From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: English Orthography (was "easy to learn?")
Date: 17 Aug 92 18:17:05 GMT
Organization: SPSS Inc.

In article <1992Aug15.081820.25427@leland.Stanford.EDU> richwing@leland.Stanford.EDU 
(Rich Wingerter) quotes Sven Hauptfeld:
>> But there is a bigger problem. English has a very different set of sounds.
>          1  2 3          4      5                6     7          8
>> Anyway, what is really so wrong with English spelling? Apart from rare 
>      9   10                11                           12
>> exceptions, like "yacht" or "aisle", I don't see any problems.
>   13                                  14
>> Sven
>   15

and then lists a number of "inconsistencies."

Rich, you are presumably a native speaker, and very educated about linguistics; 
I just don't see how you can claim that most of these examples are 
any problem at all.  

>1  silent 'e'
    Which is very consistently used in English to indicate a particular
    change to the previous vowel.  A final e which *is* pronounced is the
    aberration.

>2  's' pronounced like 'z'
    A "problem" shared with French and Portuguese, among other languages.
    Again, an intervocalic *unvoiced* s is probably the rarer case.

>3  'a' represents a diphthong
    Don't you mean schwa?  But if you do pronounce a as [ej] here, we're
    dealing with the Great Vowel Shift, which did wreak merry havoc on
    English pronunciation and disrupt the mapping of vowels to sounds that
    works in many other European languages, but which is on the whole
    consistent and predictable.
 
>4  'o' really pronounced like 'ah'
    More Great Vowel Shift.

>5  'Eng' pronounced like 'ing'
    OK, this one is indefensible.

>6  'y' pronounced like 'ee', or is this the normal pronunciation of 'y'?
    Final y is usually pronounced [i], except in monosyllables (by, my)
    or after a vowel.  The mapping works pretty well the other way, too: 
    final /i/ is usually spelled y, except in recent borrowings (spaghetti).  
    What's the problem?

>7  another silent 'e'
>8  'f' pronounced like 'v'
    An inconsistency, but not a very widespread one.  

>9  'y' added to make 'a' long
>10  'wh' pronounced like 'hw'
     For those who really do this, it's pretty consistent; and why is this
     any worse than the other special uses of h which are very abundant in the
     European languages?

>11  'w' silent
>12  'a' pronounced like 'uh'
     Like Russian and Portuguese, English likes to reduce unaccented syllables
     --which makes comparisons with well-behaved languages like Spanish
     rather unfair.  In general English has chosen to retain the old 
     unreduced spelling of such words, which has a lot of utility in 
     comparing morphologically related words (telegraph, telegraphy, etc).

>13  'x' pronounced like 'g' or 'k'
     When is x ever pronounced [g] or [k]?  It's generally [ks] or [gz]
     (the indeterminate voicing may be unfortunate, but this is going to
     be a problem so long as human beings insist on making this particular
     lenition).  

>14  'I' pronounced like the letter's name, as a special case
     Great Vowel Shift again.  There's nothing special about this case.

>15  'v' how is this pronounced???
     When is v ever pronounced anything but [v]?
     'Sven' is not an English word, so it doesn't make sense to flag it as
     an inconsistency of English spelling.  English does have a tendency
     to adopt foreign words unchanged, a habit which may annoy the orthographer
     but which some of us like.

>There are just a lot of minor inconsistencies.

I actually agree that English spelling is full of difficulties (whether 
anything will ever be done about it is another question).  But I think it
does no service to the debate to pretend that perfectly regular aspects
of English spelling are problems.
Newsgroups: sci.lang