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From: rharmsen@knoware.nl (Ruud Harmsen)
Subject: Re: Lunatic orthography (was Re: Esperanto as a stepping stone?
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Date: Thu, 12 Jan 1995 02:49:07 GMT
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In article <D27L7o.6o2@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
>Subject: Re: Lunatic orthography
>Date: Tue, 10 Jan 1995 21:33:22 GMT

>In article <rharmsen.97.000B857D@knoware.nl>,
>Ruud Harmsen <rharmsen@knoware.nl> wrote:
>>So hav I, I doant hav a diskripshn reddy, but it iz a rezanably kansistant 
>>sistm, widh a not-too-sharp brake widh dha past. (Brittish variant: pahst).
>>It kwd be uzed for Brittish and Amerrikkan and udher varyants ov Inglish.
>>If dhare iz enuf intrest, (pleze emale) I mite take dha time ta rite an artikl 
>>about it. Ta giv an impreshn, here'z dha "tranzlaishn" ov mi one artikl:

>Like so many schemes for English spelling reform, this one spends most of
>its energy fixing what isn't broken.  For instance, <th> represents two
>sounds in English, so one could make a (weak) case for separating them;
>but why replace *both* of them with 'dh'?  

Did I? My intention was to use "th" AND "dh" for these two sounds. Where did I 
write a "dh" for what is spoken as "th"? (sorry if I overlooked),

But you are right that these two sounds, though clearly distinguished by all 
speakers, are most probably just one phoneme. I set up rules to predict the 
sound (a number of years ago, when I didn't have a computer yet, and I don't 
know where I kept the piece of paper), and it CAN be done with almost no 
exceptions. But you need not only surrounding phonemes for these rules, but 
also grammatical categories (e.g. the, that, this, they, vs. think. There are 
no _verbs_ that have an initial dh sound, etc.).


Intervocalic <s> is generally /z/
>in English; why bother with 'pleze' or 'rezanably' then?  
You mean intervocalic after _long_ vowel or diphthongs? What about "hissing"?

