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push spelling pronunciation with the current spelling system?
What if every letter in a word had to be pronounced? Az English iz curently speld, it wvd'nt quait w'rk. The traditional wraiting sistm dvz not asociat letrz with specific saundz 60% ov the taim. Speling pronunciation requairz a functional alfabet - a clir set of corespondens betwin simbolz and saundz. Othr langwijez hav consistent corespondences. English wans had clir correspondences so the ta.sk mait bi simply wan ov restoring the alfabet. Ther ar thri problemz [1] English haz mor fonimz tha.n ther ar letrz in the alfabet, [2] ther ar tu meny co'd ovrla.ps in TS, a.nd [3] the new co'd haz tu bi clo's enof tu the traditional sistm tu bi red withaut a kiy. The co'd wd not hav to bi precis, only clo's enof tu bi undrstwd. O'nly tho'z w'rdz tha.t cwd not bi undrstwd hwen saunded out wd hav tu bi respeld. Ther ar quait a fyu spelingz tha.t ar clo's enof. It wd not bi necesary tu resort tu a sistem a.z radical a.z the wan yuzd hir. Som w'rdz
wd bi repronounsd rathr than respeld. For instans, ther wd bi no
point in respeling Latin and Greek basd saintific w'rdz. Thiz wrds
wd bi repronaunsd tu coinsaid with international pronunciation. The resulting
speling pronuciation wd bi a nu dialect of English.
What if each letter could not be associated with more than two sounds? If
every letter had to be pronounced, many silent letters
would have to be removed. The W in write could stay because
when pronounced, it would not significantly change pronunciation.
However, the B in debt and the E in have and give,
would be cut because they distort the correct pronunciation.
Spelling
Pronunciation
Spelling Pronunciation
presumes that people assign a particular sound to each letter.
Spelling pronunciation must be based on an alphabet. To make it work, the English alphabet has to be restored. Fortunately, English used to have a perfectly good Latin based augmented alphabet. Restoring the Saxon alphabet essentially solves the alphabet problem. The word has to be pronunced
without silent letters and be understood.
The transcription of the poem below into SPanglic shows that it is posible to come up with a notation that preserves the connection between shape and sound. There are hundreds of such phonemic scripts for English. All of them respell at least 60% of the words in English. Some reduce the number of respellings by allowing up to 42 irregular spellings. SPanglic, shown below, closely corresponds to the International Phonetic Alphabet and international [Latin] spelling conventions. It is very compact with a minimum of digraphs. All diphthongs are simple combinations of the component letters. Yet, it can still be easily read without a key. [a.] is the ascii equivalent of [ae]. In informal writing this distinction as well as the distinction between awe and owe [o, o'] would be dropped. The syllabic letters rlmn would always be pronounced as syllabics: Not as [ ar el em en ] but as [ 3:r 'l ''m ''n ]. v is revived as a vowel /^/
and used the same way as it is used in SAMPA. ['ap]
is the alternate way of transcribing up [vp].
Except at the beginning of a syllable, w and y are vowels:
w has the short u sound in hook /u/ and y is /i:/
as in eel. If ther wasn't such a strong association in English of
y
with /ai/ [as in fly], y could be consistently used for /i:/
[fi fai fo fvm]
words that are spelled the same are not pronounced the same. Words that are pronounced the same are not spelled the same. Complete Poem
If SP were taught in the schools, The dictionary never faces this issue. It provides two spellings
TES and a phonemic one.
Other than Mont Follick, who has advocated going back to the Saxon correspondence
table.
Knoweldge of the Saxon grapheme-phoneme correspondence table would make it possible for more people to adopt spelling pronunciation. It would also quickly indicate what words cannot be pronounced as they are spelled and be understood. If spelling pronunciation were taught in the schools, then it would become obvious to everyone what letters were redundant and confusing. In Spanglish August would be pronounced ah-oo-goost. Australia would be ah-oo-strah-lee-ah/uh. Derby would be ambiguous - Dair-bee or Drr-bee [ d3rbi or d3:bi
]
Day would be pronounced dah-ee. The rule in Spanglish is that if spelling pronunciation can be understood,
then
Spanglish is an extremely broad, broad transcription. If there was a base dialect, it would be the dialect referenced by TES.
Does this make any sense? Valerie asked why I focused on the long vowels in Spanglish ah eh/ey ee aw oo rather than the short vowels, ae, eh, ih, ah, w, uh The reason is that these are the vowels that shifted the most. [see David Kelly's table]. Spanglish is ambiguous, the six vowels reference 12 sounds.
short-long-dif- rr combination
SUMMARY
to advocate the teaching of spelling pronunciation? There could be two sounds assinged to the vowels and to a few consonants. At the max, we would want no more than ten exceptions (or rules) e.g., c can be s before i and e city center cycle [pron. seekl]. e.g., where letters should be removed to improve clarity and understanding Some words cannot be pronounced as spelled and be understood. There are words that would be easier to repronounce than respell There would be no point in respelling international spellings just to acknowledge the English mispronunciation.
Lvky Luk lwkt laik a li.tl lidr. With gwd eir in hiz seilz, Eric d' red ro'd d' weivz tu vinland. You are Host of Spelling Reform.
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To see the
What word might
we spell GOLOBCH
>Answer: JERK - >G /j/ as in MARGARINE
Dats a gud wan! Ai invented wan for brazilian
portuguese, it was MBAÇQLLA for MUSCULO
MB as in TAMBEM /tameng/
Of cors yu can du quait a fiu
of dis dings in portugis as wel as in
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