On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 4:54 AM, Rustom Mody <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> And how does this strange language called English fits into your rules
> and (no) special cases scheme?
>
> http://www.omgfacts.com/lists/3989/Did-you-know-that-ough-can-be-pronounced-TEN-DIFFERENT-WAYS
I learned six, which is no more than there are for the simple vowel
'a' (at least, in British English; American English has a few less
sounds for 'a'). Consider "cat", "bay", "car" (that's the three most
common sounds), "watch", "water", "parent" (these three are less
common, and American English often folds them into the other three).
Now have a look at Norwegian, where the fifth of those sounds
("water") is spelled with a ring above, eg "La den gå" - and the sixth
is (I think) more often spelled with a slashed O - "Den kraften jeg
skjulte før". Similarly in Swedish: "Slå dig loss, slå dig fri" is
pronounced "Slaw di loss, slaw di free". Or let's look at another of
English's oddities. Put a t and an h together, and you get a
completely different sound... two different sounds, in fact, voiced or
unvoiced. Icelandic uses thorn instead: "Þetta er nóg" is pronounced
(roughly) "Thetta air know". And the whole notion of putting a dot on
a lower-case i and not putting one on upper-case I is pretty
illogical, but Turkish, as I mentioned in the previous post, uses the
dots to distinguish between two pronunciations of the vowel, hence
"aldırma" which would sound somewhat different with a dot on the i.
(You may be able to see a theme in my example texts, but I figured
it's time to see what I can do with full Unicode support. The cold
looks of disapproval never bothered me, anyway.)
ChrisA
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