Glossaphile wrote:To answer this latest critique, the re-assignment of a few familiar letters to not-so-familiar sounds was, as stated on the website, aimed at making better use of traditionally redundant graphemes in order to get the most out of the current 26-glyph alphabet. This keeps the number of unconventional characters to a minimum, which is inevitably a plus when it comes to public persuasion.
In my opinion, a much better way of keeping unconventional characters to a minimum would be
not introducing them in the first place, considering that we already have a bunch of digraphs that do the job just fine. A word like
adulthood is so transparently obviously a combination of
adult +
hood that most people have no trouble at all realizing that the <th> combination is not supposed to be pronounced as a digraph here.
Also, as you point out, your most unintuitive choices concern uncommon sounds... So if you're going to introduce "unconventional" characters anyway, why not use them for these and reserve <x> and <q> for something more common? There are real-world languages out there that use <x> for /ʃ/, for instance.
The lone <c> for /tʃ/ should be easy because the lone letter is already a member of the corresponding traditional digraph <ch>.
I'm not too sure about this. People have internalized completely separate pronunciations for <c> and <ch>; removing the <h> from the latter and expecting people to still associate it with the old <ch> rather than the old <c> would probably work about as well as removing the ascender from <d> and expecting people not to see it as <ɑ>.
In my experience, the notion that <c> is /k/ before a back vowel can be
extremely difficult for people to override once they've internalized it (even though - or perhaps because - many of them are probably only subconsciously aware of the whole "before a back vowel" thing in the first place). If I got a nickel for every time I've heard students of eastern European languages (where <c> tends to stand for /ts/ regardless of what follows) pronounce <c> as /k/ despite being way too far in their studies not to have gone over basic pronunciation rules, I'd have... well, perhaps a couple of dollars at this point (the best example might be [lä:tsäkot] for
lazacot from one girl after about six months of studying Hungarian; this stuff is
hard for some people). So it wouldn't exactly make me rich, but I'd say it's still indicative of a trend.
A <ç> is visually derived from <c>, and its sound (/ʃ/) is also conveniently (and thus mnemonically) related to that of unmarked <c>.
Eh, I guess. Still, if you want a single-letter representation for /ʃ/, I'd suggest something like <š>, which is also conveniently related to a letter with a related sound, and, again, has the advantage of actually already being in use in several real-world orthographies. (Another possibility would be the aforementioned <x>.)
Regarding the practicality of restoring a Romance-like vowel/diphthong paradigm, I guess my question is: why not? Assuming for the sake of argument that we all agree to bite the bullet and undertake the arduous process of reform, why not get just a little bit more out of our efforts by making the world's lingua franca a little more universal?
Because any potential advantage this has would 1) be too small to justify the negatives and 2) only affect new learners - and of them, only second-language speakers. Spelling reforms pretty much always cause difficulty and controversy; assuming for the sake of the sake of the argument that one were possible for English at all, why needlessly increase the difficulty?
Also, as Xing points out, keeping things more distinct can actually help people remember to mind the differences. Despite all the /k/ for <c> and /ts/ for <z> confusion mentioned above, I've
never heard anyone pronounce English with Finnish values for the vowels (except as a joke or a quick way to spell out a word).
Glossaphile wrote:What would you prefer, then, Ossicone? Hopefully not the traditional <ng>, since that would be ambiguous.
It's not, for the same reason that <th> isn't in
adulthood. Also, even if it is to some people, the contrast is so marginal that it hardly warrants introducing a whole new letter (and with an unusual value for said letter, to boot).