Quote:
Originally Posted by Kingswood
Spoken language does evolve. However, in English the spellings are not allowed to evolve to keep pace with changes to the spoken word. The result is a gradual divergence of spelling from pronunciation which in the case of the English language has diverged to the point where it is considered perfectly normal to consult a dictionary to find out how some words are pronounced.
|
This is actually true of any language that accepts its dictionaries as authoritative -- which I think is all of them that actually have them. Writing preserves the transcription of older pronunciations.
Should we call for a new character for, say, the southern English exhalatory pronunciation of the letter
R? This seems to have developed since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while the American dialect retains the harder R of earlier times.
Shall we call for a set of vowels to represent A E I O U as spoken by Australians in full yowly-vowel Strine?
A phonetic forty-character system systematically representing today's English really only delays the pronunciation problem for a few centuries, which rather seems to make the exercise bootless.