Mesaĝoj: 90
Lingvo: English
eshapard (Montri la profilon) 2015-junio-05 08:40:31
Tangi:Shoe, sheep, shear, ship, dish, sham, shy... All morphemes. Letters stand for phonemes in an alphabet; not morphemes.
Why not have a specific letter for it? It is not rational, as there is no English morpheme which has /-sh-/ sounds. Extra letter for sh is just superfluous.
Tangi (Montri la profilon) 2015-junio-05 10:54:28
eshapard:Shoe, sheep, shear...And each starts with 'ʃ', not 'sh'.
eshapard (Montri la profilon) 2015-junio-05 13:39:55
Tangi:Oh, I see, you meant /-sh-/ to be two sounds. Sorry. I didn't catch that. I thought you were referring to the English sh.eshapard:Shoe, sheep, shear...And each starts with 'ʃ', not 'sh'.
So you're saying it's not better to have a unique letter for ʃ because you can do the mental work to separate out morphemes and figure out when sh should be ʃ and when it should be an s and an h.
Which you can do easily if you're fluent and not learning English... and not a child learning to read.
And as long as we don't accept any loan words in the future that have such a morpheme...
And of course we haven't even mentioned words such as sure and sugar...
Does the current way work? Of course it does. I never said it didn't. But it seems perfectly rational to me to have a regular spelling system with a one-to-one correlation between letters and phonemes and perfectly phonetic spelling.
To me, that seems much better than our current system. Having a separate letter for each phoneme is clearly not necessary, but I much prefer it to irregular usage of letter combinations. I even prefer it to regular usage of letter combinations.
I think we understand where each other is coming from now. We clearly have different criteria for what constitutes a 'better' spelling system. So let's just agree to disagree.
JaapJoosten (Montri la profilon) 2015-junio-05 14:41:42
Talking in English can be difficult an confusing for the Dutch. Among the Dutch, we have a joke, welknown among the elder adults: I speak English very wel, but not so snel, maar dat komt nog wel. (I speak English but mot so fast, but someday the time comes that I wil understand you, at last.)
Vestitor (Montri la profilon) 2015-junio-05 15:15:00
robbkvasnak:I was born in the USA and so despite the fact that my first language is German, I am also a native [American] English speaker. I wrote my dissertation in English and taught TESOL at the university for 8 years. Despite that I often have to check spelling when writing English which is a pain and which is very time and thought consuming. When writing German or Esperanto or even Turkish which I do not speak fluently, I only very, very rarely have to check. And the problem with English is that it is getting worse and not better. American English spelling is, however, already an improvement over British English spelling - in fact, British English spelling sometimes just looks childish to me - I will never try to learn it and I am glad that I have no need for it.Childish? You mean you've failed to master it? It's not very problematic if you grow up with the spelling system and in any case English in the former colonies (USA) has not drifted all that far from its roots since independence
. The "improvements" are barely noticeable. It is just that English spelling in the UK still reflects its historical origins, especially the Norman French influence.I tire quite quickly of people thinking they can improve upon English; they're as bad as the Esperanto reformists.
Tangi (Montri la profilon) 2015-junio-06 03:31:17
eshapard:But it seems perfectly rational to me to have a regular spelling system with a one-to-one correlation between letters and phonemes and perfectly phonetic spelling.It is absolutely not rational for English, with its vowel reduction, homonymy and complex phonetic changes around morphemic seams. The rational English orthography would use constant spellings of morphemes, and alternative spellings to separate homonyms with hints aimed on their semantic domains.
Vestitor (Montri la profilon) 2015-junio-06 09:16:11
Forget about English and work on Esperanto, which is the entire point right?
Tempodivalse (Montri la profilon) 2015-junio-06 15:03:20
Vestitor:And then it would no longer be English. Irregularities in the language are useful culturally in e.g. poetry and language jokes.Sure it would be, if you got the speaking community to accept it (but that's another matter). Russian didn't cease to be Russian after the substantial orthographical reforms. It's a bit slower to read old texts now, but nobody disputes that it's the same language.
Tangi (Montri la profilon) 2015-junio-07 04:09:32
Tempodivalse:substantial orthographical reforms.Are you serious? Such Russian orthographic atrocities as 'сОбака', 'мОлОко' or 'огурцЫ' are written exactly the same as Pushkin used to write them.
Tempodivalse (Montri la profilon) 2015-junio-07 04:33:40
Tangi:I was thinking of the five-odd letters that were dropped from the alphabet, including the very common jat and jer (the latter of which survives only as tvjordyj znak). The use of the jat (phonetically identical to je) in particular was notoriously arbitrary and irregular, and in some cases it was even unclear which spelling was preferred.Tempodivalse:substantial orthographical reforms.Are you serious? Such Russian orthographic atrocities as 'сОбака', 'мОлОко' or 'огурцЫ' are written exactly the same as Pushkin used to write them.
Also, don't forget the changes to masculine singular genitive, and the complete removal of feminine and neuter plural adjectives (supplanted by the same masculine for everything). For instance, mertvyja dushy. It all adds up to be fairly substantial, in my view, as far as reforms go. Greek's change in ~1980 was much milder in comparison (removing the extra diacritical signs).