[Spellyans] del 'leaves' and dèl/dell 'so, as'
Michael Everson
everson at evertype.com
Sun Dec 14 19:06:44 GMT 2008
On 14 Dec 2008, at 16:06, <ajtrim at msn.com> <ajtrim at msn.com> wrote:
> <war> "aware" has, of course, a regular long <a> so it should only
> be marked <wâr> in KS if <war> "on" is to be unmarked.
> That would be one solution but not totally satisfactory.
It would not be a solution for KS, because it would violate rules KS
has already accepted. <war> is [wæːr] regularly. <wàr> or <warr> are
[wɑr], regularly.
> In KS this should be improved if possible (but only if possible).
We write <wàr>.
> The sound of the <a> in <war> "on" is not the regular short <a> so
> it should not be <à>.
Not correct. The vowel is short, and its quality is regular preceding -
r. That is, you don't have [wær] because the r lowers the vowel.
> Some other symbol should be used, perhaps <ä> if that is not used
> for anything else.
We don't need to adopt a new graph. The rule for how <a> is pronounced
in front of <r> just needs to be stated. The SWF does not seem to
recognize this, but the phonological description it gives has many
errors where UC and UCR practice is concerned.
> Unfortunately, that would add a lot of diacritical marks to the
> language as <war> "on" is a very common word.
> Using <wàr> for "on" would have the same effect.
The French manage with: à, à côté de, après, d'après, derrière,
malgré, près de, and quant à.
The Germans manage with für, außer, gegenüber, außerhalb, während,
and über.
The Danes manage with på and the Irish with díom, díot, dínn,
díbh, díobh, dó, dúinn, dóibh, fúm, fút, fúithi, fúinn,
fúibh, fúthu, léi, ó, tríom, tríot, tríd, tríthi, trínn,
tríbh, tríothu.
All pretty common.
> However, <war> "aware" is much less common.
No one ever said minimal pairs were fairly distributed.
> To maximise usefulness we should mark the less common word to show
> that it is not the more common irregular word.
That's one of the tactics one may employ in orthography design. It
makes the pronunciation rules more difficult in this case, which is
why it's better to write <wàr>.
> The common irregular word could be easily learnt as an exception.
It's better to avoid exceptions when one can.
> So, I think it should be <war> "on" and <wâr> "aware" in KS, even
> though that seems a bit strange.
That would disassemble the system. We use <â> in words like brâs to
show the [bræːz]~[brɒːz] alternation. So your idea would not work.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
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