|
|
| Orthographic
Design Principles Orthographic Design Principles Orthografic Dizain principlz [ritn in saxon spanglish]
Similarity to TO where possible - Similarity tu TO weyr possibl Spelling pronvnciaeshan izz wan wey to impruv similarity Beisd on ejyakeitid [edyucaeted] British or General American Tha hisstory and etymollajy av wrds aar nott connsiderashans |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| .................. |
An orthographic design
Cann wi rait consistently and bi undrstwd? It shwd not bi a problm iff wi caen caerfully difain tha naechur av sillabics. Thiz aar semivaulz wich aar consonants only wen they cam bifor vaulz. 1. Phonemic
consistency
A phoneme range of acoustically distinct sounds which are treated as equivalent by a speech community. A phoneme has been defined as the smallest unit of sound capable of changing the meaning of a word. For example the L-sound in look, like, leave, full are all different, due to influence from adjacent sounds, or due to the position of the sound in the word. Yet English speakers consider/l/ to be one phoneme. It can distinguish otherwise identical words, for example the pair light/right [lait/rait] or abbot/abut [aebat/abat-abvt] [ aeb-^t / a'-b^t ] aebat Abat a.bat a'r abvt ab^t 'bvt The schwa is the most frequent phonogram in the phonemic rendering of English. ae is about 4th. The ideal alphabetical writing system consistently uses one letter [grapheme] for each phoneme [simple sound]. Most languages have more phonemes than letters. The deal with the shortfall by either using diacritics or digraphs [2-letter combinations treated as a new symbol]. English uses the second option. The disadvantage of using phonemes represented by a combination is that take more space that those written as one letter. Diaphonic: A compromise is to use combinations sparingly, but also make some single letters stand for more than one phoneme, but then dictated by unambiguous, or nearly unambiguous, rules. The problem with an English reform is that a number of bad habbits have been acquired as a result getting used to some odd rules of English orthography. For example, the otherwise unambiguous phonemic spelling pazes /p'-'zes/ for "possess" is often incorrectly read as [peizes] because the a is taken to mean /ei/ and the e is assumed to be a mute marker. Retain existing consistencySpelling pronunciation - broad romicAlthough somewhat chaotic, the existing English spelling does have rules, which make it possible to guess the right pronunciation of an unknown word at a glance, with at least some chance of success. The well-known example ghoti, which is said to read as fish (as in enough, women, nation), illustrates this, for no one would spontaneously read it as fish, because the letters can mean the sounds, but not in this situation. The new system proposed here uses as much as possible of the existing rules, which makes it possible that, although it is drastically different, the new spelling is readable to a certain extent for anyone familiar with the traditional spelling. (Try it yourself by reading the Sample Text ). This also means the new system is not made unnecessarily "un-English": That in most other languages the letter a sounds something like the a in father, and the sound in make is often written with an e or a digraph containing it, doesn't mean this has to be the case in English too. Thus, make and take stay the same in the newly proposed system. I think it does. The historic difference between long and short sounds, like in licking and liking, tacking and taking, etc., shown in spelling by following them with a single or double consonant, is retained in the new system, together with the sound quality to which they developed. All five letters have such originally short and long forms. Some letters also have other meaning independent of this scheme, and they do not need doubling, but they are often governed by stress (like the a in ago), or they are implicit, meaning the new system is not completely unambiguous, though much more so than the old. To avoid some ugly new spellings, some letter combinations are supposed to be single for the purpose of deciding whether the vowel before them is "short" or "long" (short and long in the historic sense, not corresponding to present-day sounds). Thus in taste (new and old spelling alike), the st is counted as one letter, which the a "long". Now, if a word tass-ting existed (luckily it does not), in the new system it would have to look like tassting, to distinguish it from the gerund form of taste: tasting (again, old and new spelling the same). So to double a single letter, it is doubled (k becomes kk, never ck), but to double a double letter which is counted as single (for example sh in smash), double its first letter, so it becomes ssh: smasshing, so it doesn't sound like smay-shing. This doubling of the first letter is admittedly very un-English, and is borrowed from Hungarian (where it denotes the letter itself, and does not influence the preceding sound, by the way). One other very un-English trick is to use the letter w (which can be a consonant too), as a vowel. This a taken from Welsh. At the end of a word, a single
letter is enough to get the "short" sound, but if another vowel follows,
doubling is required. We follow the Dutch (and to a large extent, English)
system here, not the German system, which uses doubling even at the end
of a word (sometimes English does that too, as in off and inn and sick).
Examples of this are let and letting, get and getting (new and old system
alike). A typically English feature in addition to this is, that a mute
e (as in mute, where the e makes the u is "long", but is not itself heard)
lengthens the preceding vowel. This is retained in the new system too.
Thus, the new spelling kahezhen (cohesion) suggests that the last syllable
does not have a vowel, but that the e is mute and serves only to make the
previous e "long", and the last syllable has a syllabic n. The new spelling
kahezhan would mean that the last syllable has a schwa vowel (as a in ago),
followed by an n.
All phomemic writing systems require a base pronunciation. ä for ei Consistency for all speakersEnglish is spoken in many different countries, and even within one country in many different ways. This wouldn't have to complicate a spelling system, if only all variants had the same phoneme system, but realised the same phonemes with different sounds. Unfortunately, although the differences are not too many, this is not the case. Different phonemes in one style of pronunciation fall together in another. A phoneme in one word may defect to another. What is conveniently seen as one phoneme in one style is better considered two in another.All this makes compromises inevitable. Some cases in detail: Some Americans do not distinguish caught and
cot. The new spelling (like the old) does: kaut and kot.
Some Americans pronounce bother and father with the same vowel. The new spelling (like the old) distinguished them: boddher and fahdher. Father and rather in North-America have different vowels, whereas most everywhere else, they're the same. Here alternative spelling are possible to reflect this: fahdher (everywhere), rather (North-America, Scotland, Ireland), rahdher (England, Australia, New-Zealand) Dear sounds the same as the last part of idea in the pronunciation of many (not all) in North-America, many (not all) in England, and most in Australia and New-Zealand. Yet, the spelling does always show the difference: idea and dere. Many Americans don't distinguish merry, marry and Mary, but many other speakers do. The spelling does too, and there's no difference between new and old. Many say missin for missing. The new spelling, like the old, insists that it's missing. In Scotland some distinguish (or distinguished?) fur/fir/fern, and morning/mourning, for/four. The spelling does not show the difference: fer, fer, fern, morning. However special spellings in direct speech might be considered: fur/fir/fern, and morning/morening, for/fore. It seems in some parts of the USA, get and just have the same vowel. The spelling keeps showing the difference, identically in new and old system. A decreasing number of people distinguish ware and where, which and witch. The new spelling does not reflect this: ware and wich, although variant spellings may be considered: ware, hware and hwich, wich. For most Americans the two vowels in abut are the same, in Britain they're usually distinct. For both there's an stress difference. The spelling, new as well as old, reflects the distinction: abut. There is an American tendency to flap intervocalic t's, to such an extent that madder and matter become almost indistinguishable. The spelling will not reflect this, and write madder and matter as before. The phoneme written "long u" (and in the old spelling, often ew), when after dentals (t, d, n), sounds like the phoneme written oo in America. After s, l this is nearly always, and after r always (except in Wales) the case in non-American forms of English. Yet, instead of writing it oo in those cases, we always write u. Examples: nu (new, knew), flu (flew, flu), super (super), tune (tune), ku (cue, queue). MorphologyIn some cases the principle of morphology is used, like in daylite instead of dalite, hier (higher) instead of hire, dayz (plural of day), not daze (as in "dazed and kanfuzed"), star and starry.Where compounds could lead to ambiguity, a hyphen may be used: gras-hopper (grashopper would sound like gray-shopper). Many frequent words have strong forms (when said in isolation) and weak forms (in connected speech). In some cases there even more forms than two. Although the weak form occur more often, the spelling for the sake of clarity shows strong forms. So for is always written like that, even though is more often sounds like fa or fer, as is written as as, at as at (the strong and weak forms have the same spelling here, and this is a feature, not a bug), and is always and, has, had and have are always that. That stays dhat and than stays dhan (again the weak forms would be spelled the same). The principle of writing strong forms applies
even to compounds: twmorro, not tamorro. In "He came to" and "he came to
his senses", to is always spelt tw (he kame tw; he kame tw hiz sensiz),
although is the first case, it may sounds rather like too. The spelling
too is reserved for the meanings "also" and "a number one higher than one).
The special meaning of the letter e, as in be, we, she etc. is a special case of the same principle. Thus be and bee are identical in new and old, and distinct in both. EtymologyAny attempt to indicate a etymological connection to the origin of a word will ultimately conflict with the alphabetical principle. Orthographies based on the Saxon/Latin alphabet will do the least damage to historical spelling. In some cases, this results in repronouncing words of Latin/Greek origin to bring them in line with international pronunciation and spelling., the English relies heavily on the etymological
principle which often means that the word is spelled as it was spoken some
time in the distant past. Spelling and sometimes pronunciation sometimes
indicate the origin of the word. An etymological principle is hardly
applied at all except perhaps when writing you as yoo, not u.
ASCIIbets | SAMPA | LATIN-1
| DESIGN PRINCIPLES |
This document is similar page found at Ruud Harmsen's homepage. | sounds of english |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
© 2000
BETA
Information Design
|
