[Spellyans] <y Y> + diacritical

[Michael Everson]

At 12:01 +0000 2008-06-25, Jon Mills wrote:
>Michael,
>Why do you need to orthographically distinguish words with the 
>bys/bes-alternation from those without?

And why do we want the orthography to be precise? Because learners 
need help. Because someone with a bit of Cornish might be asked to 
read a passage in Church, and if the text is written in an 
orthography which is more precise rather than less, it will be easier.

The SWF is fairly "phonetic" to use the word as laymen use it -- but 
where it isn't, it is badly ambiguous. We can distinguish bys/bes 
words from res words and bys words easily, with a diacritical mark. 
The word shape is unchanged, and (in fairness) we can expect people 
to leave the marks of when sending SMS text messages. (U cn hrdly 
xpect thm to spel english correctly in SMS anywy, can U?)

We can't oblige people to use the diacritics. But we can choose good 
diacritics rather than bad and we can be examples of best practice by 
using them regularly and correctly in our publications.
-- 
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com