[Spellyans] del 'leaves' and dèl/dell 'so, as'

[Daniel Prohaska]

It’s <del> and <war> in the SWF because they are unstressed. Just like
<gwedhen> is spelt <gwedhen> and not **gwedhenn. The SWF rule is that
consonants are not doubled in unstressed syllables. E.g. <rag> is /rag/ when
unstressed, but /ra:g/ when in stressed in the sentence, i.e. usually when
it’s used as an adverb rather than a preposition.

Dan

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Everson
Sent: Saturday, December 13, 2008 3:20 PM

 

"In the SWF and KS we have a rule that in monosyllables a vowel is short
before -ll. So the expected form of the word 'so, as' is <dell>, just like
<pell> 'long'. We can distinguish <del> 'leaves' and <dèl> 'so, as', but why
not <dell>? <Dell> also happens to be the form in KK. Why do we have <del>
for 'so, as' in the SWF?

 

Ray Chubb told me that Albert Bock had argued against <del> (our <dèl>)
because it would imply that we ought to write <warr> 'on'. We write <wàr>,
but in terms of orthography design I think Albert's view is incorrect. Yes,
both *<warr> and <dell> follow the rule and give nice predictable short
vowels. But <dell> occurs 152 times in the corpus, so there's certainly no
reason to avoid it. True, we don't like <warr> which contrasts with <war>
[wæ:r] 'beware'. But in good orthography design we should use the
predictable rule whenever possible and mark only exceptions.

 

I think we should write <dell> and not <dèl> in Kernowek Standard."

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://kernowek.net/pipermail/spellyans_kernowek.net/attachments/20081213/0577f172/attachment.htm>