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----- Original Message ----
From: Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
To: shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, May 7, 2008 8:02:31 AM
Subject: Re: [shawalphabet] Re: keyword pronunciation


On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 1:54 PM, Star Raven <celestraof12worlds@ yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Merry/marry are already accounted for with Air and Err (Urge or Her), since
> that distinction is clearer.

Not for me, since "air" is the sound in "Mary" but not in "merry" or
"marry", and "err" doesn't occur in any of the three words. (If it did
occur in a similar word, it might be spelled "murry", perhaps meaning
someone who tends to murr a lot, whatever that might mean.)

***Oops, too early in the morning. I'll figure out what I meant later...

> There has to be a line in the sand, and I draw
> it at or/oar, as there would be *no* way to explain it to the non-linguist
> or even myself in a convincing way, and would only slow down writing: Bore?
> Boar?

Presumably because you don't make the distinction in your speech! (I
don't, either, and was rather surprised when I first learned that
there are people for whom "horse" and "hoarse" are not perfect
rhymes.)

***Here's the thing I think we've lost here. If I say to someone, Bore or Boar the speech distinction is so subtle that it's likely that it will go unnoticed. We are talking about an alphabet that makes for *ease* of writing. If I read b+or, I'll likely look for context. Pumbaa is a Boar, Zazu is a Bore, but he's a hornbill. That's just it. We keep wanting to make distinctions for things that
are minor: or/oar/ore may be different when heard in each and every
last word that they are in, but we don't need a letter for bor, boar, or bore. If I
read the word ash, I say short a+sh, but my redneck neighbors would say
something akin (Yes, I used "akin") to Long I+sh. Here, I think we are
too focused on minor differences that would be read or inferred.

***The wile/while distinction is a different matter. Here we have a voiced/voiceless pair, not a difficult to hear minor change.

> And which do I use for Lore? Core? War?

You'd have to look it up in a dictionary, if Shavian made those
distinctions -- just like people with pen/pin mergers do now, or those
with cot-caught mergers, etc. etc.

Or use spelling clues: Wikipedia says (s.v.
<http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ English-language _vowel_changes_ before_historic_ r#Horse-hoarse_ merger>)
-

"For the most part, the NORTH words are spelled with or followed by a
consonant (fork, horse, morning, north, York); the words or, for and
nor and all words spelled with war or quar (quarter, war, warm, warn)
also belong to this group. The FORCE words are usually spelled with
oar (board, coarse, hoarse), oor (door, floor), ore (bore, core,
more), and our (course, mourn, pour), and also many words with or
followed by another vowel (boring, glory)."


***So are we going to have to look up *everything* in the dictionary? There's a fine line between ease of writing and reflecting speech accurately. Again, a line in the sand here. For aesthetic's sake, I'd be willing to accept another letter that solves a problem, perhaps the kw/qu or ks/x but not for such a subtle vowel sound that is really only noticeable if you are sitting there saying "bore boar bore boar b-ore b-oar" Now, poor/pour IS something I had beaten into me as a child (not literally) but is it worth adding a letter.

***Please don't read this angry. I'm often "read" as far angrier than I am. I'm just making points. Devil's advocate and all that. 50 is a nice round number and /hw/ takes it to 49. Just think about that.


Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@ gmail.com>



***--Star



____________________________________________________________________________________
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Ph. D.:

You did not say where you attended elementary school. I was surprised
because I have always pronounced "wh" and no teacher at any time ever
told me the "h" was a silent letter. What is your definition of a "vast
majority"? I read a statistic about 3 years ago that 20% of the
American population still pronounces the "h." (approx. 60 million
people) I would expect that the percentage was higher in the 1960s.

So based on our personal experiences, you weren't surprised because your
teacher clearly did not know that some people pronounced the "h" and
with her/his lack of training, did not suspect that this situation was
any different than the silent "k" in "knee," which is appropriately
termed a "silent letter" since there is no significant group of English
speakers to my knowledge that pronounces it. If 60 million people still
pronounce the "h," then it clearly should not be termed a silent letter
by any teacher anywhere. .

Did the difference between our experiences mean that my elementary
teachers still pronounced the "h" (which I suspect was the case) or were
they just better trained than yours (probably unlikely.)? Since reading
is, arguably, the most important thing children learn in the beginning
school years, it would seem appropriate that elementary teachers should
know more about the theory of reading, alphabets, phonetics, etc. than
the casual approach which you indicate occurs. If memory of their
training is accurate and typical, then I have found one more reason to
be appalled by government-controlled education.

Paige

Ph. D. wrote:

Paige wrote:
>> Within the last year, I was told that an elementary
>> school teacher of tender years (by our standards)
>> engaged in teaching her students to read actually
>> told them the "h" in words beginning with "wh" was
>> SILENT! I almost had a coronary.
>>
>
> You seem surprised. I remember when I was in
> elementary school back in the 1960s, that we were
> also told that the h in such words was silent. I suspect
> the vast majority of elementary school teachers tell
> their students the same thing. Unless specially trained,
> they honestly don't know.
>
> Some of my friends from high school went on to
> become elementary school teachers. We remained
> friends through college. As I recall, they were not
> primarily trained in what to teach but how to teach,
> i.e. child psychology, behavior, developing unit
> lesson plans, and such.
>
> --Ph. D.
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>

--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com,
--- Star Raven <celestraof12worlds@...> wrote:

> *blink, blink* Maybe it's just too early in the morning,
> but I think I missed that class in code breaking school.
> OED 1? COD 1+?

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the largest dictionary, some
twenty large volumes in all, in the English-speaking world and is
usually considered the ultimate source of especially etymological
derivations. The principal contributor to the First Edition was James
Murray, who compiled a comprehensive notational system for the sounds
of English that was useful on both sides of the Atlantic, perhaps for
the Antipodes as well. Because of its size however, and of course
expense, a Concise Oxford Dictionary (COD) in one volume was compiled
by the Fowler brothers even before the complete OED was published,
using a simpler notational system that remained in use for the next
seven or eight editions until ultimately replaced by IPA notation.
The Concise Oxford is probably the most popular dictionary in
Britain; Shaw most probably had a copy of the edition of his day, if
not the larger OED. Henry Fowler's "Modern English Usage", though now
a century old, or thereabouts, is still in print and is probably the
most readable of all such books ever published.

The second edition of the OED, some thirty years or so ago, scrapped
Murray's (and Fowler's) system and replaced it with IPA notation,
which quickly became standard in the complete range of Oxford
dictionaries even though it is much more exclusive, more "English"
than its predecessor, relying as it does upon narrow RP
pronunciation, thus rendering it less useful for American readers.
The man behind this transformation was one A. C. Gimson, who had
previously assumed the editorship of the English Pronouncing
Dictionary (EPD), a book also still in print, founded by Daniel Jones
in the early part of the last century to provide guidance for foreign
students in the mastery of proper, i.e., Received Pronunciation (a
term Jones is believed to have coined).

Gimson I believe is someone of interest to this group, as I am fairly
certain that it was his modifications of Jones' original notations
that formed the basis for the sound-values of Kingsley Read's Shavian
alphabet. One clue is Read's omission of a compound letter for the /
poor/sure/tour/ group of words to accompany his /ear/err/air/or/
series. Gimson was of the decided opinion that poor and sure should
be pronounced "po" and "sho", thus no special indication for this
sound was needed. This pronunciation may be heard in the speech of,
among others, Prince Charles.

Fowler's self-explanatory notational system, if I remember correctly,
is as follows:
rack, reck, rick, rock, ruck, rook;
mate, mete, mite, mote, mute, moot;
mare, mere, mire, more, mure, moor;
bah, bawl; bout, boil;
barn, burn, born; sour, shower;
plus an undifferentiated a, e, i, o, u (= schwa)

Couldn't be simpler. It does however include provision for an or/oar
distinction, which you find objectionable although neither Shaw nor
George V, to whom you have expressed some loyalty in adherence to
Shaw's wishes, did so. It is true that in the speech of many these
two sounds have coalesced; Gimson did not recognize a difference, and
consequently Read did not; nor does the current OED. However, I have
noticed something of a comeback for the /or/ as opposed to the /oar/
pronunciation thanks to the nowadays common suffix .org, which to my
ear is clearly in the mouths of most people pronounced /or/ with the
vowel of awful (for those who do not pronounce this word "ahful".
Some test pairs are: short/shore, storm/store, cord/core, lord/lore,
sort/sore, fork/four, and of course the traditional horse/hoarse.
Moreover, horror upon horror, I've noticed some American television
commentators pronouncing .com with the back-rounded short-o, a vowel
not even included in American vowel lists. Perhaps it will be the
next fashionable thing to do; consider how quickly the pronunciation
of Moscow was changed on the airwaves from MosCOW to MosCOH once the
television people through some process of osmosis decided it was
desirable. No one objected.

> Anyway, while (/hw/) the /w/hw/ distinction is clearer, the oar/or
> distinction is not. I don't see it as up/ado either. I worry about
> introducing too much to the system and creating a Chinese debacle
> where every word has it's own special character. Or/oar is so minor,
... ... ...
> There has to be a line in the sand, and I draw it at or/oar, as there
> would be *no* way to explain it to the non-linguist or even myself
> in a convincing > way, and would only slow down writing: Bore?
> Boar? And which do > I use for Lore? Core? War?

Wouldn't it slow down reading to have unnecessary homonyms?
All distinctions are minor, it seems to me, in terms of actual sound
quality. That is the amazing thing about language, that so much can
be made from unconscious manipulations of such slight differences,
Consider the typical first encounter with a foreign language.
Gibberish! How can they make sense of what they are saying? It all
sounds alike. Yet somehow they do.

quite frequently unconscious,
dshep

--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com,
--- yahya wrote:

>--
If we *must* elect a representative Englishman, I'd much rather the
Shavian script reflect the pronunciation of, say, Michael Parkinson,
(or even David Beckham) than of a royal who came to power about
80 years ago! But surely the spirit of Shavian is that *all* varieties
of English speakers can spell their own speech as simply as possible -
not just some privileged Englishmen and Americans? Shaw's
instincts seem to me to have been thoroughly democratic.
>--

I think Shaw's instincts were more democratic than they may appear to
be today. George V was by all accounts a very popular sovereign, who,
like George VI, became King by accident. The importance of this, as I
understand it, is that both had trained for a more-or-less normal
career and neither spoke in the affected manner current at the court.
So he was more of an acceptable model than we might suppose today.
Then there is another, anecdotal explanation for Shaw's choice. Shaw
was appointed to a BBC Board whose purpose was to recommend
pronunciations for their news presenters, whenever there was any
doubt about a particular word. One day, so the story goes, a
disagreement arose over the proper pronunciation of "launch", there
being several varieties on offer and no consensus. But, as it so
conveniently happened--or perhaps this was why they were discussing
the matter in the first place--the King was that very day officiating
at the launch of an important ship in Scotland, so important that the
ceremony was broadcast over the radio, or wireless as it was called
then, and in the course of his speech used the pronunciation that
Shaw had promoted, to Shaw's delight. Of course this also improved
Shaw's standing within the committee, something he would have
enjoyed. Perhaps the selection of George V as model was a reward for
prestige gained. This sounds a bit like an after-dinner story, but
might well be true.

>--
I would say that the only addition needed is the /hw/ sound.
--Star

I'd say we need more than that: we need a letter for each distinct
phoneme in any distinct speech variety of English. This might well
see us adding letters for sounds unique to, say, Indian English,
Aboriginal English or Filipino English - provided those sounds occur,
within that English variety, in such contexts that its speakers
actually need a different letter to distinguish it from any other
letter. For example, we find that the cot/caught merger influences
many American speakers to the point they only need one vowel letter
between the 'c' and the 't', with the result that 'cot' and 'caught'
have become homophones for them; however, for most British &
Commonwealth English speakers, the words are not homophones.
>--

This is worth further exploration, I'd say.

>--
For those of us with more conservative (less evolved?) speech
habits, we of course want to represent that remaining aspiration in
our own
speech. But I'm not at all sure that "wh" is anything different in
pronunciation than /hw/. Are you?
>--

It is exactly /hw/. The aspiration comes first. I believe the current
spelling was an invention of Norman scribes way back then on the
analogy of /th/, /ch/, and /sh/, to mark sounds unfamiliar to their
ears. Whether (hwether) the /hw/ should be a combination or have its
own letter can be debated; but all the above plus /dj/ have their own
Shavian letter.


increasingly less evolved,
dshep

re: keyword pronunciation

pgabhart wrote:

Dshep, I THANK YOU!


Well, I thank YOU. I am so accustomed to my contributions generating
little but resigned displeasure that I am speechless (which some
might wish were permanent).

still in shock,
dshep

dshep, as usual, your arguments are very well thought out. You've nearly got me convinced, AND since it's only fair that the alphabet remain even (49 is a sucky number) then it should be /hw/ and /?/ added. Except, is there enough distinction between oar/or, or would it be more necessary to use Poor/pour. Not only is it a sound that even I can understand, it's also a combination sound, so my aesthetic self likes it as well. Besides, you had me nearly from "Hello" since, as I have said before Poor/pour has been beaten into me since grammar school as much as pin/pen.

I still worry about the slippery slope, though I'm willing to move my line in the sand back a tad. My loyalty to King George V is simply a loyalty to Shaw and his stated desires, the problem is that both are dead and in England, which is a wee bit northwest of my home in Tennessee--not that I wouldn't *love* to visit! Anyway, the slippery slope goes as follows: We've added two letters to represent sounds Read might not have deemed worthy, but which are necessary to *General* American "RP" if you will. But if we added a symbol for every phoneme, we would lose the point of the alphabet, not to mention make an already steep learning curve even steeper. Every school child would have to know some obscure symbol they may never encounter because they might want to read a book written by a foreigner who pronounces some letter or something slightly differently. We don't have a letter for a rolled R as in Spanish, which would be different from one used in French
or Japanese. Should we include these as well? Or the S/TS difference?

To be frank, this *ISN'T* IPA. It's not international. It's an alphabet for pronouncing English. Now, there are four major dialects, if you will, of English: British, Canadian, American, and Australian/New Zealand. Each of these places have their own pronunciations, but most are included in Shaw. Now look at the placed beyond that, the Chinese who speak English because of the *complexity* of their own dialectal system, now add to that a native speaker of, say, Arabic, who is going to pronounce things using his own dialectal clues. Should we include a soft K as in Hanukkah?

I mean, just a thought,
--Star

=========

"By Grabthar's hammer, by the sons of Worvan, you shall be avenged!"
-- Dr. Lazarus, Galaxy Quest


http://www.livejournal.com/users/wodentoad



----- Original Message ----
From: dshep <dshep@...>
To: shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, May 8, 2008 12:44:09 AM
Subject: [shawalphabet] re: keyword pronunciation


--- In shawalphabet@ yahoogroups. com,
--- Star Raven <celestraof12worlds@ ...> wrote:

> *blink, blink* Maybe it's just too early in the morning,
> but I think I missed that class in code breaking school.
> OED 1? COD 1+?

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the largest dictionary, some twenty large volumes in all, in the English-speaking world and is usually considered the ultimate source of especially etymological derivations. The principal contributor to the First Edition was James Murray, who compiled a comprehensive notational system for the sounds of English that was useful on both sides of the Atlantic, perhaps for the Antipodes as well. Because of its size however, and of course expense, a Concise Oxford Dictionary (COD) in one volume was compiled by the Fowler brothers even before the complete OED was published, using a simpler notational system that remained in use for the next seven or eight editions until ultimately replaced by IPA notation. The Concise Oxford is probably the most popular dictionary in Britain; Shaw most probably had a copy of the edition of his day, if not the larger OED. Henry Fowler's "Modern English Usage", though now a century old, or
thereabouts, is still in print and is probably the most readable of all such books ever published.


The second edition of the OED, some thirty years or so ago, scrapped Murray's (and Fowler's) system and replaced it with IPA notation, which quickly became standard in the complete range of Oxford dictionaries even though it is much more exclusive, more "English" than its predecessor, relying as it does upon narrow RP pronunciation, thus rendering it less useful for American readers. The man behind this transformation was one A. C. Gimson, who had previously assumed the editorship of the English Pronouncing Dictionary (EPD), a book also still in print, founded by Daniel Jones in the early part of the last century to provide guidance for foreign students in the mastery of proper, i.e., Received Pronunciation (a term Jones is believed to have coined).

Gimson I believe is someone of interest to this group, as I am fairly certain that it was his modifications of Jones' original notations that formed the basis for the sound-values of Kingsley Read's Shavian alphabet. One clue is Read's omission of a compound letter for the /poor/sure/tour/ group of words to accompany his /ear/err/air/ or/ series. Gimson was of the decided opinion that poor and sure should be pronounced "po" and "sho", thus no special indication for this sound was needed. This pronunciation may be heard in the speech of, among others, Prince Charles.

Fowler's self-explanatory notational system, if I remember correctly, is as follows:
rack, reck, rick, rock, ruck, rook;
mate, mete, mite, mote, mute, moot;
mare, mere, mire, more, mure, moor;
bah, bawl; bout, boil;
barn, burn, born; sour, shower;
plus an undifferentiated a, e, i, o, u (= schwa)

Couldn't be simpler. It does however include provision for an or/oar distinction, which you find objectionable although neither Shaw nor George V, to whom you have expressed some loyalty in adherence to Shaw's wishes, did so. It is true that in the speech of many these two sounds have coalesced; Gimson did not recognize a difference, and consequently Read did not; nor does the current OED. However, I have noticed something of a comeback for the /or/ as opposed to the /oar/ pronunciation thanks to the nowadays common suffix .org, which to my ear is clearly in the mouths of most people pronounced /or/ with the vowel of awful (for those who do not pronounce this word "ahful". Some test pairs are: short/shore, storm/store, cord/core, lord/lore, sort/sore, fork/four, and of course the traditional horse/hoarse. Moreover, horror upon horror, I've noticed some American television commentators pronouncing .com with the back-rounded short-o, a vowel not even
included in American vowel lists. Perhaps it will be the next fashionable thing to do; consider how quickly the pronunciation of Moscow was changed on the airwaves from MosCOW to MosCOH once the television people through some process of osmosis decided it was desirable. No one objected.

> Anyway, while (/hw/) the /w/hw/ distinction is clearer, the oar/or > distinction is not. I don't see it as up/ado either. I worry about
> introducing too much to the system and creating a Chinese debacle > where every word has it's own special character. Or/oar is so minor,
... ... ...
> There has to be a line in the sand, and I draw it at or/oar, as there
> would be *no* way to explain it to the non-linguist or even myself
> in a convincing > way, and would only slow down writing: Bore?
> Boar? And which do > I use for Lore? Core? War?

Wouldn't it slow down reading to have unnecessary homonyms?
All distinctions are minor, it seems to me, in terms of actual sound quality. That is the amazing thing about language, that so much can be made from unconscious manipulations of such slight differences, Consider the typical first encounter with a foreign language. Gibberish! How can they make sense of what they are saying? It all sounds alike. Yet somehow they do.

quite frequently unconscious,
dshep



____________________________________________________________________________________
Be a better friend, newshound, and
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On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 2:13 PM, Star Raven <celestraof12worlds@...> wrote:
>
> dshep, as usual, your arguments are very well thought out. You've nearly got
> me convinced, AND since it's only fair that the alphabet remain even (49 is
> a sucky number) then it should be /hw/ and /?/ added. Except, is there
> enough distinction between oar/or,

Is there enough distinction between "cot" and "caught" to warrant two
separate letters? What about "pen" and "pin"?

I say yes, in both cases, but others may disagree.

Since I merge "horse" and "hoarse", I don't know how speakers with the
distinction feel about the difference, but I can imagine that it's
similar.

> or would it be more necessary to use
> Poor/pour. Not only is it a sound that even I can understand, it's also a
> combination sound, so my aesthetic self likes it as well.

I wouldn't mind a separate letter for that, either.

> Anyway, the slippery slope goes as follows: We've
> added two letters to represent sounds Read might not have deemed worthy, but
> which are necessary to *General* American "RP" if you will. But if we added
> a symbol for every phoneme,

Careful: I don't think anyone proposed adding a symbol for every
possible sound that the human vocal tract can make, since that would
be an infinite number. But only for distinctions which are separate
phonemes (i.e. pronunciation distinctions which serve to distinguish
words) in at least one variety of English.

Which would, if we go the whole hog, still be quite a few more than
some may be comfortable with, and some phoneme distinctions are only
in fairly limited geographical use, so there's still a slippery slope
- but not, I think, one that's as big as you seem to make it out to
be.

> we would lose the point of the alphabet, not to
> mention make an already steep learning curve even steeper.

That would indeed be the case unless we restricted the number of
phoneme distinctions to those "commonly" made - for whichever value of
"common" you pick.

For example, I'd be for a "cot/caught" distinction but think that a
"wait/weight" distinction is less likely to be useful and would lead
to more people having to learn spelling rules (or look up words) than
"necessary".

> Every school
> child would have to know some obscure symbol they may never encounter
> because they might want to read a book written by a foreigner who pronounces
> some letter or something slightly differently. We don't have a letter for a
> rolled R as in Spanish, which would be different from one used in French or
> Japanese. Should we include these as well?

No, because those are not phonemes in English.

If someone from Spain pronounces "r" with a trill, then they're
pronouncing the English phoneme /r/ rather differently from most other
people, but it's still the same phoneme.

It's not a new phoneme unless someone uses both an unusual
pronunciation *and* a more common one *in English* *to make a
distinction between words*.

> Or the S/TS difference?

What's that?

> To be frank, this *ISN'T* IPA. It's not international. It's an alphabet for
> pronouncing English.

Yes.

And it's also not even a phone_t_ical alphabet for English (as IPA is
the International Phonetic Alphabet) -- it's a phone_m_ic alphabet.

So if someone pronounces "Kate, wait" the way I would say "kite,
wight", they'd still use the letter "age" because it's the phoneme
that counts, not the exact pronunciation.

> Now, there are four major dialects, if you will, of
> English: British, Canadian, American, and Australian/New Zealand. Each of
> these places have their own pronunciations, but most are included in Shaw.

It's not the separate pronunciations that are important - it's how
many distinctions they make.

For example, some people pronounce "crass" and "glass" with the same
vowel sound, and others with distinct vowel sounds. It's this
difference that's important (IMO), not exactly where in the mouth the
vowel is made, which may differ from place to place.

> Should we include a soft K as in Hanukkah?

Only if it's used in English words as a distinct phoneme that can
differentiate words.

And some do indeed include this as a phoneme in English due to the
presence of such words as "loch", which some pronounce differently
from "lock", but it's a fairly marginal phoneme and I'm not sure
whether the number of speakers who make this distinction regularly is
large enough to warrant making the distinction in the Shaw alphabet.

Also, one could argue that "loch" is not an English word but a loan
word from Scots (similarly with Chanukkah, chutzpah, Bach, etc.), in
which case the pronunciation is irrelevant since we're no longer
talking about English phonemes.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

Don't caught and cot already have different letters? Ah, awe, oh and all that.

--Star

=========

"By Grabthar's hammer, by the sons of Worvan, you shall be avenged!"
-- Dr. Lazarus, Galaxy Quest


http://www.livejournal.com/users/wodentoad



----- Original Message ----
From: Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
To: shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, May 8, 2008 8:47:21 AM
Subject: Re: [shawalphabet] re: keyword pronunciation


On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 2:13 PM, Star Raven <celestraof12worlds@ yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> dshep, as usual, your arguments are very well thought out. You've nearly got
> me convinced, AND since it's only fair that the alphabet remain even (49 is
> a sucky number) then it should be /hw/ and /?/ added. Except, is there
> enough distinction between oar/or,

Is there enough distinction between "cot" and "caught" to warrant two
separate letters? What about "pen" and "pin"?

I say yes, in both cases, but others may disagree.

Since I merge "horse" and "hoarse", I don't know how speakers with the
distinction feel about the difference, but I can imagine that it's
similar.

> or would it be more necessary to use
> Poor/pour. Not only is it a sound that even I can understand, it's also a
> combination sound, so my aesthetic self likes it as well.

I wouldn't mind a separate letter for that, either.

> Anyway, the slippery slope goes as follows: We've
> added two letters to represent sounds Read might not have deemed worthy, but
> which are necessary to *General* American "RP" if you will. But if we added
> a symbol for every phoneme,

Careful: I don't think anyone proposed adding a symbol for every
possible sound that the human vocal tract can make, since that would
be an infinite number. But only for distinctions which are separate
phonemes (i.e. pronunciation distinctions which serve to distinguish
words) in at least one variety of English.

Which would, if we go the whole hog, still be quite a few more than
some may be comfortable with, and some phoneme distinctions are only
in fairly limited geographical use, so there's still a slippery slope
- but not, I think, one that's as big as you seem to make it out to
be.

> we would lose the point of the alphabet, not to
> mention make an already steep learning curve even steeper.

That would indeed be the case unless we restricted the number of
phoneme distinctions to those "commonly" made - for whichever value of
"common" you pick.

For example, I'd be for a "cot/caught" distinction but think that a
"wait/weight" distinction is less likely to be useful and would lead
to more people having to learn spelling rules (or look up words) than
"necessary".

> Every school
> child would have to know some obscure symbol they may never encounter
> because they might want to read a book written by a foreigner who pronounces
> some letter or something slightly differently. We don't have a letter for a
> rolled R as in Spanish, which would be different from one used in French or
> Japanese. Should we include these as well?

No, because those are not phonemes in English.

If someone from Spain pronounces "r" with a trill, then they're
pronouncing the English phoneme /r/ rather differently from most other
people, but it's still the same phoneme.

It's not a new phoneme unless someone uses both an unusual
pronunciation *and* a more common one *in English* *to make a
distinction between words*.

> Or the S/TS difference?

What's that?

> To be frank, this *ISN'T* IPA. It's not international. It's an alphabet for
> pronouncing English.

Yes.

And it's also not even a phone_t_ical alphabet for English (as IPA is
the International Phonetic Alphabet) -- it's a phone_m_ic alphabet.

So if someone pronounces "Kate, wait" the way I would say "kite,
wight", they'd still use the letter "age" because it's the phoneme
that counts, not the exact pronunciation.

> Now, there are four major dialects, if you will, of
> English: British, Canadian, American, and Australian/New Zealand. Each of
> these places have their own pronunciations, but most are included in Shaw.

It's not the separate pronunciations that are important - it's how
many distinctions they make.

For example, some people pronounce "crass" and "glass" with the same
vowel sound, and others with distinct vowel sounds. It's this
difference that's important (IMO), not exactly where in the mouth the
vowel is made, which may differ from place to place.

> Should we include a soft K as in Hanukkah?

Only if it's used in English words as a distinct phoneme that can
differentiate words.

And some do indeed include this as a phoneme in English due to the
presence of such words as "loch", which some pronounce differently
from "lock", but it's a fairly marginal phoneme and I'm not sure
whether the number of speakers who make this distinction regularly is
large enough to warrant making the distinction in the Shaw alphabet.

Also, one could argue that "loch" is not an English word but a loan
word from Scots (similarly with Chanukkah, chutzpah, Bach, etc.), in
which case the pronunciation is irrelevant since we're no longer
talking about English phonemes.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@ gmail.com>



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On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 10:09 PM, Star Raven
<celestraof12worlds@...> wrote:
>
> Don't caught and cot already have different letters?

They do, which means that I can write them differently in the Shaw
alphabet just as I pronounce them differently.

However, people who pronounce "horse" and "hoarse" differently do not
have a similarly easy option of representing this pronunciation
difference in the Shaw alphabet (unless they use on+roar and awe+roar
rather than ligatures).

Cheers,
Philip

--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, --- Star Raven  wrote:
 
> > >There has to be a line in the sand, and I draw it at or/oar,
> > >as there would be *no* way to explain it to the non-linguist
> > >or even myself in a convincing way, and would only slow > >
>down writing: Bore? Boar?
>
> > Presumably because you don't make the distinction in your > >
speech! ... ... ... ...
>
> ***Here's the thing I think we've lost here. If I say to
someone, > Bore or Boar the speech distinction is so subtle that
it's likely > that it will go unnoticed. 

Unnoticed by you perhaps; everyone however usually notices 

anything they haven't expected.



> We are talking about an alphabet that makes for *ease* of >
writing. 

Ease of reading and comprehension are equally important,

surely?



> If I read b+or, I'll likely look for context. Pumbaa is a Boar,
 > Zazu is a Bore, but he's a hornbill. That's just it. We
keep  > wanting to make distinctions for things that are
minor:> or/oar/ore may be different when heard in each and
every > last word that they are in, but we don't need a letter
for bor, > boar, or bore. 
This is a line of reasoning that could be applied
equally well to justify a proposal to merge the e and a
of bed and bad. After all, the distinction (of sound
quality) is minor, less so even than that for or/oar, as less
effort is required. The tongue must be retracted to form
back vowels, but only raised slightly to go from æ to e. The
pin/pen merger is probably a result of a similar minimal
effort that has unconsciously evaporated. Furthermore, context
could be generally relied upon to knowwhen bed or bad is meant, said
or sad, etc. There is even some
historic slippage between the two, for example, do
you pronounce "catch" to rhyme with fetch or latch?
"Back" can be and is pronounced beck through bæck
to back, the latter with the continental value of a, as in
italian "pasta". I do not push this argument; i merely
point out it that it could be made based upon your
objections above.        
> If I read the word ash, I  say short a+sh, but my redneck
 > neighbors would say something akin (Yes, I used
"akin") 
Good for you: lovely expression. As an experiment, try to
get them to say storm/store, short/shore. You might be
surprised.  
> to Long I+sh. Here, I think we are too focused on minor >
differences that would be read or inferred.
Pretty much all differences in speech are minor, but it is the
recognition and comprehension of distinctions
that makes language possible. > ***The wile/while
distinction is a different matter. Here > we have a
voiced/voiceless pair, not a difficult to hear minor > change.
Just a few weeks ago I was assailed for claiming that
the voiced/voiceless distinction had importance. 
> ***So are we going to have to look up *everything* in
the > dictionary? There's a fine line between ease of
writing and  > reflecting speech accurately. Again, a line
in the sand here. > For aesthetic's sake, I'd be willing to
accept another letter > that solves a problem, perhaps the
kw/ qu or ks/x but not > for such a subtle vowel sound that is
really only noticeable > if you are sitting there saying "bore
boar bore boar b-ore > b-oar" Now, poor/pour IS something I had
beaten into me > as a child (not literally) but is it worth
adding a letter.
For what it's worth, I was not necessarily arguing for
an additional letter, even though that might be
convenient, only the possibility of an alternative spelling
that recog-nized a different pronunciation. I can, and have,
spelled or/oar, for/four using the
Shavian combination [Yr/Or].Works fine. So does [Ur] in "tour".
Because the err/air letters were mixed up I would scrap the
single-lettercombinations entirely except for the unaccented
[D], leading to fewer letters, not more. Yahya, our
Ozland correspondent said something recently to
the effect that if Shavian were more flexible it
could more easily absorb speech patterns from
other cultures, permitting those for whom English is a
second language to more readily join in. If English maintains its
status as world language it will inevitably be changed by the
world that uses it. perhapsShavian should be able to adapt as
well.
> ***Please don't read this angry. I'm often "read" as far  >
angrier than I am. I'm just making points. Devil's advocate >
and all that. ... 
> ***--Star

And i am tiresomely provocative for perpetually repeatingthe same,
tired old arguments.
tiresomely,dshep   

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