Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site sphinx.UChicago.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxn!ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!cjdb From: cjdb@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (Charles Blair) Newsgroups: net.nlang Subject: Re: more diacritical marks... Message-ID: <998@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP> Date: Fri, 16-Aug-85 21:05:24 EDT Article-I.D.: sphinx.998 Posted: Fri Aug 16 21:05:24 1985 Date-Received: Tue, 20-Aug-85 04:46:57 EDT References: <487@talcott.UUCP> Organization: U. Chicago - Computation Center Lines: 25 > If you can't come up with a very good linguistic reason for > keeping your specific national characters, I think you > should re-consider your position . . . > . . . The full 'English' alphabet happens to be > known to all users of the Roman writing system, and it happens > to be the common subset of characters on typewriters and > computers. And it is perfectly usable for the phonetic representation > of languages as rich in sounds as English, German, or Chinese. > I sincerely doubt that *your* language is phonetically so much > more complex than these that you could not represent it easily > (and in fact without any serious changes to your current use > of the Roman writing system) with 26 letters and a handful > of letter-combinations (like the German 'ch', 'sch', &c) . . . Since these remarks could be taken either as insensitive or as chauvinistic, let me hasten to point out that the "English" alphabet is not perfectly suited for the writing of English itself. The phoneme represented by "ng" in the common suffix "-ing" has a separate symbol in IPA--the pronunciation of "ng" as if two different phonemes were involved, which one sometimes hears, is not a standard pronunciation, neither is the dropping of the final "g" (as in "keep on truckin' !"). As far as the vowels are concerned, forget it. A recent book on phonetics lists 14 "pure" vowels in English--far greater than the available number of vowel-signs.