LL-L "Orthography" 2008.12.17 (05) [E]

[Lowlands-L List]

===========================================
L O W L A N D S - L - 15 December 2008 - Volume 05
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please set the encoding mode to Unicode (UTF-8).
If viewing this in a web browser, please click on
the html toggle at the bottom of the archived page
and switch your browser's character encoding to Unicode.
===========================================


From: Paul Finlow-Bates <wolf_thunder51 at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Orthography" 2008.12.17 (01) [E]

You'd also have to have spellings with medial and terminal "r"s for Scots
and Americans, and many southwest English, and different versions without
that sound for most other British, Australians and New Zealanders.



Personally I like relicts like "night" and "light" (and for some Scots,
they're not relics at all).  These words link us to our history and to other
Germanic languages.  It's much easier to see the connection between "dogter"
and "daughter" than with something like "doata".



We saw the situation in China, where the revised characters rendered many
older books almost unreadable to many new learners. Of course, when it was
introduced the Chinese Communist Party was keen to expunge the "Four Olds",
so that didn't matter, but I wouldn't want to see a similar thing in
English.



As for making it easier for foreigners to learn, I haven't noticed the
Greeks, Thais or Russians bending over backwards to make their writing more
accessible to me, nor should they.  The Germans have made revisions to what
I always thought was a pretty logical system anyway, but in any case they
did it for their benefit, not mine.



I suspect a lot of this difficulty with learning is a smokescreen for other
difficulties; are we going to change our irregular verbs and plurals too? (I
gived the mans some sheeps and gooses).



Nobody is holding a gun to the world community's head to speak English. OK,
we sort of did once, and our historical heirs seem keen to keep up the
tradition, but the rest of the world either threw us out or we left. The
world is free to adopt Klingon as the international language if they want
to.  And I've no idea how you spell that.



Paul

You'd also have to have spellings with medial and terminal "r"s for Scots
and Americans, and many southwest English, and different versions without
that sound for most other British, Australians and New Zealanders.



Personally I like relicts like "night" and "light" (and for some Scots,
they're not relics at all).  These words link us to our history and to other
Germanic languages.  It's much easier to see the connection between "dogter"
and "daughter" than with something like "doata".



We saw the situation in China, where the revised characters rendered many
older books almost unreadable to many new learners. Of course, when it was
introduced the Chinese Communist Party was keen to expunge the "Four Olds",
so that didn't matter, but I wouldn't want to see a similar thing in
English.



As for making it easier for foreigners to learn, I haven't noticed the
Greeks, Thais or Russians bending over backwards to make their writing more
accessible to me, nor should they.  The Germans have made revisions to what
I always thought was a pretty logical system anyway, but in any case they
did it for their benefit, not mine.



I suspect a lot of this difficulty with learning is a smokescreen for other
difficulties; are we going to change our irregular verbs and plurals too? (I
gived the mans some sheeps and gooses).



Nobody is holding a gun to the world community's head to speak English. OK,
we sort of did once, and our historical heirs seem keen to keep up the
tradition, but the rest of the world either threw us out or we left. The
world is free to adopt Klingon as the international language if they want
to.  And I've no idea how you spell that.



Paul

----------

 From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Orthography

Hi, Paul!

Not to detract or distract from your argument, let me just add that Greek
orthography was in fact officially reformed in 1982. A single accent sign is
now being used in place of the old polytonic diacritics.

Please read here:
http://www.lowlands-l.net/anniversary/ellinika-info.php

Please compare the Wren text versions:

Monotonic (reformed) as originally supplied:
http://www.lowlands-l.net/anniversary/ellinika.php

Polytonic as "reconstructed" by yours truly:
http://www.lowlands-l.net/anniversary/ellinika2-utf.php
http://www.lowlands-l.net/anniversary/ellinika2.php

However, reform did not include graphemic simplification of homophones, such
as *η*, *ι*, *υ*, *ει*, *οι* and *υι* now being pronounced [i], *ε*
and *αι*now being pronounced [ε] ([E]), and
*ο* and *ω* now being pronounced [ɔ] ([O]).

An argument in favor of reforming is that Greek lost tonality and developed
a single stress system at the latest by the early Christian era (1st century
CE, within the Hellenistic era: 300 BCE – 300 CE), and tonal diacritics
became meaningless and were considered an educational burden by many. There
is now a movement advocating reinstatement of tonal diacritics, the main
argument being that they are a part of the heritage and link today's Greek
with earlier forms. An argument against this is that the absence of tonal
diacritics does not change spelling to the degree of making older spelling
illegible, and those who wish to write earlier forms of Greek have plenty of
specialist resources to learn to do so.

This latter argument is also being used with regard to simplified versus
traditional characters for Chinese, except that many (though not most)
traditional characters are unrecognizable to those that learned only
simplified characters, and *vice versa*. However, nowadays many Mainland
Chinese, certainly better educated ones, teach themselves to read or even
write traditional characters (especially China's numerous calligraphers),
and traditional characters are more and more featured in publications as if
for decorative purposes. All this seems to indicate that there is widespread
private regret about simplification, though official opposition would be
problematic for obvious reasons. In my Chinese language program in Australia
we had to master both systems simultaneously. Many people, including
Chinese, find this very rigorous when I tell them this. Yes, we did have to
work extraordinarily hard and a good number of students fell by the wayside.
But it was certainly possible, and I am glad that I had this opportunity
that now turns out to have been a rare one. I feel equally "at home" in both
systems.

In the case of Mongolian, the traditional vertical (Uyghur) script was
replaced with a Cyrillic-based systems with the beginning of the communist
era in Mongolia and Kalmykia, not in Southern ("Inner") Mongolia (which is
under Chinese rule). Two or three generations did not learn the old system;
only specialists did. So the link with pre-communist-era literature has been
broken for the average person. Mongolia is now trying to reintroduce the old
system, but this proves to be problematic because the spelling is based on
the Mongolian language of the 12th and 13th centuries. It is excellent as an
inter-dialectical system, since pretty much all modern dialects are derived
from that earlier form. But it takes a lot of studying, especially for
writing purposes. In other words, the spelling of each and every word has to
be learned, which requires life-long learning for most people. It shares
this with the Tibetan and English systems.

The inter-variety utility of spelling systems oughtn't be undervalued. It
certainly is an option and may be found preferable to a system that
represents only a "high" dialect. This is not to say that only older systems
can be used inter-dialectically. Theoretically speaking, new systems can be
devised or older systems can be reformed for such a purpose. But such
proposals tend to be rejected and older systems tend to be preferred for
various reasons, including emotionally based ones.

Personally, I don't much care what systems are used as long as they have at
least some consistency and internal integrity. I do have a problem with
imposing a system onto a language (typically a minority language) from
another language (typically a power language) if such a system is not
suitable for the recipient language, in other words, has not be adapted to
the recipient language to properly represent its native structure. And there
is the additional symbolic aspect of treating minority languages as though
they were dialects or appendages of the respective power languages.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lowlands-l/attachments/20081217/08243b76/attachment.htm>