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sp1.html saxon-spanglish.html |
This page is sponsored by
the Saxon Alfabet Foundation
Developers of Spanglish, a bilingual phonemic transcription system based on the Anglo-Saxon alphabet modern systematic spelling - restored tradtional alphabet |
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| ..... | Goal: Eventually, this
is supposed to be a series of 50kb pages dealing with Saxon Spanglish and
pronunciation guide spelling systems that can also be used for informal
communication and email. I am reminded of a similar effort by Fox
who did not reveal his system until the reader had clicked through 20 pages.
Clearly it is hard to appreciate a phonemic transicription system without
some background. All of them look odd because they respell 60% or
more of the words in English. SS-Alfabet
Why respell? - to achieve consistency and reduce irregularity. Why consistency? because transparent consistent orthographies are much easier to learn and they enable people to pronounce unfamiliar words and spell unfamiliar pronunciations. Spanglish is primarily an alphabet reform. Words that can be understood when pronounced or sounded out according to the Saxon alphbet are not respelled. 85% of the words in English make sense after the fact. Spelling is not predictable over half the time because there are four different codes and a vowel shift that affects the lexical standard. We can say that English spelling is not predictable [period] because we cannot identify which half is spelled in a regular manner. Some people do eventually learn to spell [perhaps as many as 20% of the speakers], however, they do so by memorizing word shapes and the dictionary. The Spanglish proposal is to adopt it [or something like it] as the dictionary pronunciation guide spelling and to teach this form of spelling along with the traditional one. Spanglish
is a systematic and highly phonemic way of transcribing English speech.
It is based on the ancient Saxon alphabet [900-1066] and the old practice
of inserting trailing double consonants to mark short stressed vowels.
The augmented Latin alphabet [sound-symbol correspondences] was used until
the 15th c. when the pronunciaiton of the long vowels in many words changed.
There was no corresponding change in spelling. This led to a divergence
between spelling and pronunciation. There are two ways to represent
each vowel in Spanglish: stressed or unstressed. Most one syllable
words therefor have two possible spellings. e.g. aet or att,
ej and edj. Spanglish is a parallel pronunciation guide spelling.
Respelling is limited to words that cannot be understood when pronounced
according to the values assigned in the Saxon alphabet. enough
becomes enuff or enof.
(1)
Every simple sound will be associated with a single distinct symbol, and
The Roman alphabet provides a very legible and distinct set of characters. It just doesn't provide enough of them: 5 letters for 14 vowels. While there is a shortage of vowel letters, the difficulty of our present English spelling lies not so much in any of the inherent defects of the Roman alphabet as in our irrational use of it. -Sweet paraphrased The immediate practical questions of Spelling or Orthographic Reform are - If we exclude new letters as impractical, we are obliged to use [1] digraphs, [2] uppercase letters as new symbols, or [3] merge phonemes reduce the number of phonograms. The first system for English used an extended alphabet and digraphs. Later versions added new digraphs, dropped non-Latin characters, and merged phonemes. Digraphs are two-letter combinations, such
as th and ch. This is the traditional solution and
it can work. The 36 pure sounds
of English can be represented with 26 letters + 10 digraphs. The
objection to digraphs is that they can violate the principle of denoting
every simple sound by a simple sign. [ITA
avoided this by making digraphs such a sh into ligatures, IPA
]
Writing systems do not have to be phonemic or sound based at all. They can be pictographic or iconic - marks can resemble what they stand for. The icons used in airport terminals or to mark controls on consumer electronics are multinational. They can be logographic - marks can arbitrarily represent whole words or concepts. Some number signs can be an example of this. It can be argued that the first three numbers are iconic tally marks. Writing systems are usually a combination of soundsigns and logograms or wordsigns. There are 23 letters in the Roman alphabet plus three redundant letters: This means that in order to represent 36 meaningful sound segments of speech, we much either assign some sounds to the upper case letters or assign some to two letter combinations or digraphs. The objection to digraphs is that they can violate the principle of denoting every simple sound by a simple sign. Digraphs representing diphthongs are another matter. There is nothing wrong with using two letters to represent a blend of two simple sounds. Unifonic systems such as the Shaw Alphabet and Unifon use q and Q for au and oi. This saves space, but makes the code more difficult to read and write. If simplified spelling and easy pronunciation is the goal, unpronounced or silent letters should be miniized. There is a problem when one of the letters is a silent or used as a marker. In NS [nu speling] poet is pronounced /poat/. In SS, poet would be pronounced /paw-uht/ which is the way that many people pronounce this word. In NS, /pou-et/ would be spelled poeet. The letter string, poeet, would have two different pronunciations in NS depending on the syllable division: poe-et or po-eet. Truespel solves this problem by inserting a w, poewet. Spanglish has a simpler solution: poet or powet.
This practice of using double consonants after short vowels is found in the traditional system in two syllable words of germanic origin: little, settle. Some one syllable words are also marked, lass, fell, miss, loss, buck. Some are mismarked [fall]. They are traditionally marked when the trailing consonant is an s, l, ck, or...[see Wijk]. Spanglish is about reducing ambiguity and irregularity - the phonemic version is probably overly precise. Close enough is close enough for communication if read aloud. By this standard, 80% of the traditional spellings are close enough if pronounced as spelled. According to the Saxon alphabet [below], poet would be pronounced paw-eht. Spanglish would spell the common pronunciation powet but this is probably overly precise. tear [rip] and terrier are both correct. terror is ok but terrer would be a more consistent way to write /@r/. Spanglish allows [ea] to be a representation of the extended [e], thus tear= terr. ter on the other hand, would be pronounced as in matter or terminal. The double consonants [better, terr, bear, berr] mark the short e sound and distinguish it from the rr /3:r/ sound. Spanglish removes code overlaps. You cannot write tear when you mean tir/tier. This is one of many cases where pronunciation changed after 1450 but the spelling remained the same.
Comments Spanglish is designed for the ESL community. It is based on i.t.a.
and international spelling not the shifted spelling of long vowels.
It uses digraphs instead of special symbols requiring a special font.
T.O. consists of at least three codes and a vowel shift. The best that any phonemic system can do is to teach one of the consistent codes. To transition ou still have to learn four others. When you say you could read the GA in Russian did you mean the russian language or the russian alphabet? You could certainly read it in the Russian alphabet which is quite good. I think the two key issues on any reformed spelling are
If it is going to be an i.t.a. then it has to have an easy way to teach the transition to TO. I don't think that TO is going away any time soon. I think the one group that might advocate reform would be the ESL and bilingual community. So what kind of code would be best suited for ESL learners. Although stress is phonemic in English. It is not really needed by native speakers. After about ten years, English becomes logographic so it does not make any difference how it is spelled as long as it is spelled consistently at the word level -- until one gets to an unfamiliar word. Then one is unable to pronounce it or if heard one is unable to spell it with any certainty.
--- Ed Rondthaler <edrond@bestweb.net> wrote:
wordlist hat=hot, hus=house, ham=home,
http://www.egroups.com/files/saundspel/saxon-spanglish.html |
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