LL-L "Orthography" 2008.12.22 (10) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 22 December 2008 - Volume 10
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Orthography" 2008.12.22 (08) [E]

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

> If ordinary spelling does not fully indicate it, pronunciation ought
> to be shown in some other way in reference and teaching material.

I remember owning a Dutch-English English-Dutch dictionary where the
English-Dutch half gave the English pronunciations but the Dutch-English
half didn't give the Dutch pronunciations. Perhaps one of the main
reasons for me skipping Dutch at a time when I was trying to learn as
many languages as possible!

I agree that there are languages where a pronouncing dictionary isn't
absolutely necessary (Italian and Welsh spring to mind), but Dutch isn't
one of them!

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

Italian and Welsh orthographies are pretty close to be phonemically based,
but then have flaws also.

Welsh orthography does not distinguish long and short "y" (the long version
being written with a circumflex in better older dictionaries and textbooks).

In Italian, unpredictable stress is inconsistently marked, being unmarked
particularly often in proper names (e.g. *Bartoli* should be *Bártoli*).
Except in word-final position (where they are written *é* vs *è* and *ó* vs
*ò*) tense [e] and [o] are not distinguished from their lax counterparts [ɛ]
and [ɔ] respectively, phonemic differences that occur only in stressed
syllables.

Russian stress assignment, which is unpredictable, has important
ramifications in that unstressed syllables undergo more vowel reduction the
farther away they are from the stressed syllable, which in the case of /o/
involves unrounding. This can make words sound very different, often
unrecognizable to native speakers, if the wrong syllable is stressed. This
is why it is really important that the learner be given stress assignment
information, and the native speaker too in cases of newly learned words and
names. I would expect to find it in all reference and teaching material and
am therefore pleased that in this regard the Russian team plays an exemplary
role in the Wikipedia family with its predominance of sloppiness when it
comes to orthography and phonology.

Unfortunately, this sort of sloppiness predominates among all sorts of
on-line dictionaries as well. Try to find a Hebrew or Arabic dictionary with
vowel diacritics, for instance! If I as a non-native speaker look for Hebrew
or Arabic words in dictionaries I expect to find them spelled with vowel
diacritics. How else would I know how to pronounce them? Well, I guess I
could go to printed dictionaries to find out what the vowels of found words
are. But what good is the on-line dictionary then except for native speakers
that know a given word already? In that case I may as well go straight to
printed dictionaries, most of which do provide vowel diacritics. Online you
can even find Polynesian language dictionaries without vowel length
diacritics, in languages in which use of these diacritics is mandatory! ("I
don't know how to type those vowel letters with macrons. Ah, well ... I
s'pose I'll just ignore them then ... never mind that I'm presenting a
dictionary.")

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
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