[Spellyans] <y Y> + diacritical

nicholas williams njawilliams at gmail.com
Wed Jun 25 14:48:43 BST 2008


The bys/bes words are very many indeed and absolutely central to the  
lexicon of the language.
Think of dres 'over' but dres/drys 'brought', res 'necessity' but res/ 
rys 'given'.
Nicholas
-----------
On 25 Jun 2008, at 14:05, Michael Everson wrote:

> At 08:55 -0400 2008-06-25, stinney at sas.upenn.edu wrote:
>
>>> Making this distinction is good orthography design.
>>
>> But it is necessary for the othography to bear
>> the entire burden of these distinctions?
>
> I believe so.
>
>> For one thing, learners are routinely taught
>> exceptions, and if the list of bys/bes words is
>> short, they can simply learn them.
>
> The list isn't short. There are other lists which
> are short. This isn't one of them.
>
>> For another, information of this kind really
>> belongs in the lexicon, not in the spelling.
>
> As I said, we have mabm/mamm because
> pre-occluders want to write pre-occlusion and
> non-pre-occluders don't, and as orthography
> designers we wanted to make sure that speakers of
> one dialect would recognize texts written by
> speakers of the other dialect.
>
> Similarly, we have bÿs/bës because some people
> say and want to write [bi:z] and some say and
> want to write [be:z]. But here we have an
> additional problem: there are [e:z] words which
> are not part of the alternating class, which
> everyone pronounces the same.
> -- 
> Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
>
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