tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post894635967729930626..comments2024-03-17T09:14:13.950+00:00Comments on John Wells’s phonetic blog: the Seoul olympicsJohn Wellshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13684304410735867148noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-77596779309626799902009-10-20T14:12:30.334+01:002009-10-20T14:12:30.334+01:00Lance: read again. The Korean speaker did OK - as ...Lance: read again. The Korean speaker did OK - as indeed he ought to have done, given that he was professor emeritus of phonetics at Seoul National University.John Wellshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13684304410735867148noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-44836258714825081322009-10-20T00:44:10.852+01:002009-10-20T00:44:10.852+01:00Too bad the Korean speaker wasn't equipped to ...Too bad the Korean speaker wasn't equipped to give a good presentation of Hangul. The system is a miracle of morphophonemic representation.<br /><br />If a prize were to be given for the least user-friendly script (apart from the ideographic scripts), it would most likely go to Tibetan, which probably reflects with some accuracy the way Tibetan was pronounced a thousand years ago. It makes English and Scots Gaelic spelling look like models of consistency.Lance Eccleshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04712002642501309020noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-65514847970529969602009-10-20T00:16:44.175+01:002009-10-20T00:16:44.175+01:00I might be mistaken, but I believe I read somewher...I might be mistaken, but I believe I read somewhere (possibly in Daniels's <i>The World's Writing Systems</i>) that Burmese is saddled with a certain number of scholarly words that are spelled as the original Pali loanwards, but are pronounced with Burmese equivalents. The result is that for these words, the pronunciation is absolutely unpredictable; it bears no relationship to the spelling at all. The situation reminds me of the entry in Kenyon and Knott for "e.g.", which it says may be pronounced "exempli gratia" or "for example".Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-18667710414419434832009-10-19T18:24:21.201+01:002009-10-19T18:24:21.201+01:00Personally I think that casing scripts are nicest....Personally I think that casing scripts are nicest. :-)Michael Eversonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16882679137179765872noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-53194227642702904022009-10-19T18:02:41.465+01:002009-10-19T18:02:41.465+01:00I think Burmese is better off than English (I can&...I think Burmese is better off than English (I can't judge Tibetan), especially for monosyllabic words. Although the letters no longer all have their historical values, they still have largely predictable values (you just have to learn that KY and KR are pronounced /tʃ/, C is pronounced /s/, S is pronounced /θ/, etc.). The problem is mostly polysyllabic words, where you can't tell from the spelling whether or not a nonfinal syllable has been reduced to /ə/.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-12433169352003037822009-10-19T17:45:39.841+01:002009-10-19T17:45:39.841+01:00I don't know Korean, but Devanagari as applied...I don't know Korean, but Devanagari as applied to Hindi is not far from a one-to-one corespondence of phonemes to graphemes. Unfortunately the huge number of "conjunct" characters, each representing a sequence of two consonants, make learning the script a far harder task than it needs to be.vphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16647609487352038948noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-80986548478374247162009-10-19T17:02:40.388+01:002009-10-19T17:02:40.388+01:00Even then you'd have to argue the case of alph...Even then you'd have to argue the case of alphabetic systems. And there are aspects such as whether it's machine-readable, or topology in general, then aesthetics, how common it is now, maybe how good it works for other languages &c.Phillip Mindenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16801818752833289089noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-72038333679660433952009-10-19T16:17:45.671+01:002009-10-19T16:17:45.671+01:00I think the gold medal should have been awarded to...I think the gold medal should have been awarded to Mkhedruli (the Georgian alphabet) as applied to Georgian. There is no distinction between upper and lower case, and there is a one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes.Thomas Widmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14481786791740154131noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-69741981350708365142009-10-19T16:01:17.159+01:002009-10-19T16:01:17.159+01:00There have been some interesting attempts to devis...There have been some interesting attempts to devise a sort of Hangul IPA. Mostly they failed as they took no account of actual calligraphy in terms of letter derivation.Michael Eversonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16882679137179765872noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-82844542495398111052009-10-19T15:59:49.468+01:002009-10-19T15:59:49.468+01:00Burmese spelling followed the values of the Brahmi...Burmese spelling followed the values of the Brahmic alphabet when it was applied to it way back in Pali times; massive sound changes of various kinds mean that whilst the old spelling reflects the historical pronunciation, it matches the modern pronunciation rather bady.<br /><br />So it's a bit like English and Tibetan.Michael Eversonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16882679137179765872noreply@blogger.com