Re: Not to mention hairy potters

On Sun, 23 Sep 2007 15:37:56 -0700, Kurt Busiek <kurt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On 2007-09-23 14:44:57 -0700, jsavard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (John
Savard) said:

On Sun, 23 Sep 2007 16:16:34 -0400, Lawrence Watt-Evans <lwe@xxxxxxx>
wrote, in part:

Whether they're three different sounds, or two, or all the same is a
well-known and much-studied variable in American dialects. In New
England, where I grew up, they're all very much different, and no one
would ever get them confused; in Maryland, where I live now, that's
not the case at all.

It is unfortunate that English is pronounced differently in different
areas, since this is clearly an obstacle to spelling reform.

Variations in speech add more texture to life than spelling reform.

Indeed.

In Italian when there's regional variation in pronunciation, the
spelling varies with it. I found this confusing in Venice, where it
even affected street signs.

French spelling was fixed when the language was pronounced very
differently from the modern version, but because it borrows far less
than English the spelling's relatively consistent.

German spelling gets tweaked every so often, which confused some
people when one of the words was "Neandertal." English speakers
resented losing the H, which had been silent in German for a century
or more, but not in English. Spoken German, however, doesn't always
bear much resemblance to literary German -- I'd be surprised if your
average Pomeranian could always understand what a typical Bavarian is
saying without some sort of assistance, even though the written
languages are the same.

Chinese, of course, is the extreme example of that -- Chinese is a
written language representing at least a dozen separate (albeit
related) spoken languages, and even within those spoken languages,
there are lots of dialects. Your typical Mandarin-speaking peasant
from the western reaches of Hebei probably can't understand a word a
Beijing laborer says. (Beijing has two very distinct dialects, the
official one and the working-class one. The working-class one has a
strong R glide and slurred consonants that render it virtually
unintelligible to many other Mandarin speakers.)





--
My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
The fifth issue of Helix is at http://www.helixsf.com
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