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From: tmb@talcott.UUCP (Thomas M. Breuel)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: about diacritical marks (danish dynamite)
Message-ID: <492@talcott.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 17-Aug-85 22:25:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: talcott.492
Posted: Sat Aug 17 22:25:13 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 24-Aug-85 00:18:03 EDT
References: <1065@diku.UUCP>
Organization: Harvard University
Lines: 52

In article <6582@boring.UUCP>, jack@boring.UUCP writes:
> It seems that the latin alphabet is insufficient to almost all languages,
> and that three solutions have been chosen by different
> languages:

What do you mean by insufficient? If you want a one-phoneme-one-letter
correspondence, it is probably insufficient even to represent Latin itself.
As a mnemonic notation for natural language it is sufficient for
practically any spoken language.

> 1. Take a letter that sounds fairly close to the needed letter, and
>    put a funny sign on top of it. Example: German umlaut, Swedish
>    oA, etc.

NO. THE GERMAN UMLAUT IS *NOT* A LETTER WITH A FUNNY SIGN ON TOP OF IT.
The German umlaut is a combination of a vowel and an 'e', which was
contracted to two little lines on top of the vowel in handwriting and
later in print. Don't ever just drop the two dots/lines. Write the 'e'
out if you must, i.e. 'A"' is 'Ae', 'o"' is 'oe', &c.
Likewise, 'B' (sharp s) is written out as 'ss' (although 'sz' would
be more logical).

> 2. Take 2 letters that, when pronounced very fast after each other,
>    have some similarity to the wanted sound, and decree that, when
>    seen together, they sound different from usual. Example: au,ou,eu
>    in Dutch, ng in Dutch and English. This has the advantage of not
>    needing more letters, but the disadvantage that it creates
>    ambiguities: 'engrave' is pronounced as en-grave, not eng-rave.

Ambiguity only if you insist on 1-1 correspondence between individual
letters and pronounciation, which is present in *no* language that
uses anything like a character oriented writing system.

Also, German has several letter combinations that denote special consonants
and are not even close in pronounciation to the individual letters that
they consist of, e.g. 'sch' ('sh'), 'ch' ('kh'), 'st' ('sht').
No ambiguity or confusion occurs, however.

> 3. Somebody Else's Problem. This means to just use the letters you
>    kind of like for a sound you need, and let other people worry
>    about how to pronounce them. As far as I know, English is the only
>    language that adopted this solution. Two simple examples of the
>    fun this gives : gaol == jail, laughter != slaughter.

English spelling is not that problematic. You will always have to
do work to learn a written language and its correspondence to a
spoken language. A purely phonetic notation is impractical except
for dictionaries. Have you ever tried to read something out aloud
purely by phonetic notation? I challenge you! You won't be able to,
even in a language as simple (phonetically) as Japanese.

					Thomas.