Eggcorn? "warn" > "worn"

[Randy Alexander]

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 11:28 PM, Matthew Gordon <gordonmj at missouri.edu> wrote:
> That's a tough call. Should we teach our students a system of phonetic
> representation used by an international community of scholars and available
> in standard reference works including the OED or should we instead teach
> them an idiosyncratic system developed by a parochial amateur who lacks even
> an elementary understanding of the concept of the phoneme?

I'm not going to comment on the veracity of the above, but I will say
that the idea of a phonemic pronunciation key that can be easily typed
out is not without merit.  Truespel has quite a lot of good points,
and I would be tempted to use it myself if I needed such a system.
I've chosen a completely different approach -- teaching the spelling
patterns that English actually has, and the (albeit complex) way that
they are represented.  After that I use IPA to teach the way that
pronunciation changes the faster a speaker talks.  A phonemic system
like Truespel is too simple for that; IPA barely cuts it.

--
Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China
My Manchu studies blog:
http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu

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