Spelling System for Dialect

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5jj

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5jj

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I am sorry if you, 5jj, will say nothing more on this subject. You seem to bring to it considerable expertise.
Consistency was never my strong point. ;-)

I believe that most English speakers use about 42 phonemes.
Yes. The exact figure differs according to which variety we are talking about.
I am not sure that any system -- even the IPA -- can adequately represent them.
The International Phonetic Alphabet, with its diacritics can be used to represent any and every sound known to exist in languages all over the world - and a few that are not known to exist.
They seem to be on such a "sliding scale". E.g. "cot" and "caught" in my dialect sound identical -- \kot\.
Your dialect has only one phoneme there, and you would use one phonemic symbol. My dialect has separate phonemes, and we use different phonemic symbols for the vowel sound in the two words. I don't know if your 'cot/caught' vowel sound is exactly the same as my 'caught' vowel. If it is, then we would use the same IPA symbol when transcribing your 'cot/caught' vowel and my 'caught' vowel, and a different one for my 'cot' vowel. If, however, it is not exactly the same, then we would use three IPA symbols, one for your 'cot/caught' vowel, one for my 'cot vowel and one for my 'caught' vowel.
 

Frank Antonson

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5jj. Thanks for coming back.

I want to learn, not argue.

I did considerable research this morning, but I find that almost no one has concerned himself with writing literature in dialect.

Didn't Rudyard Kipling do some of this? -- and without being condescending?

Actually, what really set me off, back in the day when I wrote "The Folk Makes No Apology" was the apostrophe required to write "makin' hay". Here, any farmer who would say "making hay" \meykyng hey\ would sound like no farmer at all, but rather like someone from the city who was trying to understand (good for him). But there was no missing letter! And, so, why had I to write an apostrophe?

One of the things that I remembered this morning is that my subject, really, is spelling reform. And that subject has a long history. There is good essay about it, though, on wikipedia.

Frank
 

Frank Antonson

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Here is an example of how I used to use this when I was teaching school and trying to show that Black English was not merely Standard English wrongly spoken.

Standard Engilish -- "You are my friend."
\ Yw ar muy frend.\
Omit verb "to be" \Yw muy frend.\
Take the "glide" away from the end of dphthongs.
\Yw mu frend.\
Do not pronounce the second consonant in consonant blends at ends of words.
\Yw mu fren.\

The last example sounds remarkably like American Black English. But there is no denegrating of it (As might be the case with a more standard spelling system.)
 

konungursvia

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:up: I've just read that SAMPA page, and realize it's more multinational than I thought If it's based on the IPA, though, I find it an unusually regressive development.

b

Yes, I found it odd and counter-intuitive when I had a look. How could 3 represent the vowel in 'nurse'? It looks like a cursive z, which matches its IPA meaning very well.
 
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