RE: SUO: English language (fwd) OUCH!
Graham and Pat,
Your examples illustrate one of the major reasons why phonetic
spelling for English would create major confusions:
>Actually, I was thinking of the ambiguities under SR1 (as I
>recalled it) of tort vs taut vs taught. I guess if we can understand them
>when spoken, we must be able to understand it when all are written as
>"tort".
Perhaps they may be homonyms in your dialect, but in my dialect,
"taut" and "taught" are homonyms, but "tort" is very distinct.
When I was studying German, I did not find it helpful to use
so-called "phonetic" spellings that suggested "Goethe" was
pronounced "Gerta".
There are actually three distinct treatments of final "R":
those dialects that pronounce them, such as mine; those that
drop them, such as Graham's; and those that drop some R's
while inserting other R's, as in former President Kennedy's
"ideaR" and "CubaR". (And on the radio, I heard an announcer
with a very well-schooled standard American pronunciation,
who betrayed his native Brooklynese when he mentioned the
Russian composer GlinkeR.)
Vowels are even worse. The first vowels in each of the three
words "marry merry Mary" illustrate the problem. In some
dialects, they are all distinct, in some they are all
identical, and in others, two are homonyms, but one isn't --
and all three possible ways of selecting which two are homonyms
are in common use in some dialects.
>Could an "Esperanto " have ever succeeded (in so far as that
>being the name of the winner of the George Bernard Shaw legacy award for a
>new language for universal application) had it gone down this path? I
>wonder?
The problem with creating an "International Auxiliary Language",
as it was called around the turn of the 19th to the 20th
century, was that there were too many competing proposals
(much as we have with versions of logic and ontology).
The version I think might have had some chance was Peano's
propsoed Latina sine Flexione. At an international conference,
Peano gave a lecture in which he started speaking in classical
Latin with all the classical inflections. As he lectured, he
proposed various simplifications to the grammar. As he proposed
each one, he began using it, and his speech became easier to
understand. By the end of the lecture, he was speaking in
Latina sine Flexione, and almost everybody in the audience
(who had all had at least some exposure to at least one
modern Romance language plus a little forgotten high-school
Latin) was able to understand him without difficulty.
Of all the proposed artificial languages, Latina sine Flexione
was the least artificial, and the easiest one for anybody with
any exposure to any Romance language to learn. But just for
that reason, it did not appeal to the religious fanatics who
wanted something more exotic, and the French refused to accept
anything but French for international diplomacy.
As a result, the world was gifted with English by default.
John Sowa