~chooldrin

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Wed Oct 18 21:17:26 UTC 2006


It seems to me that a major problem for the concept of devising a
system of phonetic spelling for English is that of choosing the
dialect to use as its basis. All those speakers who don't have the
chosen dialect as their native speech will have a much *harder* time
trying to learn to read and to spell. They're first going to have to
learn the standard as though it were a foreign language.

If this sort of thing was easy or even possible, why haven't any of
those countries, such as Germany, that already have a designated
standard dialect of their language tried to go phonetic? What's going
to be done WRT homonyms?

-Wilson

On 10/18/06, RonButters at aol.com <RonButters at aol.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       RonButters at AOL.COM
> Subject:      =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re:=20=A0=20=A0=20=A0=20Re:=20[ADS-L]=20~chooldri?
>               = =?ISO-8859-1?Q?n?=
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> In a message dated 10/18/06 1:02:13 PM, truespel at HOTMAIL.COM writes:
>
>
> > That way we end up with a phonetic language that's
> > easy to learn.
> >
>
> Nah, English was a lot easier for me to learn than Spanish, French, or
> Russian.
>
> And then there are the Chinese, who have no "phonetic principle" at all, but
> they learn Chinese and can readily read each others' writing even though, when
> spoken, the dialects are mutually unintelligible.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


--
Everybody says, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep
a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our
race. He brought death into the world.

--Sam Clemens

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list