Danish Spelling

[David L. White]

> By your criterion, phonemic transcription would have to use something
> like /p_ht_hk_h/ and /ptk/ to denote the two series of stops in
> Danish, which would be inconvenient

        The technically proper thing would be to use /p/ versus /ph/, and so
on, with superscript "h", not available to most of us.  Yes, it would be
inconvenient.
        But anyway what I was really working up to was a semi- (or perhaps
pseudo-)Sapirian observation that people do know what the phonemes of their
own language are, and things like "illiterate" (or perhaps "naive")
spellings can show us what they think.  Thus Danes, seeing that /p/ is, so
it seems, spelled /b/, tend to think that /sp/ should be spelled "sb", which
is reasonable enough.  (I marvel that the Gaels had the temerity to update
their spelling to fit their perceptions.  Usually spelling conservativism
rules.)   But in any event over-wrought abstract analysis is not, in my
opinion, necesary.  Blank stares are likley to be the response to any
question along the lines of "What are the phonemes of your language?", but
if we are inspired by Liddell Hart and use "the indirect approach", the
truth will come out.

Dr. David L. White