32
votes
Why doesn’t a language modernization initiative adopt pure phonetic spelling?
Because most of the benefits of such a change would be to learners, while most of the costs would fall on the existing users of the orthography.
Where there is no established writing culture (or ...
- 7,314
22
votes
Why doesn’t a language modernization initiative adopt pure phonetic spelling?
wʌn ˈɹʷijzn̩ iz ðæɾ ɪndʌˈvɪdʒl̩z ˈdɪfɹ̩ʷ səp̚ˈstæ̃ʃəli ɪ̃ ðɛɹ prʷəˈnʌnsiɛiʃn̩ ʌ wɹ̩ʷdz. In fact, it is extremely difficult to get undergraduate students in a linguistic class to produce an accurate ...
- 77.4k
13
votes
Why doesn’t a language modernization initiative adopt pure phonetic spelling?
Designing an orthography is a difficult task, and having a phonemic orthography is only one of several goals in this task. Other goals may may include recognisability of morphemes (this is why, e.g., ...
- 29.2k
9
votes
In english, what's the origin of pronouncing the `e` as /i/ or /e/?
In Middle English (and even earlier), English scribes had a problem: they had a lot of vowels to represent, and not very many vowel letters to write them with. There were seven long monophthongs /iː ...
- 60.3k
7
votes
How did Chomsky conceive orthography and spelling?
The first relevant work that I know of are comments for Project Literacy Meeting, Chicago, August 6, 1964, which was later published in Readings in applied transformational grammar, ed. by M. Lester (...
- 77.4k
5
votes
does modern Hebrew have spelling pronunciations?
One phenomenon that fits well in the definition of "spelling pronunciation" is the reflexes of tsere in Modern Hebrew. There are two graphical versions of the vocalization sign tsere: ...
- 408
5
votes
Accepted
Why do some Vietnamese words have the tone marking on the last letter?
This is a difference in spelling reform, unrelated to pronunciation or meaning. Both the cases you give here (hóa and hoá) represent /hʷa/ in the sắc tone, and both are written and pronounced the ...
- 3,113
5
votes
What is the origin of ⟨c⟩ for /ts/?
C and K both represented the /k/ phoneme in Classical Latin, but had different etymological uses: K was relegated to Greek loanwords (and occasionally kalendae), whilst C was the usual orthography (...
- 6,878
4
votes
Why doesn’t a language modernization initiative adopt pure phonetic spelling?
One reason is that language is fluid. Pronunciation varies by geographic region, and over time. Which point in both space and time do you use as your standard? What do you do when pronunciation is ...
- 1,202
4
votes
Why was the letter K removed from the Welsh alphabet?
It was redundant with C. They indicated the same sound, and C was vastly more common, so K was lost.
- 60.3k
4
votes
Accepted
Does deep orthography decrease the collision entropy of a written language?
I'm not aware of any studies on this. If there are any, I expect them to be related to old-school cryptanalysis.
Intuitively, the collision entropy depends on the frequency distribution of different ...
- 60.3k
4
votes
In english, what's the origin of pronouncing the `e` as /i/ or /e/?
This, as with so many pronunciations of English vowels that are counterintuitive for speakers of many other languages is due to the Great Vowel Shift (see the diagram below, from Wikimedia).
Time ...
- 6,114
3
votes
Why doesn’t a language modernization initiative adopt pure phonetic spelling?
One practical issue is the question of whose English dialect and accent should we standardize to? I pronounce certain words differently than my parents, much less people in other parts of the US, much ...
- 131
2
votes
Ways of classifying writing systems by appearance?
I assume the question is, "Can you tell, from appearance, whether the script is Sinhalese vs. Kannada?" (or other languages). No, because scripts can be and often are employed non-...
- 77.4k
2
votes
In english, what's the origin of pronouncing the `e` as /i/ or /e/?
Modern English "be" derives from Middle English [be:n]. Here is the entry for Middle English. There was a historical sound change where [e:] changed to [i:], [æ:] changed to [e:] and so on – ...
- 77.4k
1
vote
How did so many Arabic letters converge to hold the same shape?
This convergence took place at two different levels. First there is the purely graphic evolution of the Aramaic-based scripts, leading (in Arabic) to the merger of “j” and “ḥ”, or of “r” and “z”, and ...
- 23.5k
1
vote
What is the nature of punctuation marks, are they paralinguistc features; where are they studied?
From a very applied linguistic point of view that does not care what things "ARE", but just computes statistics about them, punctuation is studied in stylometry with applications to ...
- 29.2k
1
vote
Are there modern languages without standardized spelling? If not, why?
Western Abanaki in Northern New England and parts of Québec has no standardized spelling; however, work is currently being done to more or less standardize it. The reason is simply because until ...
- 61
1
vote
How can I distinguish modern Scandinavian languages at a glance?
The Twitter user incunabula tweeted (https://twitter.com/incunabula/status/1560597822151356416) a diagram with an algorithm to distinguish between European languages. The feature that - in this ...
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