04-20-2009, 08:30 PM | #106 | |
Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus
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Some people do pronounce "minuscule" as if it was spelt "miniscule". For such people, a "miniscule" spelling makes more sense which is why that spelling is seen so often. We have a similar situation already with the two spellings aluminium and aluminum: the two spellings correspond to different pronunciations. What generally happens with this word is that one would assign one's own pronunciation to both spellings. The extra or missing i doesn't cause trouble. Tiki's point about "compounding the problem" may be reasonable or in error, depending on the exact approach to spelling reform that would be chosen. Tiki appears to have made an implicit assumption that words with really bizarre spellings would not be remedied, such as colonel (the l is pronounced like "r") and lieutenant (with the British pronunciation of "leftenant" where the "u" is pronounced "f"). If such words were not remedied, the problem is indeed increased. However, it is possible that such words would be scrutinized and new alternative spellings proposed. This would be more likely to lead to a net reduction of words with spellings that do not correspond to a plausible pronunciation of the word. The two words colonel and lieutenant have an interesting history which explains their unusual pronunciation in relation to their spellings. Colonel is a 16th-century borrowing of an obsolete French word coronel (note the spelling). This in turn was borrowed from an Italian word colonnello (note the spelling) meaning a column of soldiers. If the word was spelt as it was borrowed from the French, it would be spelt coronel: it would still be a little tricky to spell the vowels but at least the consonants would all be correct. The word appears to have been hypercorrected to have an l rather than an r to correspond to the Italian origins. While this is where the word does come from, it is not from the Italian that the word was borrowed but from the French, where the pronunciation of the word appears to have changed between the borrowing from Italian and the reborrowing into English. I feel that if the spelling of a word is to reflect its origins, it should reflect the spelling in the language from where the word was borrowed, and not attempt to trace the word all the way back as far as we can because such efforts to trace a word are sometimes speculative and subject to error. So far as I can tell, lieutenant intentionally had its pronunciation changed by the English so as to put some distance between the word and its French origins. While the word has been in the English language, the English have fought a few wars with the French and my understanding is that it is during one of these wars (possibly the Napoleonic wars) that the pronunciation was changed. Before the 17th century, u did double duty as vowel and consonant, so the word was pronounced as if spelt "levtenant" (with the i being silent). The following voiceless consonant t appears to have devoiced the v, giving the "leftenant" pronunciation that the British use today. I do not know the origins of the more logical American pronunciation, but it appears that the Americans have retained the older pronunciation (if the word did change during the Napoleonic war). The pronunciation of this word in Australian English is altogether more bizarre: the pronunciation follows British English or American English depending on which branch of the armed forces that the officer is serving in.
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04-24-2009, 08:17 PM | #107 | |||
Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus
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Suppose you read the following in a book: Quote:
Did you assume the verb is "put"? Wrong. This person is playing golf: Quote:
Why is it better to rely on context rather than having words stand on their own?
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04-25-2009, 08:09 PM | #108 | |
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04-25-2009, 08:34 PM | #109 | ||
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Something you can particularly tell us, Dana: is not "favour" is said rather like "fave-oor" in some parts of the UK? The American is distinctly short-o "fave-or," or indistinctly a schwa -- "fav'r."
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04-25-2009, 10:44 PM | #110 |
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Not just drygulching foreign tongues for loose grammar or vocab
Hee hee hoo hoo ho -- this is entertaining. Seems James D. Nicoll is quite the raconteur.
I can hardly wait for the story of James D. And The Giant Peach. Should be lots of .
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04-26-2009, 06:23 AM | #111 |
We have to go back, Kate!
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Don't know really UG. Different parts of the country say it differently. Mostly I think the last syllable is shortened and pronounced with the schwa. What vowel sounds lives inside that shwa is very different town to town. *smiles* For me it's more of an uh sound Fav-uh (which is how it's said in Bolton) but if I was a full on Manc, I might say it as more of an short 'o' sound. Fav-o'. The 'r' is not pronounced. In Liverpool, it ends with more of an 'eh' sound (quite slight). Fav'eh. Again, the 'r' isn't pronounced.
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04-26-2009, 04:54 PM | #112 | ||
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Tell me something; does the word 'run' "stand on its own"? Do you know what I mean when I yell the following sentence? "RUN!" No, you say? How can that be? It's an entire sentence. It's a single word, "standing on its own." It's a pretty straight-forward spelling. What words would you suggest for the 200+ meanings of 'run', so that they're entirely different, not reliant on different spellings (how many fucking ways could there be to spell 'run' anyway?), without needing context? |
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05-01-2009, 09:06 PM | #113 | ||
Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus
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Answer this: Why do the authorities that look after the other major languages of Europe all choose to avoid heterophonic homographs in their orthographies? And answer this: If you think context is not a problem, can you state the context rules for disambiguating the 500 or so heterophonic homographs in English in such a way that one can use these rules to program a computer to read text out loud flawlessly? If you think this isn't important, ask any blind person about the inadequacies of screen reader software. Good screen readers do get it right most of the time, but some words always cause problems. Quote:
Why do you make up this shit about my suggesting that the word "run" must have 200 plus different spellings to go with 200 plus different meanings when every one of those meanings has essentially the same pronunciation? I have not said that we need different spellings in this case; in fact I have explicitly said the opposite in an earlier post in this thread. You have chosen not to answer any of my other questions regarding spellings. I'm not surprised: some of the spellings we must put up with due to the forces of tradition and social conformity are truly indefensible when scrutinized objectively. Ultimately, the spellings we have in English are nothing more than a tradition. Some traditions don't always stand up to scrutiny. If we always stuck with bad traditions, in the USA only men with land would have the vote.
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05-02-2009, 03:33 AM | #114 | |
We have to go back, Kate!
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I still don't advocate top-down spelling reform; however, I can well see that technological shift driving a bottom-up change. My guess is that the tech shift will lead to a 'computer english' being developed. A reformed spelling system into which standard texts are translated prior to being accessed through synthesised speech. That may or may not then feed into the language proper. Right now, though, for all the people you'd help by simplifying spelling, there are a bunch of people who'd be disadvantaged by that change. The ideosyncracies of English spelling helped me to learn how to read. I don't know if I'd have loved it so much without them. |
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05-05-2009, 02:08 AM | #115 | |
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Should we call for a new character for, say, the southern English exhalatory pronunciation of the letter R? This seems to have developed since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while the American dialect retains the harder R of earlier times. Shall we call for a set of vowels to represent A E I O U as spoken by Australians in full yowly-vowel Strine? A phonetic forty-character system systematically representing today's English really only delays the pronunciation problem for a few centuries, which rather seems to make the exercise bootless.
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05-05-2009, 07:02 AM | #116 |
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Please expand on this point. You claim that people would be disadvantaged by changes to spelling. Who would be disadvantaged and how?
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05-05-2009, 07:48 AM | #117 | |
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We do not need 40 letters for the 40 or so phonemes. We make do with digraphs instead, some of which arose out of pronunciation changes to which you alluded to in your first paragraph quoted above. It is unlikely in the extreme that the whole orthography is to be thrown out and a whole new alphabet introduced. If any repair of English orthography was to be done, the only approach that has any hope of succeeding would use the existing rules but simply apply them more consistently. Your point about the older pronunciations being preserved in orthography is most accurate for those languages that have complex orthographies. Finnish has a pure phonemic orthography, and to a lesser extent so does Italian. The orthographies for these languages do not preserve the older pronunciations if they have changed. Modern Greek has an orthography that evolved from Ancient Greek and hence it is somewhat complex but they manage just fine. French used to have a silent s in words like hôpital and être (which used to be spelt hospital and estre) before an 18th-century spelling reform elided the s and marked where it used to be with a circumflex. German uses sch for the consonant in the word shoe. Old English used to use sc for the same consonant because it was once an allophone of the consonant cluster "sc" (pronounced as in "disc"). The name of the English Language in c.1000 was "Englisc", pronounced as spelt (but not as you think: E-N-G-L-I-S-C; all letters were pronounced separately and the consonant we now represent by "ng" in sing did not yet exist). Finally, a lot of the irregularity in older words in English orthography derive from words that changed their pronunciations in different ways: food, good and blood once all had the same vowel, as did break, meat and leather.
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05-05-2009, 09:05 AM | #118 |
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how do you feel about the spelling of "one-trick pony"?
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05-05-2009, 09:18 AM | #119 |
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It seems K's point is that correct spelling is prohibitive to communication.
Have you tried reading K's posts? I can't understand a freaking word.
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05-05-2009, 09:21 AM | #120 |
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We're not worthy, obviously.
But at least I can spell!
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