digraphs and sorting

[Joyce McDonough]

hello colleagues,

Here's my too sense.

I don't know but this appears to be an issue of our (linguists') awareness or training, not the speakers.  We are talking about orthography as American English speakers here. Wright? Rite? Riet? Wreit? Write?  We tell kids to look up words in a dictionary to find out their pronunciation, we teach kids to spell so they can look up words. Mandarin does not mark tone. Japanese does not mark pitch accent. Portuguese does not mark nasality. English doesn't mark stress. Arabic does not (always) mark vowels.  All contrastive features, and also mostly prosodic ones. Prosodic ones are the hard ones to capture in an alphabetic system. 

Orthographies, including IPA orthographic symbols, are just tools that represent sounds as symbols. IPA doesn't do such a stellar job either. The sound contrasts can be pretty squirrelly. 

The existence of keyboards and computers makes using a wide range of ASCII symbols feasible. Young and Morgan in The Navajo Language use several different symbols for a single contrast, the velar fricative, because that sound exhibits a lot of contextual variation. It works. They use diagraphs and nasality markers and special symbols, which modern keyboards make easy to use. But that's an orthography that everyone uses, it's changed over time and people still complain about it. But they use it and recognize it widely. So it works. My experience is that people get religion about orthography, I don't quite know why. But really anything works as long as we who have developed it can explain it and the people who are using it, use it and like it.

If you want to capture regularities in a community's speech, you need to look at the speech, do a nice phonetic analysis of the language. No orthography will capture the speech habits and patterns of a language.  The orthography is connected but separate from the phonemic contrasts and the structure of the sound system. 


 Joyce





Joyce McDonough 
Chair, Department of Linguistics 
Associate Professor, Linguistics and Brain & Cognitive Sciences 
Lattimore 505 
University of Rochester 
Rochester New York 14627 

585 275-2895 
585 275-8053 (main office) 

http:/ling.rochester.edu/ 



----- Original Message -----
From: "Arnaud" <fournet.arnaud at WANADOO.FR>
To: ATHAPBASCKAN-L at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Sent: Sunday, July 29, 2012 10:45:01 AM
Subject: Re: digraphs and sorting

Le 29/07/2012 18:34, Marianne Mithun a écrit :
> I was actually talking about the native speakers themselves.
>
> Marianne
***

ok
then the issue is more that they lack some awareness and training,
After all we learn to speak well before we ever hear about consonants 
and vowels and syllables...

A.
***



>
> --On Sunday, July 29, 2012 6:31 PM +0200 Arnaud 
> <fournet.arnaud at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>
>> Le 29/07/2012 18:14, Marianne Mithun a écrit :
>>> I have to agree completely. In my experience, especially people who
>>> are already literate in a language without distinctive tone or written
>>> vowel length (such as English) often have a very hard time writing
>>> tone, even though they perform it flawlessly.
>>>
>>> Marianne Mithun
>> ***
>>
>> This is quite surprising,
>> I tend to think that if you can master tones in a language (as well as a
>> native speaker) then you have no problem telling which one is in which
>> word.
>>
>> A.
>
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