[Lexicog] variant words

[David Frank]

Mike Maxwell, I like the idea of a writing system based on reconstructed
proto forms, and I like the idea of a writing system based on
morphophonemics, but so far I have only heard about the intriguing
possibilities -- especially of the latter -- but don't know of any cases
where the writing system was consciously and systematically created along
these lines. I am not a literacy specialist and maybe this is venturing too
much into the field of literacy. I would be curious to know if anyone has
done what you suggested, though.

In St. Lucian (French) Creole, we had four forms of the definite determiner
clitic:

    -a
    -an
    -la
    -lan

In this writing system, a vowel followed by an "n" represents a nasal vowel.
These four forms are phonemically distinct, but the selection is
predictable, based on phonological environment. There was some
experimentation with leaving the nasalization unspecified on the definite
determiner clitic, since it is predictable in this context, but we settled
on a system where the spelling was phonemic rather than morphophonemic. Note
that I don't think it would have been acceptable to anyone to have a single
orthographic representation for all four of these.

In English, we can get away with having one written representation for the
definite article "the", even though there are two slightly different
pronunciations, depending on whether what follows is a consonant or a vowel.
But it would be less conceivable to have only one written representation for
the indefinite article "a/an". But a morphophonemic orthography does sound
like an intriguing idea.

-- David



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