Walter's Famous German Language Essentials Guide

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 5 May 2016 at 14:52:00 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:

>
> [...]
>> But hey, it's just a coding convention. We shouldn't be too 
>> attached to spellings, especially if reforms make it easier to 
>> spell (i.e. to spell out a word as you hear it in your head) 
>> and parse text. It's a code to communicate, not a religion.
> [...]
>
> It's a falsehood that you can just spell out a word "as you 
> hear it in your head". No writing system actually does that, 
> even though some come pretty close. Almost all writing systems 
> are compromises, balancing etymology, grammatical marking, ease 
> of use, and closeness to actual pronunciation -- the latter of 
> which is actually an extremely thorny issue due to the 
> existence of myriads of dialects and personal pronunciation 
> peculiarities. If you're merely talking about what's spoken in 
> the Queen's court, then there's no issue, but it's a big 
> problem when applied to the diverse regional English dialects 
> across the globe. The way a Texan spells will be 
> incomprehensible to a Briton, for example.  (But perhaps that 
> would actually be an advantage of sorts, in recognizing that 
> Texan is actually a different language, contrary to popular 
> belief. :-P)  Or, for that matter, American vs. Australian.  It 
> would cause a splintering of dialects.  Even across different 
> persons within the same dialectal community, there are bound to 
> be subtle differences that would make a difference in a pure 
> spell-it-as-you-say-it system.
>
> Chinese writing is actually an ironic illustration of the last 
> point, in fact. Thousands of years ago everybody spoke the same 
> ancestral tongue, but since then, the original ancient Chinese 
> language has splintered into what's commonly called "dialects" 
> today, but in actuality are completely different languages on 
> their own. The distance between, say, Mandarin and Cantonese is 
> far greater than between Spanish and Portuguese, for example, 
> yet for some unfathomable reason we regard the latter as 
> separate languages whereas the former are somehow still mere 
> "dialects".  But in spite of that, the one thing they all have 
> in common is a writing system understood by all -- thanks to 
> the writing *not* being phonetic, which is something usually 
> regarded as a bad thing. Since the writing isn't phonetic, it 
> has survived as a common system of communication in spite of 
> thousands of years of sound change and language drift, which in 
> any other community would have caused complete breakdown in 
> communication. (Of course, it's not a *perfect* common system 
> of communication, because "dialectal" differences are in some 
> cases big enough that one "dialect" would use characters that 
> don't exist in other dialects, or some words can't be 
> represented at all. But still, you can at least understand each 
> other to a workable extent just by having pen and paper handy, 
> which is a lot more than can be said for, say, an Englishman 
> trying to communicate with a Russian, having no common writing 
> system at all, even though thousands of years ago their 
> respective ancestors spoke the same proto-Indo-European tongue.)
>
> So you see, "write as you say it" isn't quite the panacea as it 
> may first appear to be. Neither is "keep the ancestral spelling 
> even though nobody actually talks that way anymore, just so we 
> can communicate with the Russians in writing in spite of having 
> completely mutually unintelligible pronunciation".  All 
> real-life writing systems are compromises between conflicting 
> goals. (Reminds one of programming language design, doesn't it? 
> :-P)
>
>
> T

I knew I'd regret it, when I wrote "as you hear it in your head". 
:) The ideal is phonetic spelling (Spanish comes quite close to 
it). This does not mean that you have a letter for each sound, or 
that you write allophones or every little local nuance. However, 
it is important to be consistent, even if the spelling system 
does not 100% reflect the spoken reality (which is the next best 
thing to phonetic spelling). If in English you wrote "nite" 
(instead of night), the grapheme <ite> would be identifiable as 
the phonemes /ait/, bite, fite, lite, tite, although the -e is 
silent.

In Irish, due to the differences between local dialects the 
spelling is somewhat conservative and doesn't reflect the 
phonetic reality of each dialect, however, it is quite consistent 
and everybody can read it using their respective pronunciation.