Re: homo(phones/graphs/nyms)

iwantlambert_at_yahoo.com
Date: 11/17/04 

Date: 16 Nov 2004 16:06:14 -0800

"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message news:<4199FCB1.1129@worldnet.att.net>...
> iwantlambert@yahoo.com wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > Only linguists distinguish homophones and homographs.
> >
> > and this distinction is of little importance except when talking about
> > languages like English or French with their strange and unsystematic
> > spelling conventions.
>
> Strange, perhaps (due to the GVS); unsystematic, absolutely not.
>
> (French strikes me as neither strange nor unsystematic.)

English spelling uses different conventions depending on the origin of
a word (one could call that systematic) but not consistently. As a
result of the GVS some vowels merged, most of the time keeping
different spellings. I'm prepared to call etymological spelling as
systematic, but in that case lots of words in English are misspelled,
e.g. [i:] in "deed" and in "read" have the same origin, just as [o:]
in "boar" and "more" or [ou] in "loaf" and "stone".

A foreigner learns spelling together with the words, unlike native
speakers who starts learning spelling after having learned lots of
words already. Most of those speakers are not that much interested in
etymology, so to them the system is lost as far as etymology is
concerned.

There are other quite irregular spellings in English, e.g. the words
containing "ough".

As for French, it was spoiled by the French.
Old-French started out with a spelling that fitted the language of the
day quite nicely, but already in medieval times the french introduced
all kinds of etymological spellings that were logical only to those
who knew Latin. As most of the people able to read and/or write knew
some Latin this was not really a problem at the time. Nowadays these
spellings are not always clear to anyone.
They are said to be usefull when distinguishing between homonyms, but
the "g" in "doigt" (which gets it's "g" from Latin "digitus" (which is
a correct etymology) seems to me quite useless, since the difference
between "doigt" (finger/thumb) and "doit" (he/she must/should/ought
to) is most of the times clear from context).
Often they got their etymologies wrong, e.g. where does the "d" in
"poids" come from? (the word itself stems from Latin "pensum")
Later on they misread earlier graphs for [ws] < [ls] as /ux/ and then
used this digraph in words where it didn't belong. There are more
things to say on french spelling, but let me mention just one more:

The grammar of the French Written Language is not the same as the
grammar of the French Spoken Language, e.g. in verbal conjugation. An
example is the present tense of the regular verb "parler", belonging
to the largest conjugation-class:
je parl-e
tu parl-es
il parl-e
nous parl-ons
vous parl-ez
ils parl-ent

The endings -e, -es and -ent are silent, so whereas the FWL has five
forms, FSL has only three.

French spelling beats English spelling in one respect though: once you
read something, you can be quite sure you know how to pronounce it,
even if you do not know the word(s), in English, unless you know the
word, you can often only guess.

greatings, erik.

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