Re: Orthography supporting sound changes?

Helmut Richter :

> Why should it not happen? Yet I consider it improbable. You need four
> ingredients:
>
> 1) a language that has been written for enough time that sound changes
> could be visible in spelling habits
>
> 2) a conservative and irregular orthography where sound changes do not
> yield spelling changes shortly after
>
> 3) an influence of the spelling on the language
>
> 4) the absence of conservative dialects
>
> For point (2), conservative spelling is not enough. French and German
> spelling are fairly conservative but also fairly regular. There is no
> reason that a silent letter is ressurrected in the pronunciation when
> *all* letters in that position are silent.

I'm not sure which (of the above, and/or other) conditions should apply to
the following case, as I'm not sure of the time and circumstances in which
it happened. (Though not through the kids, I'd think; it would rather have
been a 'normative' initiative in influential circles).
I mean the re-establishing of the final -r in French initiatives. At one
time they were all lost in speech: "aime:", "fini:". Then it was agreed
(some may remind me how) to try and restore the -er and -ir pronunciation.
Only the -ir bit got through however: finir, ouvrir. AimeR, alleR didn't
make it.

Also, in my Larousse etymo-dico (only centered on French and hardly ever
referring beyond Latin BTW, typically F) I came along several words that
have been "re-latinised" by restoring, spelling- and sound-wise, letters
that by the time were gone in speech. This seems a case however, not of
orthography restoring sounds, but of taking wrongly or rightly to ancestral
Latin).

guido
http://home.scarlet.be/~pin12499/

.

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