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From: jc@mit-athena.UUCP (John Chambers)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Rationalizing English (Spelling)
Message-ID: <139@mit-athena.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 29-Mar-85 12:02:06 EST
Article-I.D.: mit-athe.139
Posted: Fri Mar 29 12:02:06 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 1-Apr-85 23:49:02 EST
References: <400@utai.UUCP>
Organization: MIT Project Athena
Lines: 115

[Ohboy, another spelling flame session, lemme at it...]

What's this about a phonetic spelling for English being 
impossible? I saw several in assorted linguistics courses.  
Of course, they do get a bit hard to read....

Oh, he didn't mean "phonetic"; he's one of those [adjective 
deleted]s that doesn't distiguish "phonetic" from "phonemic".

Well, you see, phonetic writing systems are only of interest
to linguists trying to notate exactly the way a particular
speaker of a particular dialect spoke (on a particular day,
when in a particular frame of mind, and so on).  They tend
to be very cluttered with funny little marks indicating the
exact way a phoneme was pronounced in each case.  I mean,
phonetic English would have to have explicit marks for the
aspiration of all stops, although this is not a phonemically
significant feature of the utterance.

Ok, what we are really talking about is a phonemic system like
Spanish and Italian have, or maybe a morpho-phonemic system like 
German, Russian and most other sensible language communities use.
Is there any problem with coming up with one in English?  Yeah,
lots of them, and they're all political.  There's no technical
problem at all.  I've come up with several as class exercises.
I even did one using classical Hebrew symbols.  (It worked quite
well.)  

To start the ball rolling, I'll propose one that could be based
on ASCII characters.  There is a problem, of course, in that we
have only 26 letters, and roughly three dozen phonemes, depending
on dialect.  So obviously we use digraphs.  It would be better if
we could use superposed diacriticals, but what can you do?

I'm going to use two marks (for reasons that may be obvious after
a little thought), '^' and '~'.  Feel free to use any other marks
that you like.  Using 'h' for '~' might be a good idea.  I put them 
after the letters, so things will come out right is sorted lists.  
(The Esperantists like to put them before, but who am I to criticise?)

First, the consonants.  English consonants can be organized roughly
as follows:

          lab dnt alv ret vel phr
vd.stop    b   d           g
vl.stop    p   t           k
vd.affr        c       c~
vl.affr                j~
vd.spir    v   d~  z   z~
vl.spir    f   t~  s   s~      h
vd.nas     m   n           n~
vd.smiv    w   y   l   r

Note some funny things, like 'c' meaning 'ts', with 'c~' for 'tsh'.
Now for the vowels.  They're a bit more confusing, because most
English-speaking people can't even define "vowel", and think that
many things are consonants when they're vowels.  But here goes:

           front mid  back
st.high      i^        u^   ["Strong" high vowels]
wk.high      i         u    ["Weak" high vowels]
st.mid       e^        o^
wk.mid       e    u~   o
low          a^        a

Note that with one exception, I've used '~ to mark consonants
and '^' to mark vowels.  This pattern will continue with the
"special" vowels that double as consonant sounds:

             m^ n^ l^ r^

Dialect difference are to be handled in a straightforward manner,
by using the "superset" of phonemes that are distinguished in the
standard "generic" English, plus pronunciation rules that say how
each dialect maps the phonemic symbols into sounds.  Thus, in my
native dialect (West Coast North American), the 'o' and 'a' sounds
are merged into one intermediate sound.  But this doesn't change
the fact that the spelling system distinguishes them.  I just have
to learn the spelling of the words that are homophones.

Some samples using this spelling system:
Su~m sa^mpl^z yu^zin~ d~is spelin~ sistm^:

	Old		Nu^
	---		---
	cat		ka^t
	cot		kat
	caught		kot
	coat		ko^t
	curt		kr^t
	coot		ku^t
	word		wr^d
	weird		wird
	ward		ward
	warred		ward [Du~z eni^wu~n pronawns d^i^z difrentli^?]
	they		d~e^ [or d~ey]
	them		d~em
	this		d~is
	these		d~i^z
	think		t~in~k [or t~ink]
	button		bu~tn^
	bottom		batm^
	throttle	t~ratl^
	thirsty		t~r^sti^
	prince		princ
	prints		prints [print + s]
	grep		grep

Isn't this fun?  See how easy it is?  Come on, let's hear some more
ideas from other linguists (amateurs or prose) on the network.
-- 

			John Chambers [...!decvax!mit-athena]

If you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the precipitate.