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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.