Walter's Famous German Language Essentials Guide

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Thu, May 05, 2016 at 04:03:46PM +0000, Chris via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> 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.

Point taken, though I think the correct term is "phonemic spelling". ;-)
Even then, there are still compromises, because not all dialects share
the same phonemes, and some dialects may consider certain words as
having different phonemes from another dialect (and not all dialects
share the same set of phonemes -- though they are close, at least as far
as English is concerned).

Another issue is that the Latin alphabet, with its dearth of vowel
letters, is really inadequate for representing the extensive English
vowel system.  Modern English has far more vowels than there are letters
to represent them, and in an ideal writing system you'd have a distinct
symbol for each of them. In current writing these vowels are
contextually represented, mostly in their historic forms, hence the
proliferation of silent e's everywhere. These were actually pronounced
as separate vowels way back when, but since then they have been dropped,
leaving behind their trace of modifying the quality of the previous
vowel. Hence in writing, these silent e's have come to represent that
modification of preceding vowel quality, rather than an actual vowel. (A
similar thing happens in old Russian orthography, with those ъ's and ь's
everywhere, coloring the previous consonant, and, by modern times, also
the preceding vowel.) This contextual representation is one of the
reasons why English spelling is so atrocious -- you're basically
replicating about 400-500 years' worth of sound change when you write
/ate/ to represent [eːt] (or [ejt], depending on dialect) as opposed to
/at/ [æt]. But, as any historic linguist knows, many sound changes tend
to be contextual, so not all final e's are silent, and not all silent
e's have the same effect on the preceding vowel. Hence the inscrutable
list of unending exceptions to English spelling "rules".


> 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.

Present-day English dialects are probably still close enough that a
common representation of phonemes is possible, barring some minor
exceptions. Of course, good luck convincing people to adopt whatever
system you come up with. :-P  I think there has been no shortage of good
ideas in spelling reform proposals; the main obstacle is the inertia of
the status quo.


T

-- 
What are you when you run out of Monet? Baroque.