From pycyn@aol.com Sat Sep 02 10:05:52 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 23043 invoked from network); 2 Sep 2000 17:05:52 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by m1.onelist.org with QMQP; 2 Sep 2000 17:05:52 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO imo-r18.mx.aol.com) (152.163.225.72) by mta2 with SMTP; 2 Sep 2000 17:05:52 -0000 Received: from Pycyn@aol.com by imo-r18.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v28.15.) id a.69.9fbed4f (657) for ; Sat, 2 Sep 2000 13:05:42 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <69.9fbed4f.26e28d66@aol.com> Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2000 13:05:42 EDT Subject: RE:vowels To: lojban@egroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 3.0 16-bit for Windows sub 41 From: pycyn@aol.com ivan writes: <> 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?]