Re: homo(phones/graphs/nyms)

From: Peter T. Daniels (grammatim_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 11/17/04 

Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2004 00:47:06 GMT

iwantlambert@yahoo.com wrote:
>
> "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

The GVS did not merge any vowels whatsoever.

> 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".

Some such apparent double spellings are the result of mergers in the
standard language in recent centuries (and are kept apart in some
dialects to this day; others are due to spellings from different
dialects both being adopted into the standard.

> 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.

So what?

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

They are not irregular; their backgrounds are complicated. 

-- 
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@att.net

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