[Lexicog] variant words

[Mike Maxwell]

As David Frank wrote, if you choose a phonemic orthography, probably
your only choice is whether to set one dialect as standard, or to allow
variation.

One alternative is to write things in a spelling that corresponds to the
(reconstructed) proto-language.  Obviously you don't want to go back
very far, or you end up with a spelling system like the one I'm using
now.  But sometimes a little diachrony gives you a slightly
morphophonemic system, which is (hopefully) not too difficult to teach.
  It all depends on how complex the changes are, and what their
functional load is (and how willing the people are to tolerate such
things--if they're already literate in some other language, they may be
more tolerant of oddities in their own orthography).
--
	Mike Maxwell
	Linguistic Data Consortium
	maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu


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