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From: henry@netcom.com (Henry Polard)
Subject: Re: Lunatic orthography (was Re: Esperanto as a stepping stone?
Message-ID: <henryD294pL.DJp@netcom.com>
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References: <3ergbm$g14@condor.cs.jhu.edu> <smryanD257Mr.9Mu@netcom.com> <D27vLM.vy@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <3f0rfh$7rb@condor.cs.jhu.edu>
Date: Wed, 11 Jan 1995 17:32:09 GMT
Lines: 51

In article <3f0rfh$7rb@condor.cs.jhu.edu>,
Paul Tanenbaum <pjt@condor.cs.jhu.edu> wrote:
<snip>
>     I agree with this restatement.  But it's not a paraphrase of "English
>orthography is lunatic."  I think it uncontroversial to say that the main
>thing complicating the relationship between the orthography and phonology
>of English is another factor special to the language:  its habit of wholesale
>adoption of loan words, whether from Norman invaders, Jewish immigrants,
>or whomever.  Perhaps you were just being glib, and I should have understood
>you to mean, nonjudgmentally, that the orthography <--> phonology link is
>tortuous?

The vowel shift in early modern English also played a major role,
blending previous distinctions.  

Alphabetic writing systems involve the eye as much as the ear.  Does a good
alphabetic writing system (whatever that is) have to represent sound
primarily?  

For languages in which a morpheme can have more than
one phonemic realization, would it make sense to have an
alphabetic writing system that represents each morpheme with the same symbols,
regardless of how they are realized phonemically (except for
suppletive morphemes, such as go/went)?  

In a "phonemic" system, it is easy to determine pronunciation, but
morphemes might be hard to recognize.

In a "morphemic" system, the morphemes are easy to recognize, but
it is difficult to determine pronunciation.

For example, a's in each of these sets:
sane/sanity and nation/national/nationality
in a phomemic writing system would be represented by a variety of
letters (since they are sounded differently). On the other hand, I like it that
the morphemes represented by "sane" "-ity" "nation" and "-al" 
have the same (or similar) visual representation, even though they have
different pronunciations.

I thought that the Shaw Alphabet (a phonemic writing system with
letters that are written with one stroke each) was a great
idea, then I tried to read it.  The problem was not recognizing the
letters, but having to say out loud what I was reading (which I
don't do normally) in order to understand it.

Are there any experts in writing systems who can comment on this?

(I have simplified but hopefully not distorted too much the notions of
morpheme and phoneme.)

Henry Polard || My dictionary puts the cart before the horse.
