Re: BBC does it again


"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
On Jun 12, 10:58 am, "John Atkinson" <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
On Jun 12, 12:05 am, "John Atkinson" <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
> > "John Atkinson" <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > There's a huge difference between saying that vowel length is a
> > phoneme, and that long vowels are a sequence of two short vowels.

> No one (including Abondolo) is "saying" (or implying) either of > these
> things. In some languages, long vowels may indeed be bimorphemic,

Tsk, tsk, tsk.

Does this mean you don't agree that there are such languages? Or is it
that the term "bimorphemic" is meaningless according to "classical
phonological theory", that, in fact, you can't count the number of
morphemes in a word? Or something else entirely? You have to be just a
little more explicit to us poor autodidacts.

Compare and contrast:

bimorphemic
biphonemic

Gotcha. A spelling flame. Accept my abject apologies. (Have you ever noticed how hard it is to spot your own careless mistakes when rereading something you've written?)

Have we been talking about morphemes _anywhere_ in this discussion?

> either a sequence of two short vowels, or, a short vowel plus a
> morpheme of length. (I don't think either of these is the case in > the
> Uralic languages that have long vowels, but what would I know?) In
> others, long vowels (and diphthongs too) are apparently just as
> monomorphemic as short ones.

> I can see the logic of using only the macron in the latter > languages,
> only double vowels in those where long vowels behave like other > cases
> of
> two short vowels in hiatus, and only ":" where an added morpheme of
> length is the best (or most economical) analysis (which may well be
> the
> case in many Australian languages).

> Is this standard practice, in your experience? (Rhetorical question)

> > Similarly, in Polynesian and Australian languages, some authors > > use
> > double letters and some use macrons, both in phonemic
> > representations
> > and standard orthographies. Thus the Maori orthographic convention
> > uses macrons, while most developers of scripts for Australian
> > languages
> > use double letters because most of the people who'll be using > > these
> > orthographies are already used to writing English, which (as > > usually
> > written) doesn't have diacritics. Actually, in Maori, many writers
> > wrongly leave out the macrons, for the same reason -- because of > > the
> > influence of English.

Your quoter _still_ isn't working right.

My quoter is working just fine on everyone except you (no doubt Google
is putting something funny in your headers). Every time I answer one of
your posts, I have to go through and add an extra ">" to every line.
It's boring, so I won't do it any more.

Do you have the same problem when you quote Franz?

Probably. Of course, it's so long since I've clicked on one of Franz's posts, let alone read it, let alone answered it, that it's difficult for me to remember.

> Orthographies need not be phonemic.

> Of course not. They rarely are, completely. But when linguistically
> sophisticated people devise orthographies for previously unwritten
> languages, they tend to make a serious effort to be as phonemic as > is
> reasonably practical.

This is left over from Pike's "Technique for Reducing Languages to
Writing." People like Smalley went far beyond the notion that a
phonemic orthography is an ideal orthography.

Exactly. I said "as phonemic as reasonably practical". There are a
number of different, often contradictory, things that make an
orthography "good" (for a particular language, whose speakers live in a
particular linguistic environment), and the aim of the developer is to
devise a decent compromise, not any sort of "ideal".

As I said, that's an outmoded approach.

To devise an orthography that the intended native-speaker users find intuitive and easy to use is outmoded? I'd have thought that was what the game was all about.

What approach is in vogue today?

[...]

John.

.

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