LL-L "Orthography" 2005.08.18 (06) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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L O W L A N D S - L * 18.AUG.2005 (06) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) N=Northumbrian
S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic V=(West) Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeêuws)
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: "Proposal" [E]

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Proposal
>
> Hi, Mark!
>
> > Is it, Ron, that you would look favourably on such an orthographic 
> > system
> > being developed today?
>
> But why stop there?  Then you'd have to include the others as well,
> definitely Dutch and Afrikaans.  After all, let's not perpetuate the myth
> that the difference of "High" and "Low" is merely one of the presence vs
> absence of sound shifts.  There are far more lexical, idiomatic, syntactic
> and morphological difference.  They would be as numerous as between, say,
> Dutch and "High" German, but _Eindeutschung_ of LS on the German side of 
> the
> border has taken its toll, resulting in a reduction (but by no means
> elimination!) of lexical and morphological differences.  So,  ... pas op,
> nefie!

Traditional Scots orthography is such an orthographic system (if I've 
understood what were talking about here) with respect to modern Scots. Some 
modern Scots writers such as myself stick to the traditional spellings 
because they can represent all of the major dialects of Scots with the same 
orthography.

For example the "ui" diphthongs represents /:/, //; /e:/, /I/; /(w)i:/, 
/(w)i/ according to length and dialect. Eg "guid" pronounced variously 
/gId/, /gd/, /gwid/.

Again "wh" might be pronounced /f/ or /W/ according to dialect.

Since Scots is only spoken in the Scottish Lowlands the numebr of major 
dialects are limited and it doesn't take very many "diaphonemes" to produce 
such an orthography.

Would it be possible to develop an orthography to cover Scots and English 
this way? Well, the use of "wh" and "w" for what is usually the same phoneme 
in modern English follows the Scots pronunciation (as two separate phonemes) 
almost exactly, so that takes us some way there. Similarly the "r" in 
English fits Scots perfectly even though it doesn't really represent a 
phoneme in the pronunciation of many English dialects.

I write quite a lot by hand and I use Teeline shorthand for this. This 
brings Scots and English much closer to a common orthography, the way it 
drops most vowels and has special ways of writing most prefixes and 
suffixes. So if you were extreme enough to use shorthand or and ASCII 
representation of it you could cover more ground.

> > But there is 'capability' in another direction too, but I couldn't say 
> > if
> > it
> > is good or not though Ron would know with his Chinese. The ideoglyphs of
> > that language took no note of sound values, or even of some aspects of
> > language, so although it originally served speakers of one tongue, as 
> > they
> > spread out & changed into dialects that at this point many of them are
> > mutually unintelligable, the script still serves matchlessly for sheer
> > communication clear across the dialect divide, & even into some other
> > unrelated languages.
>
> Or sign language with a written version?

Wouldn't work!

At least not if I understand what's being said here - you're suggesting that 
since Chinese ideoglyphs can be used for some other unrelated languages it 
could possibly be used for sign languages?

The problem is, as is often the case, in the fact that the two types of 
language use a different medium. For example, sign languages typically use 
various timelines, about three kinds of space, mutlidimensional classifiers 
and rather complex pronoun systems, because a language represented in three 
space dimensions lends itself to this. There are also several channels of 
production (eg, right hand, left hand, face, shoulders). If you have a 
writing system for sign languages then it could certainly be used to 
represent spoken languages by simplifying it, but I don't see how an 
orthography matching a spoken language could be used for sign languages - 
there is a lot of representational complexity not present in the spoken 
language.

Sandy
http://scotstext.org/

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