RE:vowels

[pycyn@aol.com]

ivan writes:
<<It still amazes my Slavic mind that the distinction between
a monophthong and a falling diphthong should count as a "fine
distinction">>
Slavs probably have an occasional spelling reform, like Hispanics
and non-English-speaking Germanics (even Chinese).  English
doesn't and didn't even have spelling regularity until the 19th
century.  As a result, English spelling tells a lot about a word, but
little of it has to do with pronunciation (not quite Chinese or even
French, but we're working on it).
The present problem is a phthong-glyph one: the diphtongs (and
triphthongs too) are often spelled with monoglyphs (/iuw/ as "u",
/ou/ as "o" /ei/ as "a" -- a nice added puzzle -- and so on). And we
get confused by that: "a GA 'a'" when we mean /a/ which in GA is
written as often "ah" or "o" as "a" and which is more likely to be
the low front of "bleating Kansas" than the low central intended. By
parity. of couirse, we spell many monophthongs as diplyphs: /o/ is
often "aw", /u/ as "ou" or "oo" and so on.  And, to crown it, when
we do use diglyphs for diphthongs the components are often all
wrong.  
[Will Barton now turn up to tell us again that 90% of all English
words can be handled by a small set of spelling rules?]