LL-L "Orthography" 2008.12.31 (05) E]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 31 December 2008 - Volume 05
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Orthography" 2008.12.26 (02) [E]

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

Thanks for the birthday wishes, Ron. Sorry if my emails are a bit
untimely but my broadband is in a mess at the moment, it only seems to
come up late at night, and then only sometimes. So if I'm lucky, this
email might get sent out within a day or two!

> In other words, written representation would equal spoken
> representation. Etymological (or historical) information is not
> provided in speech, and it would not be in writing either. If the
> system is so designed, phonemic representation (which deals with the
> basic, underlying level) would be applicable to a range of dialects,
> unlike phonetic representation which (dealing with the surface, that
> which is produced by application of phonological rules) is
> dialect-specific and is only used for scientific and didactic
> purposes.

In my experience, most linguists would rather hit themselves over the
head with a brick for enlightenment than do science  :)

I wouldn't even say we have a way of writing things phonetically. The
IPA is just an extended alphabet for refined phonemics.

Ron, a challenge for the New Year! You talk about written representation
equalling spoken representation (is speech really a representation?), so
I assume that you're proposing that this is a good thing? Can you put
this on a scientific basis? Can you propose a theory of why
written=spoken is a good thing in all cases (if that's what you're
saying) and, most importantly, can you explain how the theory can be
tested?

Some thoughts...

Even phonemic orthographies tend to be supported with a certain amount
of morphography. Some examples of supporting morphography in English:

   o    words written differently to distinguish them when they're
written context-free, eg pair, pear, pare;

   o    words written shorter than phonemics would allow, especially
very common words, eg me, be, he, we;

   o    special symbols used to represent things that are tedious to do
in the full representation, eg 54.

Are you trying to say that these things are all bad? It's easy to object
to homophone distinction as supporters of pure orthography tend to do
(causing my brows to furrow, as I'm quite sensitive to selective
arguments!), but the other two cases seem reasonable.

Morphography aside, there comes a point when strict phonemic
distinctions could be brought into question. For example, in English we
write "child" and "children". Phonemically, this would have to be
something like "chyld" and "children". Is this necessarily better?
English seems to take what these days we call a holistic approach to
spelling, is this necessarily bad?

It's similar with the English plural, writing "s" when it's pronounced
"z". Considering that the pronunciation is predictable, why not keep the
orthography regular rather than regularising the phoneme-grapheme
mapping?

I'm not saying English spelling couldn't use some improvement or that
historical spellings should be adhered to. For example, the -ible/-able
thing could be regularised because most speakers have difficulty with
it. But even this is some way to being sorted out: all new coinings are
supposed to use the -able ending.

I think the trouble with spelling reform isn't with the idea of reform
itself, but the fact that reformers rarely allow the possibility of
supplemental morphography (yet they never manage to really avoid it), or
orthographic depth (which in my opinion is either helpful or pointless
depending on the kind of language you're representing: just because
something works in Finnish doesn't mean it's good for all languages, or
even for Finnish!).

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

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

Thanks, Sandy. I hope you had a nice birthday, and our Roger, the other
birthday boy, too.

I'll let your message sink in and will try to respond to it later, because I
had a rather full day today (definitely won't make it awake till midnight).

Let me just say that your questions (if that's a word) are thought-provoking
(as usual).

This doesn't mean that anyone else who wishes to do so should hold their
response.

As I'm writing this, all of you up to Western Europe have arrived in 2009.

Happy New Year to all of us! Hopefully, 2009 will be a wonderful beginning
of better things to come.

Loving regards and best wishes to all of you, Lowlanders! And kind regards
from our Kahuna too.

Reinhard/Ron

•

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