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sp2.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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With the restoration of the Saxon alphabet, every consonant except h [which can also be a mute marker as in -ch, sh, th, ah] has one sound and each unmarked vowel letter has thres sounds which can be distinguished by a double consonant after the short sound and doubling the vowel letter to extend and stress. The semi-vowels w, y and r have two related sounds and are consonants when followed by a vowel. The r in promote is a consonant. The r in rban is a vowel. Consonant w is pronounced wa [as in one/won] and y is pronounced yie [as in yield] and r is pronounced er [as in other]. The traditional letter names dubb-ya, waa-ee, and aar are scrapped along with all the other vowel names which are names of combinations or diphthongs rather than letter sounds. A has four names or related sounds: uh [ago], aesh, aar, and aaie [eye]. Notice that ey [as in they] is not one of them. If every A is pronounced /ah/, then you will be close. A southerner could certainly understand, "Aa short taam aago aa gaat saamthing inn maa aa." O has five names: ah [otter], ao [awe], oy [boy], oa-ow [owe], ou [out/owl]. If every O is pronounced /awe/ then you will be close. Wijk claimed that English is 85% consistent if one pays attention to the surrounding consonants and uses positional spelling. In his regularized english he suggested 100 rules for keeping the traditional sound-symbol relationships straight. Spanglish is much simpler than regularized English.
Should though be respelled tho,
thou, thoa or thow? All we can say for sure is
that the [gh] has to go since today only Anglo Saxon scholars know how
to pronounce this guttural sound. The most phonetically accurate respelling
would be thew [ As with most northern European languages, English has 12 simple [uncombined] vowel sounds. Latin had 10 simple vowels [and 5 vowel letters] so those speaking a germanic language who adopted the Latin alphabet had to augment it. The Saxon augmented Latin alphabet is shown below: The representation of the obscure mid lax vowel
or schwa in Saxon was almost as ambiguous as it is today. e
could be interpreted as either [eh] or as an unstressed è
[uh]. The unstressed à [uh] had the same schwa pronunciation.
The ash [æ] is the most obvious addition
to the Latin alphabet. The extended e [listen to sweete]
and extended æ are no longer used
in English. In the chart, the [ee] position is used for the vowel
in *her. Maroon
type indicates that the passage is written in Saxon-Spanglish.
Saxon-Spanglish (SS) is wan of several world english (winglish) proposals for restoring alfabetic spelling. SS restors the original Saxon augmented Latin alfabet and unshifts the pronunciation of Greek and Latin root words: kaos, idea, amino, This set of grafim-fonim (letter-sound) corespondences is iusd tu pronounce or sound out each letter in a werd. The result is a new dialect of English that is neither GA [general american] nor RP [british]. Saxon is easy to read since so few words are respelled, the phonemic version requires an adjustment - see below. via trio poet Oanly thowz werds that cannot bi unnderstud wenn sounded out aar respeld. The effect av thiss simpl reform iz tu meik English wans agenn cloas tu 90% fonemic and consisstent. SP allauz twu sounds per spelling so therr izz yu sually summ ammbiguity. Thuss f=v / f, v=v/'a, s=z / s, -ce=ts/se, si=si / shi, w=w/'u, o=aw/ow, ow=/ou/ *owld bowt, a= ah / uh / ae. The 1755 spelling convenshanz thatt SP drops incluud the sailent e, the majjic e, ph for f, g=j, a-=awe. Dubbl consonants ar reteined at sillabl boundaries hwerr the ruut vaul izz short. Spelling
reformers
typically want to spell according to the pronounciation guide in the dictionary.
This phonemic approach respells over 60% of the words as shown below.
It can be done but why bother except in the pronunciation guide?
Ambigious Spanglish [2 sounds /letter] is easier to read than accent clarified
Spanglish.
An alternate phonemic rendering
without diacritics:
The addition of markers and diacritics may remove ambiguous pronunciation but it makes the text more difficult to read and less like traditional spelling. Compare the above to "...iz won ov sevral world english proposals tu restor alfabetic spelling." A little ambiguity [up to 2 related sounds per letter] is OK. 1.
Today's English orthography [TO] is only 40% alphabetic
In the early 1800's, Noah Webster remarked, "Letters, the most useful invention that ever blessed mankind, lose a part of their value by no longer being representatives of the sounds orignally annexed to them." The effect is, "to destroy the benefits of the alphabet." Webster was aware that there was a time in English history when the language had a functional alphabet. Tenth century clerics devised a Latin based alphabet for English that made it possible to spell words as they were pronounced and pronounce words as they were spelled. This and ease of learning are the principle benefits of alphabetical writing systems. Could the restoration of
the benefits of the alphabet be as simple as restoring the Saxon alphabet?
Could the usefulness of the alphabet be restored by restoring the sounds
originally annexed to the letters? That is the guarded conclusion
of at least two spelling-pronunciation reform proposals:
On the negative side, pronouncing words as they are spelled results in a strange dialect of English. To some it sounds something like a Middle English dialect. To others, it sounds like a foreigner trying to pronounce English words according to international conventions. For example: IDEA = ee-dey-ah rather than ai-dih-uh. The proposed reform results in at least three scripts or notations: a slightly modified traditional spelling (26 letters), a broad phonemic spelling (merged phonemes- 26 letters, 26 symbols) and a narrow phonemic spelling (26-33 letters, 34 symbols). The eight new symbols that can be used to extend the character set and reduce ambiguity are all ASCII based [ae, 'a 'e 'i 'o 'u 'r o' 'v ] and available in Latin 1 [æ à è ì ò ù 'r ó û ]. Spanglish looks something like English written in a Spanish orthography. One could justifiably call it restored English alphabetic spelling or New Saxon because it is nearly identical to the system used when English speakers first adopted the Roman alphabet. The history of English spelling Barnsdale The English language
has been variously divided into periods by different writers. In the division
most commonly recognized, the first period dates from about 450 to 1150.
This is the period of full inflection, and
The great vowel distortion aka The Great Vowel Shift Around 1400 (the end of the Middle English period), many words started to be pronounced in untraditional and unalphabetic ways. Linguists often call the change systematic and natural but not all words were affected. Some words retained their traditional pronunciation while others changed. AS hus had already been respelled hous by Norman French scribes. Around 1400 the pronunciation changed from /hu:s/ to /haus/ /hæ+ùs/ In SPanglic, house /haw-uus/ does not have to be respelled since its Saxon pronunciation is close enough. Phonemic Saxon would spell the word the same as IPA, haus. By the mid 9th century, England had a near perfect sound based spelling system known as West Saxon Standard. Old English (850-1060 AD) was written in a church Latin inspired alphabet in a way consistent with how it was pronounced in the 10th century. Anglo Saxon used grapheme-phoneme correspondences almost identical to those shown in the Spanglish vowel table. In the augmented Latin alphabet, each Roman letter was associated with a specific sound. The six vowel letters were associated with two sounds - the long and short version of the vowel. The letter [a] referenced the Roman /a/ sound [ah]. A new letter had to be added to reference the Saxon ash. The ash [æ]* provided a way to reference the sound that differed from the Italian A. When England adopted the
Roman alphabet (8th century),
they also adopted the sounds associated with the letters. To make
a 5 vowel alphabet work with a language that had 12 vowels, the Latin alphabet
was augmented. The West Saxon standard (ca. 900
AD) added several runic letters for the missing sounds.
The West Saxon alphabet had 6 vowel letters, each letter had a long and
short pronunciation as shown below:
By the 10th century, English had a highly consistent spelling system known as the West Saxon standard. The sounds that corresponded to the letters A E I O U were ah, eh, ee, awe, oo. If these letter sound correspondences were fully restored, English could once again have a functioning alphabet. Spanglish does not look like Old English because English words are not pronounced the same as they were before the Norman conquest (1066 AD). Spanglish, however, is built from the same basic set of grapheme-phoneme correspondences as Old English. This is what is being restored.
Instead of retaining the old correspondence table, the English speaking world has retained many archaic spellings. By doing so, the relationship between spelling and pronunciation has been all but lost. English went from being over 90% phonemic to being less than 40% phonemic. [proof]. The ability to spell a word is directly related to its phonemic accuracy - especially for children during the first 4 years of schooling. [K. Spencer] Restoring the alphabet makes spelling-pronunciation possible. Instead of 20 sounds per vowel letter there would be only two. Spelling pronunciation does not exactly duplicate any particular dialect. In some cases the dialect resembles Middle English because this is the way some words are spelled. It slightly distorts the pronunciation of some words, [for example -- ox becomes aux] but the distortion or mispronunciation is not so great as to prevent understanding. Many historical spellings are from Middle English. When these words are not respelled, their spelling pronunciation approximates Middle English. [time /ti:m' / is pronounced team] There are some historical spellings that do not make sense or that would make more sense if misleading letter[s] were removed. For example, [gh] is no longer pronounced in any contemporary dialect of English. Thus, the spelling pronunciation of <through> would be nearly unintelligible. The spelling pronunciation of [thru], however, exactly duplicates current pronunciation. There are 12 pure vowel phonemes in present day English. A complete alphabet would need 12 vowel letters. In addition to the 12 uncombined sounds, there are at least 12 vowel combinations. Using the Saxon, the combination of sounds is represented by the combination of letters. ai = ah + ee [the vowel in eye] The Spanglish proposal is to limit the sounds associated with vowel letters to two and to substitute new letters in traditional spellings [TS] only when the spelling pronunciation of TS cannot be understood. This approach has some fuzzy edges or boundaries since the degree to which a spelling pronunciation of a word can be understood in context varies. An alphabet is a consistent set of relations between the way a word is pronounced and the way it is spelled. In other words, in an alphabetic system, words that rhyme are spelled the same. Spanglish does a much better job of attaining this alphabetic ideal than TO. Across all English dialects, there are two ways to vocalize the word DAY. The vocalic sound in DAY can therefore be spelled two ways ay /ai/ or ey /ei/ [ah-ee or eh-ee]. Both Spanish and English orthographies prefer a y in the terminal position to mark a syllable boundary . Since the pronunciation of the traditional spelling, DAY /dah-ee/, is understandable, Spanglish does not require respelling. The only time the respelling of [day] would be required in a broad romic notation would be in a dictionary pronunciation guide where the objective was to represent a particular dialect such as General American [GA]. day /dey/ [GA] Notice that in Spanglish each letter is pronounced and the same notation is used for both quasi traditional spelling and for phonemic spelling. Except for H, there are no silent letters in Spanish or Spanglish.
The development of number words illustrates how pronunciation changes over time. According to the linguists, all of these pronunciations developed from a common pronunciation. Around 500 A.D., Anglo Saxon, Dutch, Danish, and German number pronunciations were almost identical. The word for [one] was ahn or ehn (an, en). If the word [one] is pronounced as spelled, aw-nuh, it is still close to the Anglo Saxon word [an]. The French influenced silent e was added around 1200 when the Spelling was typically [onne] so the pronunciation probably remained about the same: /ahn/. Indo European Number Words - At one time they were all pronounced the same...[more]
*the W does not have the ' oo-WAW ' sound except at the beginning of a word or syllable. In all other positions it has the short u /u/ sound. Old English TWEENE/TWIN was probably pronounced /tui:n/ on-line source Today over 600 million people in the world speak a Latin based language. More than double that number use a Latin based alphabet with Latin letter sound values. In Latin, a vowel letter has one sound which is also the letter's name. Except for the vowels the letter names are not all that much different from English. English speakers have distorted or shifted the original Latin vowel letter sounds. The vowel sounds. To maintain the alphabet, when the pronunciation of words change, the spelling has to change. Vowel Shift Vowel Shift Diagram In English, most of the pronunciation
shifts affected the vowels. Words such as fif /feefv/ began
to be pronounced /faiv/. One of the middle English spellings for
/feefv/ or /fi:v In a related example, ice used to be spelled is and pronounced /i:s/ [ees]. After the Battle of Hastings (1066) scribes spent most of their time writing Norman French which unlike Saxon, had a highly illogical spelling system. These scribes tended to write English in a French way [Scragg, 1974]. is started to be spelled ice around 1200 A.D. Later, during the great vowel shift the pronunciation of the word changed to /ais/. Instead of respelling the word again to reflect this change in pronunciation, the spelling remained the same. English became populated with words that were spelled one way an pronounced another. England standardized their word spelling around 1755 with the publication of the first popular dictionary. No attempt was made to standardize below the word level so FIVE became one of many ways to spell the vowel in /faiv/. Before this time some people probably spelled it FYV. This vowel spelling stuck with sky, fly, and my but not with five and ice. The great vowel shift took place around 1400 when the six long vowels began to change their values in a systematic way. Chaucer would have pronounced the middle vowel in time like that in modern team. see would have sounded like say, fame like farm without the R, so like saw, and do like doe, and now like naw-oo. The great vowel shift resulted in a major barrier to intelligibility between middle and modern English. As illustrated in the chart of number words, changes in pronunciation over a 200 year period are not unusual. Other languages have coped with it and retained their alphabet by making corresponding changes in their spelling. This might have been relatively easy in the early 1800s when Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster recommended that we follow the reforms that were taking place in the orthographies of other European languages. Franklin and Webster thought this was the only chance we had of preserving what was left of our alphabet.
Spanglish A [ambiguous] uses the Saxon alphabet and only respells traditionally spelled words when they cannot be pronounced. The spelling pronunciation does not have to be perfect, just close enough to be understood. Unfamiliar words would be spelled the way they were pronounced rather than historically. As a result, students would still misspell some words. The difference is that most students would spell unfamiliar words the same way. When students use invented spellings, there can be 14 or more different spellings. Spanglish A is systematic but not very phonemic since there are usually two sounds associated with a letter. To eliminate this ambiguity, diacritics or markers can be added. This makes it possible to use basically the same notation for a pronunciation guide. Since 80% of the words are spelled historically and every word can be pronounced, Spanglish A is very easy to read aloud. The dialect may be a little odd, but completely understandable. Known words can be and probably will be converted to their regional pronunciation as with TES. Phonemic Saxon, a related notation, is just another analog or isomorph of IPA [the International Phonetic Alphabet] - there is a one to one correspondence between the two notations. As a result Phonemic Saxon respells 60% of the words in the dictionary. Phonemic Saxon would be used as a pronunciation guide and all pronunciation guides respell at least 60% of the words. Most people using this parallel notation would probably read in Spangish and write in Saxon. It is relatively easy to use a phonemic notation to spell a word as you pronounce it. There are more pages on Please send questions
to
Steve Bett
 
wordlist hat=hot, hus=house, ham=home,
http://www.egroups.com/files/saundspel/saxon-spanglish.html |
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The
14 pure Saxon vowels as represented in the chart on the right are divided
into 6 short or checked vowels [yellow] and 8 long or free vowels [peach].
These may not be the same ones you learned in school. The mid vowels
were typically merged or called obscure vowels. They were obscure
because there was no single vowel letter used to represent them.
In the Saxon system, short stressed vowels are always marked by following
them with a double consonant. Stress is important only in multi-syllable
words Since there are two ways of spelling a word depending on stress,
there are two spelling options available for one syllable words.
The
phonemic version of Spanglish, which is used as an i.t.a. and pronunciation
guide, respells over 40% of the words in the language. All phonemic
notations do this. The ambiguous abbreviated version respells only about
15% of the 
u] as in
sew
but this is not a common traditional pattern. All five options are
used by the traditional writing system for other sounds. These code
overlaps are a major cause of confusion and misspelling.
In SS, tho would be pronounced thaw
which is close enough. Unambiguous spellings would be thoa
as in oat & throat or thow as in low throw. The
latter means that words like how now brown
cow owl . . . would have to be respelled hou
nou broun cou or
hau nau braun cau
where the a refers to the æ
or æsh sound.
/ was FIVE.
After the 14th century vowel shift, this old spelling became associated
with the new pronunciation /faiv/.
