LL-L "Orthography" 2003.02.01 (02) [E]

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From: Sandy Fleming [sandy at scotstext.org]
Subject: "Orthography"

(Note: I've changed my Outlook settings to UTF-8 as Ron was advising lately;
moreover, this mailing uses characters from some of the more advanced
unicode blocks - if anything looks wrong, this might explain it!)

There has been a development (perhaps alarming, perhaps not nearly as
important as some people think) in the field of Scots orthography lately,
namely, the Scottish dictionary people have been insisting on being the
authority on spelling. So far there have been no spelling guidelines that I
can see, beyond a few hints that it'll be based on Central dialects and
pretty much like what you see in Scottish comics like 'The Broons'.

Anyway, this would suggest that traditional spelling systems, however
ill-advised, still hold sway. Meanwhile, I'm still faced with the problem of
how to represent Scots on ScotseXt and other places in such a way that a
reader can get guidance on how to pronounce Scots while still using a
traditional spelling system (whether it's a truly traditional one or the one
being promoted by Scottish Dictionaries probably doesn't matter: they're
both going to be bad!).

I've explored various options, from designing an orthography from scratch
(this will fail because almost nobody at the present time would consider
reading it) to designing a sophisticated internal representation of the
sounds of the language which can then be processed by software to produce
the reader's desired orthography (I've found this doesn't work because
taking something in "The Doric", say, and transliterating it into some
Central dialect, say, results in an unnatural-looking form of Scots: the
machine would also have to alter grammar and idiom for the results to be
acceptable).

In the end it seems clear to me that what's needed is some kind of
diacritical markup system that's fairly independent of the actual
orthography. Thus it (hopefully) won't matter too much if the underlying
orthography (the actual letters used) has to be upgraded within traditional
parameters: the diactritics will still give the same sort of indications.

Independent (or optional, or supporting) diacritics would be useful to two
audiences:

    o    learners, who need to see stress patterns and pronunciations that
contrast with the standard English pronunciations that they're used to even
although the spelling looks the same as in English;

    o    native speakers who are unconsciously abandoning the pronunciation
of their parents for more English pronunciations as taught in school:
although the native speaker has a choice here, the visibility of the
alternatives offered through diacritics would help them to make an informed
choice.

Such a diacritic system could be made very simple: one or two diacritics
would be sufficient. I've explored this sort of option, but ultimately
decided on looking at established systems, which I found result in a larger
number of diacritics, but as well as having the advantage of being familiar
to readers who are familiar with certain important works in Scots, the
variety of a slightly more complicated system is aesthetically quite
pleasing, so probably the extra diacritics will bother no one other than the
most hardened minimalists.

Now on to describing the diacritics themselves.

Diacritics for Diaphonemes
=================

Robert Louis Stevenson and others used 'ü' to represent the diaphoneme in
such word as 'guid', which they wrote 'güde'. Similary P.Hay Hunter (author
who wrote the novel 'James Inwick' entirely in Scots) used this diacritic to
distinguish a Scots diaphoneme in an English-like spelling, eg 'peäce'.

I messed around with the idea of using this diacritic to represent
diaphonemes for a long time, but eventually I decided nothing would be
gained. For one thing, the whole system of Scots diaphonemes can be (and
sometimes is) represented in Scots by use of digraphs, in which case the
diacritic is redundant. For another, few people find diaphonemes easy to
understand, so there's a danger of just confusing many readers. So although
for an enthusiast this sort of diacritic has its attractions, I decided not
to use it.

Diacritics for Stress
============

Often the stress in a Scots word is traditionally different from what
learners or some modern speakers expect. For example, 'matress', 'convict'
(noun), 'forby' and 'joco' all have the stress on the final syllable.
William Laughton Lorimer (who translated the New Testament from the Greek
into Scots) used a grave accent to show these stress patterns:

à , è, ì, ò, ỳ giving, for example, awà , matrèss, convìct, ablò, forbỳ /ə'w/,
/mə'trɛ:s/, /kən'vɪkt/, /ə'blo:/, /fər'ba:i/.

Lorimer doesn't give a case of a grave accent for the letter 'u', but there
is such a word as 'illustrate', which has the stress on the 'u' when it's a
noun. However, I think this can be combined with another diacritic which
I'll describe later.

Diacritics for Vowel Sound
================

Sometimes a vowel in Scots isn't pronounced as in the English even though
there is no traditional distinction made between them in spelling. In
particular, Scots pronunciations of words borrowed from Latin are often
closer to the Latin pronunciation. The pronunciation of Greek affixes may
also be similar by analogy. For example, in 'nation', 'generation',
'salvation', 'minister', 'hypocrite' the 'a's are pronounced /a:/ or /É’:/
and the stressed 'i's and 'y's pronounced /i/.

Lorimer distinguished these by writing <â>, <í> and <ý>. We could probably
simplify the system by using <à > in place of <â>, but at least for the
moment, I'll stick with Lorimer. On the one hand, it has the advantage of
familiarity for those who have read Lorimer, and on the other, it may be
that he knew something I don't! Note that Lorimer actually used a special
'a' for this character: his son, who completed the editing work on the
translation after his father's death, changed it to the diacritic form.

This exhausts Lorimer's provision in the way of diacritics, but something I
often find a nuisance in writing Scots is the lack of traditional spellings
to distinguish the /ʌ/ sound in Scots 'bull', 'pull', 'lodge', 'logic' from
the English pronunciations of these words. In the case of the letter 'u', P.
Hay Hunter provides a diacritic for this, writing, for example, 'pÅ­ll'. So
we could also write 'bÅ­ll' /bÊŒl/, 'bÅ­lly', 'bÅ­llet', and I think we could
also just use this in the noun 'illÅ­strate' rather than needing a u-grave to
show the stress.

Hunter doesn't use this diacritic with 'o' but I think it would be useful to
do this so that we can write 'lŏdge', 'lŏdger', 'lŏgic', 'cŏnstable'
/'kʌnstəbl/ and suchlike.

As I said before, this system could be simplified to use only two
diacritics, but I don't see any big advantages in this, and I think the
system as derived from older writers works well, particularly for readers -
this is what matters as I'm not suggesting that anyone who is happy with
diacritic-free spellings need to use this, and it should be possible for me,
in a computer context to allow the reader the option to automatically
remove/restore all diactritics in a text.

Opinions? Suggestions?

One thing I'm still thinking about is the way Lorimer seems to use a certain
amount of overkill. He writes, for example:

gíe - isn't 'gie' clear enough, or did Lorimer actually encounter someone
pronouncing this word wrongly?
líe, díe - I'd rather write 'lee', 'dee', so that the text isn't anglified
on removing diacritics.
píty - this one's harder: are there traditional Scots dialects where people
say 'pity', or would it be better just to write 'peety' so that removing the
diacritics doesn't spoil the text?
Without this sort of overkill, the diacritics would be quite sparse except
in Scots written with a large number of Latinate words. A sample (D Gibb
Mitchell's version of the Lord's Prayer):

Faither o us aa, bydin Abuin,--
Thy name be holy.
Lat Thy reign begin!
Lat Thy will be duin,
Baith in Yirth an Heeven!
Gie us ilka day oor needfu fendin.
An forgie us aa oor íll deeds, as we e'en forgie them that did us íll;
An lat us no be siftit, but save us frae the Íll Ane!
For the croun is Thine ain,
An the micht an the glory,
For ever an ever. AMEN.

Quite sparse! This isn't surprising, since the main purpose is to highlight
the differences between Scots and English pronunciations where the spelling
fails to do this - it's not integrated with the spellings.
Sandy
http://scotstext.org/

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Orthography

Sandy,

Thanks for "getting with the program."

Your text (above) arrived here with apparently all "special" characters
properly displayed, with the exception of (awà ) /ə'w/ which lost its final
vowel ([ə'wɑ:]?), but that may be an omission on your part.

I assume that all this will be displayed properly in our archives
(http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/lowlands-l.html).

Cheers!
Reinhard/Ron

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