Re: Literary phonetic alphabet

Peter T. Daniels wrote:
On Sep 27, 11:41 am, Iain <iain_inks...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]

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.

I agree absolutely that the usual writing system foisted on Scots by its proponents does the language a disservice, but IMO for almost the opposite reason that you give. This "system" consists of spelling a limited number of characteristic dialect words "phonetically" (not "eye-dialect" though, which, by definition, is writing words differently from the standard which are actually pronounced essentially the same in both dialect and standard), but spelling all other words identically to English. This gives the impression that the language is _less_ alien than it really is.

Contrast the situation in Tok Pisin, which (it seems to me) is about as different from Standard English as Scots is (syntactically, a bit more different, phonetically, a bit less). Like in Scotland, Niuginians tend to command a range of varieties spanning the range from standard TP to SE with a local accent. Like spoken Scots, spoken TP is completely incomprehensible to a naive SE speaker. However, when it comes to writing the two cases are completely different. Pretty much from the start (e.g., the early bible translations), TP was written in a standard system which (dialects aside) was, and is, close to phonemic. It works, and no one seriously pretends it "gives the impression that the language is much more alien than it is".

Another example: Norwegian and Swedish (the main dialects, anyway) are much closer to each other than SE and Scots, and are readily mutually comprehensible. But, apparently for historical reasons, they use different spelling systems. The difference is not so great that a Norwegian can't read Swedish and vice versa, but it makes it very obvious at first glance which language you're looking at. I'll leave it to the locals to tell us whether this is a Good Thing or not, but, AFAIK, no one has ever proposed that the Norwegians should switch to the spelling system used by their larger neighbour.

[...]

John.

.

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