Re:Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)
by CrystalLangUser on Sunday May 27, 2018 @06:48PM
(#17169535)
Something that HN readers often don't understand is that being an engineer or having advanced understanding of a field does not equate having an understanding of linguistics, despite being a native speaker of a language. Merely striking out letters from words doesn't make a language or its spelling any simpler...
Not sure if that is directed at me, but I did minor in linguistics.
Re:Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)
by CrystalLangUser on Sunday May 27, 2018 @07:54PM
(#17169828)
Certainly not at you, but at the comment you replied to and a lot of comments whenever linguistics-related topics come up here.
Also, I think your "simpler" transcription is actually less phonologically accurate.
For instance, I would transcribe the "er" in "wonder" as [ɝ]. In some dialects, it would actually just be [ɜ] without any pronounced trace of the "r" like sound. In actuallity, I suspect that it is actually [ɜɹ] underlying, and the two sounds just coalesce into [ɝ] when you pronounce them.
That is to say, the "er" sound is viewed a variant of the vowel moreso than it is a variant of "r". I have the same complaint about "simplr" and "evr".
For "nglsh", I just do not see any motivation to remove the vowels. It is true that English allows "n" to act as a vowel, but in "English", there is a pretty clear [I] (as in Igloo) before the [n]. Similarly, [l] could act as a vowel, but there is also a pretty clear [I] following it.
Finally for "cach", I can't really complain about this being worse, as "ch" is our way of writing tsh ( /t͡ʃ/ ), but if we are simplifying English, it would be nice to clean up this too and show the relationship between that sound and the t sound.