Re: Literary phonetic alphabet

On Sep 27, 11:41 am, Iain <iain_inks...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 25, 9:34 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 25, 2:17 pm, Iain <iain_inks...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The IPA works.

I'm imagining a less precise version of that, is all, that is also
easy to handwrite, etc.

This would allow it to be easy to learn, and so could be used
comfortable by non-academics in informal contexts.

IPA can be used with whatever degree of precision is appropriate for
the circumstances.

What's not "easy to learn" about IPA? If you've learned to make the
sound, you learn along with it the symbol for it.

The IPA MUST have some kind of disadvantage. Otherwise we'd choose to
use it 100% of the time, for every kind of writing.

When a writing system is newly devised, the instinct always seems to
be to assign one symbol to one phoneme. But language is constantly
changing: not only do phonemes retain their integrity but change their
pronunciation (as in the Great English Vowel Shift), but also phonemes
split and merge. While the language is changing, however, its
orthography pretty much remains the same, for a variety of reasons.
Hence the lack of one-to-one correspondence between symbol and
phoneme.

The upside of the lack of correspondence, however, in the case of
English, is that spelling was pretty much fixed by the later 17th
century (Shakespeare and KJV are generally not read in their original
spellings, but Milton is) -- just before English started getting
spread around the world with settlers whose dialects diverged without
much mutual influence, meaning that the standard orthography they
continued to use in the various locations not only kept a regular
relationship with each individual dialect (even though they varied
between them), but also indicated the pronunciations of the earlier
forms from which the local variations developed.

I'm trying to get at the idea of an alphabet that is objectively
phonetic, whilst not having whatever failure means that the IPA is not
used at all times.

The "failure" is simply the fact that if all writing were done
phonetically, it would be hard to read elsewhere in the world or in
another generation.

If you're a casual reader of international poetry, you'll want to be
able to recognise more sounds than you're willing to memorise the
symbols for.

I'm not sure what that sort of person would be -- if they know the
language well enough to be able to read poetry in it (which is a heck
of a lot harder than reading prose), then presumably they have had at
least some training in how to pronounce it. And, of course, in reading
its own orthography, which involved memorizing either a whole new
writing system (whether for Greek or Hindi or Japanese), or else a
whole new way of interpreting a familiar writing system (whether for
French or Konkani or Vietnamese.)

Let's imagine a system whereby a diphthong can be denoted by two
symbols, each denoting a single lengthless, monotone vowel sound.

That's _exactly_ how any phonemic orthography denotes a diphthong, so
I don't know what your point is.

Isn't that a good way of reducing the number of symbols required for
vowel sounds? Now imagine that the consonant at the beginning of
"shame" had the symbol "sh", and the sound at the beginning of "dog"
had the symbol "d". With those two things in the specification, you
wouldn't need to specify a symbol for the consonant at the beginning
of "jingle", because one could just write "dsh". That, to me, makes
intuitive sense, so maybe to a world readership it might also make
sense?

Both Nathan and Sau Dan have offered valid objections to this
conjecture.

Like I said, I'm talking about an informal, intuitive phonetic
alphabet, for informal purposes.

IIRC, the only concrete example you've offered is the pronunciation of
Scots poetry by Standard English--speakers. Since Scots is (either a
language extremely closely related to English or) a dialect of
English, the phonemic inventory is almost identical, and the problem
is very much a matter of subphonemic realization of each particular
item.

Scottish literature might actually have been done a disservice by
Burns's writing in "eye-dialect," which gives the impression that the
language is much more alien than it really is. (Sorry, but the only
modern Scots poetry I've ever seen is the handful of verses by Soutar
set by Britten in "Who Are These Children?")
.

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