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From: henry@netcom.com (Henry Polard)
Subject: Re: Lunatic orthography (was Re: Esperanto as a stepping stone?
Message-ID: <henryD2DADy.KDG@netcom.com>
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References: <3ergbm$g14@condor.cs.jhu.edu> <3f0rfh$7rb@condor.cs.jhu.edu> <henryD294pL.DJp@netcom.com> <D2CzMA.3Gx@spss.com>
Date: Fri, 13 Jan 1995 23:25:10 GMT
Lines: 33

In article <D2CzMA.3Gx@spss.com>, Mark Rosenfelder <markrose@spss.com> wrote:
>Geoffrey Sampson in his excellent _Writing Systems_ makes a similar
>distinction (which he calls "shallow" vs. "deep") to your "phonemic"
>vs. "morphemic".  He and other linguists (notably Chomsky and Halle)
>have, like you, defended the notion of consistent spelling of morphemes
>despite differences in pronunciation.

Thanks for the reference. I'll take a look at it.  BTW, I merely
expressed a liking for "deep/morphemic" orthography; I don't know
enough to defend or attack any point of view.  I realize that this
is awful netiquette on my part. :-)

Most of the spelling reforms mentioned in this thread are
"phomemic/shallow." Have any "deep/morphemic" reforms been proposed
for English?  
If so, was the reaction something we can learn from (other than that
spelling reforms are hard to implement in English and are often
ridiculed)?

>On Shaw's alphabet, I wonder if you gave it a fair trial; it takes
>quite a while to get used to a new alphabet.  Learning Russian, I noticed
>that I could easily recognize words I already knew, while I had to 
>sound out unfamiliar words, months after learning the alphabet.

Maybe I did, maybe I didn't, but I found the same difficulty that
I found with phonemic transcriptions of English.  The main point
was not my ability, but to contrast my experience with a "shallow" 
orthography with the quasi-"deep" one we now use.

<snip>

Henry Polard || Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
                Inside a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
