Walter's Famous German Language Essentials Guide

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 5 May 2016 at 16:28:58 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:

>
> Point taken, though I think the correct term is "phonemic 
> spelling". ;-)

Yep. "phonemic spelling", you're right.

> 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.

What about combining existing vowel graphemes? In German you 
write <au> for the diphthong /au/, and <ai> or <ei> for /ai/, why 
wouldn't you be able to do the same thing in English?

Mai father was aut and abaut.

There would be nothing wrong with keeping <ou> as long as it 
represents only /au/ and not /u:/ "through" among other sounds.

Consistency is important. Spelling should at least serve as a 
template:

Sound convertGrapheme(T)(grapheme gr)
{
   static if (T == RP)
     return map!T(gr);
   else static if (T == HibernoEnglish)
     return map!T(gr);
   else
     return to!Sound("Bahhh!");
}

convertGrapheme!RP(ate); // returns /eit/
convertGrapheme!HibernoEnglish(ate) // returns /e:t/