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From: grass@uiucdcsb.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Phonetic spelling isn't practical
Message-ID: <10500028@uiucdcsb.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 10-Nov-84 15:53:00 EST
Article-I.D.: uiucdcsb.10500028
Posted: Sat Nov 10 15:53:00 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 15-Nov-84 01:29:54 EST
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Nf-From: uiucdcsb!grass    Nov 10 14:53:00 1984

>Perhaps conditions are different for "small" languages (I understand that
>Hungarian is actually written phonetically), but it seems unlikely to me that
>any old, widespread, culturally diverse language like English, Spanish, French,
>Chinese, Portuguese or Russian can possibly be accurately described in a static
>form.  

Russian spelling is also largely phonetic.  There are a couple of rule to
learn about vowel reduction (o's to a's for example) when not stressed,
and that voiced consonants become unvoiced before another unvoiced
consonant (and vice versa).  Once you've learned those rules, the
only difficulty is knowing where the stress goes (when reading).

It is fairly easy to write down a Russian word, even hearing it for the first
time.

Some of the Slavic languages are more phonetic then this:  Serbian
and Macedonian have the same voicing, unvoicing rules, but they
express them in the written forms as well.  I don't think this
works out as well as the Russian system.  It is a little easier 
to recognize common morphemes in Russian.

Japanese has a very difficult writing system.  They have the Chinese
characters (1,850 officially goverment approved), two syllabaries
(hiragana for Japanese words, grammatical endings, etc.; 
katakana for foreign words and exclamations), and make some use
of the Roman alphabet as well (some abbreviations, odds and ends).

The Japanese have made some efforts to simplify all of this.  Many of
the characters are not quite what they would be in Chinese, some of the
strokes are simplified or otherwise modified.  The government appears
to have deleted a number of kanji from the approved list at various times.

My favorite spelling reform story is the one about the Russian spelling
reform of 1918.  About 5 letters were removed from the alphabet
because they were "extra" (two letters denoted the same sound).
In old Russian spelling every word ended with a letter that indicated
whether the consonant in front of it was "hard" or "soft".
(Palatalized or unpalatalized).  The reformers decided that only "soft"
endings needed to be marked.  This change alone resulted in
Tolstoy's War and Peace going from three volumes to two.

			-- Judy at Univ. of Illinois