Re: Plausibility Check

DJensen wrote:
Harlan Messinger wrote:
DJensen wrote:
Harlan Messinger wrote:
DJensen wrote:
People don't learn the pronunciation of their native language from
written material. They learn it as they learn to speak, from their
parents and others in their early childhood environment.
This is for the most part true, but I don't see what it has to do with
my proposal. The first generation wouldn't be taught pronunciation,
they'd be taught a writing system that represents what they've learned
to pronounce from their parents and environment.
If the writing system reflects their pronunciation, then how will it
induce change in their pronunciation?

It won't directly. While it would facilitate the spelling of foreign
words without need to approximate the representation so much, phonemes
would only move from one language to another when the words or phrases
they are part of move.

Imagine, for the sake of argument, that the French phrase "un peu" were
to become English slang. English doesn't have the French <eu> phoneme
(close-mid front rounded), so while the characters used to write it in
French also exist in English, they don't mean the same thing and would
encourage changing the sound to something like <poo> or <puh> or <pew>
or <pee-oo>. With a more universal writing system (in which the sound
has its own character) the problem doesn't arise because the spelling
could easily be adopted with the pronunciation.

Does that make sense? Am I out in left field here?

I'm not seeing the part where the writing system causes languages to borrow from each other (which seems to be the mechanism via which you believe they will merge) any more than they already do. Also, spelling isn't the only reason, or even the main reason, words don't maintain their pronunciation upon being borrowed by another language. It's mostly because the borrowing language doesn't already have the sounds of the source language. Now, suppose you came up with a single alphabet that covered all the sounds of the world. The fact is that most speakers of any one language would still only know the sounds of their language, and upon seeing a borrowing in writing, still wouldn't know how to pronounce it; they may not even recognize the "letter" being used to spell the unfamiliar sound.

Besides that, much of language change doesn't involve borrowing at all. Languages change on their own. With one quite unified writing system, English speakers have managed to branch out into speakers who pronounce "th" in "three" as "f" or as "t", people who pronounce "ou" in "house" as all sorts of diphthongs and triphthongs, people who pronounce final "-tle" with a glottal stop instead of [t] or [d], and so on. Then consider Arabic, the standard writing system of which doesn't really resemble the way *any* native Arabic speaker speaks; and Moroccan Arabic is quite different from Iraqi Arabic. Writing just doesn't unify pronunciation the way you appear to believe.
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