so annoying is that people
> don't just take an interest in how speech differs, but
> there is somehow a more or less unexpressed assumption
> that this is strange, undesirable and/or problematic!
> why are you all conlanging if linguistic diversity is
> strange, undesirable and/or problematic?
Are you sure we're reading the same mailing list?  Because I've been
around for lots and lots of YAEPT's, actively participating in most of
them, and I don't recall any indication that the different
pronunciations are somehow undesirable.  Yes, I'm personally
fascinated by them, and  I'm sorry if that makes me insufficiently
worldly in your eyes.  Apparently, I am supposed to be utterly bored
by the idea of different pronunciations of "the same language" by now.
 But, quite the contrary, I continue to find new points of variance
which I find interesting - most recently that Australians merge
"we're" with "where/wear", for instance.

Some other folks' pronunciations of English, I freely admit, seem
"strange" from my point of view, but that's not at all the same as
thinking that they're somehow "undesirable" and/or "problematic".
Actually, I suppose some of the differences are extreme enough to
present a potential problem in mutual comprehension of speech, but I'm
not saying that either of those extremes is somehow superior to the
other, and certainly wouldn't claim such for the variety that I happen
to be closer to in my own 'lect just because of that proximity.

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>