Re: Estimation of latin words in German


"António Marques" <m.ap@xxxxxxx> wrote...
ranjit_mathews@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Suppose we were to devise an anglocentric phonetic spelling convention
for Ecclesiastical Latin and Greek and replace English's Romance and
Greek vocabulary with equivalents from Ecclesiastical Latin and Greek
lexicons rewritten using the devised spelling convention. Wouldn't
English spelling then still be dialect independent?

No, because the english vowel shift affected words differently according to stress after they were well established, meaning that replacing the radicals with something more phonetic would completely break morpheme coherence. Cf. family / familiar, but the examples are everywhere.

I agree completely with your first sentence. There are of course thousands of examples of differently stressed words in English's Romance and Greek vocabulary which have been affected by the Great Vowel Shift in such a way that if they were written phonemically their relationship would be much less apparent. Whether this is a significant argument against such a spelling reform is a question that I absolutely refuse to even think about.

However, the example you give is a very poor one:

(1) "Family" and "familiar" haven't been affected by the GVS at all, and, except for the last syllable and the position of the stress, both words are phonemically identical.

(2) Despite the spelling, I doubt if it ever occurs to even one in a hundred English speakers that these two words are related, either in derivation or meaning.

John.

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