Danish Spelling

[Lars Henrik Mathiesen]

> Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 12:00:16 +0000
> From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)

> Lars Henrik Mathieson writes:

>> Which phoneme do those plain voiceless stops belong to? They sound
>> exactly like the /bdg/ you get in initial position. They don't sound
>> like initial /ptk/. So why shouldn't <stave> (spell) be /sda:u/?

> Roman Jakobson famously wrote on this very point.  I'm afraid I cannot
> recall the reference, but maybe somebody can.

> As I dimly recall, Jakobson reported that uneducated Danish-speakers --
> apparently there *were* some in his day -- consistently assigned phones
> to phonemes on the basis of phonetic similarity, producing a result
> very different from the one recognized in the Danish orthography.

Well, I can report that Danish first graders do it too --- <sdau> for
<stave> or <sgreud> for <skrevet> are both examples I think I recall
from my daughter's first attempts.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn at diku.dk> (Humour NOT marked)