ah/ awe

[Tom Zurinskas]

>From: sagehen <sagehen at WESTELCOM.COM>
>" In m-w.com those words above /light, sight, might/ do not  have vowels
>that are two-phthongs "
>I am not familiar with m-w.com, but I'm guessing it employs the old " long,
>short, broad," &c., designations, wherein /ai/ is long  i and  /ah/ is
>broad  a. (?)
>
>Since we seem, perhaps through a misreading of the map,  to have wandered
>into a Hegelian landscape here, what happens when, inevitably, "m/ai/t"
>meets "r/ah/t"?
>Would you have some arbitrator to declare a new standard?  Would you
>re-spell words with current spellings that are not reflected in the
>ordinary speech of any of the many regions of the world in which English is
>spoken as the primary language?

I'd go with the pronunciation (not phonetic spelling) of m-w.com as the
standard, with just a few changes  in a few words I've heard.   American
Heritage talking Dictionary is just as good.   I'd like to modify spelling
to be phonetic with that pronunciation.  But that doesn't work.  So I wonder
if forces could prevail to modify pronunciation to be phonetically in line
with spelling.  For instance, could the word "you" be promoted to sound like
the "ou" in "out".  Could the word "was" be promoted to sound like "as".  If
the goal is to maximize the alphabetical principle, it seems easier to
modify pronunciation than spelling to make a fit.

Tom Z

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