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

R A Brown skrev:
> Aw - I disappear for a few days to south Wales and return to find 164
> emails waiting. I eagerly download them, hoping to read lots of stuff
> about conlanging & find they're mostly - {stifles big yawn}- about
> English spelling reform!
I guess I'm partly to blame.  IIRC it was I was among those who
explicitly brought up the subject of spelling reform.

> I don't know how many times this has cropped up on the list (quite a few
> times IIRC). In my teens way back in the 50s I used to churn out English
> spelling reforms with almost the same frequency as I did auxlangs (some
> two or three a year).
Nothing wrong with that, as long as you don't try to
*impose* your ideas on others.  Full well knowing that
there will never be any agreement I approach spelling
reform as I approach conlanging generally: as an intellectual
and artistic exercise -- definitely not as politics.

(I do get political, however, on the subject of all different
pronunciations (and other aspects of dialects) being equally
valid.  I'm not going to apologize for opposing linguistic
oppression!)

> Proposals for English spelling reforms exist from
> at least the 19th century. The market for English spelling reforms is,
> like that for auxlangs, one where supply vastly outnumbers demand.
Actually Orrm was at it in the 12th century
(Google for "Ormulum"), and there was a flare-up
in the 16th century, with Sir John Cheke and others
actually having some success -- although mostly their
'reform' consisted in introducing new silent letters
for supposedly lost Latin sounds in words like _island_
and _debt_ they also introduced means to distinguish
close and open mid long vowels, but then the Great
Vowel Shift came along and ruined the language! ;)

> Whatever we think here, or however we vote, it ain't going to happen.
What is going to happen?  That anyone is going to force
everybody to spell the way s/he has thought out?  No it
ain't, but then conversely why force anyone to slavishly
follow tradition?  The point you made about _diphthong_
being pronounced variously as /fT/, /ft/ and /pT/ by
different speakers, and so _phth_ may function as a
compromise spelling is in principle valid (but we all know
that that's not why it is so spelled -- traditionalism and
archaizing spelling works as a compromise between different
pronunciations only because it is based on a form of the
language as it was before many of those differences in
pronunciation arose.  Certainly other equally or more
effective ways of compromise might be devised, and I can't
see why they mightn't as an intellectual exercise!)

By the same token Americans ought to back down from spelling
_draft_ for both the words which Brits spell _draught_ but
pronounce differently.  It's just that these spellings have
become traditional on either side of the pond, so some
people will figuratively fight to their death over them.

Several people mentioned that untraditional spellings are a
stumbling block to fluent reading, which may in a way be
true, but it's only a matter of ingrained habit *and*
prejudice.  In Old and Middle English times differerent
scribes spelled slightly differently -- even vastly
different in some times and places --, but since the
variation was still within certain limits (essentially
variations within a single system) and since -- and this is
very important -- people were probably not making value
judgments about the differences in pronunciation which these
differences in spelling reflected people could still read
each other's writings reasonably fluently.  If they couldn't
the different spelling variations would certainly have
drifted apart to a greater extent than they actually did --
at least in Old English times; in Middle English times
mutual intelligibility between dialects and spellings were
probably quite impaired sometimes!  In the Modern age
'correctness' in spelling and grammar has strangely become
a powerful tool of social and cultural oppression --
strangely because the same age has seen the most advances
ever in terms of political and personal freedom.  You have
to express your freedom in the right spelling and grammar
for other people to take it seriously, it seems.

It wouldn't actually impair any other Swedes' understanding of
what I write if I introduced a number of new letters and/or
used some of the old ones slightly differently from them
-- it's the prejudice that everybody ought to spell identically
that is the real stumbling block.  I'm sure speakers of other
languages can come up with examples from their language, e.g.
in English, does it really impair your reding if the text
you read inserts or omits a _u_ in _colo(u)r_?  Probably not!

It is strange how people on this list, who usually defend
diverseness and aestheticism, as opposed to the normativism
and uniformising of auxlangers, become such normativists and
traditionalists when it comes to natlang spelling and
pronunciation!

>
> 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?

>
> What difference does it actually make to a phonemic spelling reform
> whether one says [k_hjEt], [k_h&t], [k_h&?], [k_hatT_d] or any of the
> other varieties of /k&t/. Obviously it ought to be spelled/spelt M-O-G  ;)
The only thing I can say in my defence is that *my* ideas for
spelling reform do take acount of the fact that phonemes are
realized and distributed variously.  I hope I am on record as
an opponent of the idea that any person's lect of any language
is more correct than anybody elses!

> Tho I am not a fan of E-o spelling, I think it is, however,
> up to the Esperanto community how they spell their language,
> just as it is up to Marc Okrand & the Klingon community how
> they spell their language, etc.
Líkwís it åt tu bé yp tu eniwyn hú tu spel þár langweʒ,
at lést prívatli.  Tu mé it'z ʒyst an ésþetik gám!

I dó hóp wé kan agré tu disagré...

--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    "Maybe" is a strange word.  When mum or dad says it
    it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
    means "no"!

                            (Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)

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