Of course the trouble with strict phonetic spelling is that different dialects pronounce the same word differently. Ask a guy in London or Texas or New York or Seattle to pronounce word “water”, and transcribe the result using your phonetic system.
Now you’re screwed. The reason there are languages that seem to have a pretty strict phonetic spelling for words is because that phonetic spelling only applies for the prestige dialect of the language. So you can make your spelling phonetic for Received Pronunciation or for Midwest Newscaster or Parisian French, but then you have to accept that “wota” “wo’a” “wada” “woda” “wader” “water” and “woter” would all be valid phonetic spellings for the word water. Or, declare that anyone speaking the non-prestige dialect is just going to have to get used to the fact that, no, spelling is not in fact phonetic but rather is arbitrary.
I agree wholeheartedly – and I’m the guy that posted the disgustingly long #19 above.
But the OP did ask for our ideas for an ideal language and what I posted was my thoughts.
Actually, I’ve figured the IPA or similar symbology would be ideal for applying to all languages, just that no languages would use all of the symbols because there are no languages that utilize all of the phonemes. So it would be more useful if I was a guy visiting all sorts of cultures on Tralfamador V and learning their different languages and giving them a writing system because they don’t already have one.
This, I think, would be better than the historical Catholics’ practice of going out and colonizing places and forcing natives to use their language and their alphabet, and just approximating or guess-timating spellings for local concepts and artifacts that don’t exist in the colonists language. We are not (any longer?) so ethnocentric as to try and shoehorn everyone else into our own way of writing/speaking/seeing the world.
I’ve been thinking about this “mandatory evidential” marker, and wondering how it would be helpful. Consider two things that come to mind that I have been told:
Walmart controls the thermostats in all stores, from a computer in Bentonville. I was told this by my bus driver, who attributes it to his sister who worked at Walmart.
Women who take birth control pills every day must be having so much sex, that their moral character and veracity is in doubt . I was told that by Rush Limbaugh on a nationally syndicated radio program.
What kind of an evidential marker would those two statements require? Which was from a reliable source? Which statement would appear to be likely true by a reasonably well-informed listener? Would the speaker have any motive for duplicity? Even if there existed an intricate grammar of ten different evidentials, an incredulous listener would still say “Where did you hear that?”, and then make his own source evaluation, regardless of which level or evidential marker was used by the speaker. So evidentials would really have no utility at all, especially in a society in which universal and systematic deception is inherent and disinformation is a whole industrial sector.
There would just be evidential creep, with every assertion enjoying the highest level of empirical confidence.
But there are languages where it’s less arbitrary than others.
In Spanish, most of the phonetic variation refers to a handful of consonants; variations in vowel sounds can generally be attributed to influence from another language. Most dialectal variation is in vocabulary and grammar.
In Catalan, it’s mostly a few vowels that change. Again, most dialectal variation is in vocabulary and grammar.
In Basque, the argument is mostly about how to spell things which people agree on how to pronounce (do we represent /ɲ/ as ñ like in Spanish, gn like in French, or ne to be different from both of the above?). Variation (are you ready for it?) is mostly in vocabulary and grammar, according to every Basque speaker I know.
In English, vowels, consonants and transcription all differ from location to location.
I think that what he means by “impressive” means the opposite of what I would mean, based on those same numbers. Based on his results, the best rules for English in the land still only net you perfect pronunciation in slightly better than half of all cases.
If you mispronounce 40% of the words you say to me, I’m not going to congratulate you on your skilled knowledge of the English language. I’ll be impressed that you memorized and could go through 56 discrete rules in your head, but I’d still tell you to go back to the drawing board.
This is where I’m coming from: my native language is Dutch and I can read/understand a fair amount of German but I find it hard to speak it. I’ve also been exposed to different degrees to French, Spanish, Ancient Greek, Latin and Afrikaans and I tried to learn Esperanto for a while.
I think Esperanto gets most things right: spelling === pronunciation and there are few enough sounds that even with a strong accent you can make out the differences. The extensive use of prefixing and suffixing makes learning words and creating new ones relatively easy. Free word order is a good idea, IMO.
The two main issues I have with Esperanto are:
First, the use of weird accents on letters. Back in the day typing accents on a computer was next to impossible. That got better, but it’s still annoying and many people don’t know how to do it. But now that we want/need to type on smartphones and tablets, being able to type a language with just the 26 letters of the latin alphabet is a huge advantage.
Second, it doesn’t seem like you can leave certain suffixes out to leave an aspect unspecified. For instance, the -in suffix makes something female. But there’s not suffix to make something male. So “patro” is father" and “patrino” is mother while “gepatroj” is parents. (“Ge” prefix indicates a group with members of both sexes.) There is no “parent”. It would be much nicer if there was a suffix for male, too, and without either of these suffixes the gender would be left unspecified. (Turns out there’s a wikipedia page about this.) I never learned enough Esperanto to know if this problem also exists in other areas, but I suspect it does.
I’ve known a few Esperantists who us “gepatro” for “non-gender specified parent”, which construction probably horrifies some other Esperantists but that’s just an example of how a language used by human being mutates over time.
It does show how Esperanto assumes male as the default, though - really, there should be a masculinizing suffix just as there is a feminizing one.
Isn’t Esperanto a bit older than computers? My great-grandfather was an Esperantist, and that was a while back. I expect that someone who’d grown up with knowledge of multiple keyboards would try to come up with other markers, but I’m hypotesizing and too lazy to check that those “weird accents” were a normal part of the first Esperantists original language(s): they didn’t find them any weirder than we find the dots on i and j.
And the Latin alphabet doesn’t have 26 letters Some of those letters you’re counting don’t exist in Latin.
I was in Romania this week and they sure like their accents there… But how many of us know how to type a Ț, or the ŭ used in Esperanto? I sure didn’t, even though I have no trouble with the mòrë çómmøñ åccênts.
Obviously, before the advent of typewriters and especially computers this wasn’t an issue, but today it is. And it’s not just a question of learning how to do it, the extra accented letters take up extra keyboard space and/or require extra presses/taps to type, so they always get in the way even for experienced users.
I believe “latin alphabet” is the correct term for the alphabet I’m currently using, even though it includes letters like V and W that Latin doesn’t know and lower case which didn’t exist when Latin was a living language. (Some people count accented letters as separate letters but I don’t.)
Some of those letters you’re counting don’t exist in Latin.