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linguoboy wrote:Is there any language which uses w to represent an unrounded vowel?
I am totally for regularizing the oddities in Russian such as silent letters or cases where former /g/ is now /v/. That would be a pretty modest change, so native speakers might actually accept it.IpseDixit wrote:On UL there has been several users suggesting spelling reforms for English, but what about other languages? On here you can propose your spelling reform for any language.
mōdgethanc wrote:I am totally for regularizing the oddities in Russian such as silent letters or cases where former /g/ is now /v/. That would be a pretty modest change, so native speakers might actually accept it.IpseDixit wrote:On UL there has been several users suggesting spelling reforms for English, but what about other languages? On here you can propose your spelling reform for any language.
mōdgethanc wrote:I am totally for regularizing the oddities in Russian such as silent letters or cases where former /g/ is now /v/. That would be a pretty modest change, so native speakers might actually accept it.IpseDixit wrote:On UL there has been several users suggesting spelling reforms for English, but what about other languages? On here you can propose your spelling reform for any language.
vijayjohn wrote:I think some Slavic languages even did that already. I'd almost be surprised if Belarusian didn't.
mōdgethanc wrote:I am totally for regularizing the oddities in Russian such as silent letters or cases where former /g/ is now /v/. That would be a pretty modest change, so native speakers might actually accept it.IpseDixit wrote:On UL there has been several users suggesting spelling reforms for English, but what about other languages? On here you can propose your spelling reform for any language.
Vlürch wrote:In my opinion, Turkish orthography is about as close to perfect as it could be. Word-final c doesn't look all that good, so replacing it with j could be a thing but since it does look nice with conjugations, it would be kinda pointless especially when there aren't that many words like that to begin with.
A nice phonetic/phonemic change would be to always pronounce ğ [ɣ~ʁ~ɰ~ʁ̞], except word-finally. So,
[flag=]tr[/flag] bağlaç [bɑɣɫɑt͡ʃ] - paperclip, conjunction
[flag=]tr[/flag] mağara [mɑʁɑɾɑ] - cave
[flag=]tr[/flag] eğer [ɛɣʲɛɾ] - if
[flag=]tr[/flag] dağ [dɑː] - mountain (remains unchanged), or [dɒː] if long /ɑ/ was rounded à la Persian
Then again, that'd make Turkish lose one of the few features that separate it from Azerbaijani...
Michael wrote:Vlürch wrote:In my opinion, Turkish orthography is about as close to perfect as it could be. Word-final c doesn't look all that good, so replacing it with j could be a thing but since it does look nice with conjugations, it would be kinda pointless especially when there aren't that many words like that to begin with.
First of all, the word-final voiced consonants of Old Turkish have all become voiceless in modern Turkish, so you won't have to worry about word-final c.
Michael wrote:You do know that g was pronounced like that in old times, right? So why would you want to encourage a language community to revert back to a phenomenon that happened because of the natural evolution of the language? Turkish phonology simply became more relaxed after a certain amount of time, as happens with all languages (I think). In the case of {BACK VOWEL}+/ɣ/ (whether word-final or not) was eventually elided, while {FRONT VOWEL}+/ɣ/ weakened to /j/. Meanwhile, what used to be intervocalic /ɣ/ has now become either a faint /ɤ/, or less commonly /j/, if between two vowels of different quality, or non-existent. All these changes make perfect sense to me.
Michael wrote:Then again, that'd make Turkish lose one of the few features that separate it from Azerbaijani...
Glad you finally realized that. I too used to think that few features separated the two standard languages, but as I've been finding out the more I expose myself to Turkish, there are far from a mere few differences between them, whether with words of Arabic or Turkic stock.
Vlürch wrote:What confuses me the most about Azerbaijani is the fact that q is /g/, even though it would seem more out of place for it to be /q/ and it makes sense given the Persian q/g thing, but I just don't get why q was chosen to represent the sound instead of g or something else if the differentiation between /g/ and /ɟ/ is so important; looking at the history of the alphabet on Wikipedia, it just looks like random letters have been switched around at random times?
It's interesting that ġ has never been used to represent /ɣ/, considering the corresponding Arabic letter being غ. Has any Turkic language's alphabet ever had ġ, though? Googling "aġaç" for example has results, but it all seems to be just Turkish stuff with random weird diacritics, although I didn't really look that hard since I'm pretty tired and need to sleep...
linguoboy wrote:But radical suggestions like tunait leave me cold.
Michael wrote:You do know that g was pronounced like that in old times, right? So why would you want to encourage a language community to revert back to a phenomenon that happened because of the natural evolution of the language?
Vlürch wrote:Is hac supposed to be pronounced [hɑt͡ʃ]?
Back when I had nothing but time on my hands, I tried to come up with phonemic orthographies for English, and Irish, and found out that I was wrong and they're just not workable. Even if you can make one that's consistent between three major dialects, it ends up being so radically different that it would have to be learned from scratch, not to mention butt-ugly.linguoboy wrote:Yeah, when I think of "spelling reform", I think of very modest changes that are more likely to be accepted. One of the few changes I would like to see to Irish orthography, for instance, is replacing inniu "today" with something less misleading. This implies a Munster pronunciation of */ˈiŋʲə/ with the actual pronunciation is /əˈnʲuv/. In this case, keeping the pre-reform spelling aniugh would've been less confusing all around.
Same. William Burroughs used spellings like this, such as "thru", and I even use them sometimes.So I'm all in favour of, for instance, donut gaining ground at the expense of doughnut (even if this does obscure the etymology) or even tonite replacing tonight. But radical suggestions like tunait leave me cold.
Belarusian goes even further than phonemic and gets into phonetic territory, like writing out all of the vowel reductions, and having a letter for the /w/ allophone of /v/. This would radically change the look of Russian and make it look very similar to Belarusian, so I doubt Russians would go for it.vijayjohn wrote:I think some Slavic languages even did that already. I'd almost be surprised if Belarusian didn't.
здравствуйтеTheStrayCat wrote:Silent letters in Russian? Like what?
I know. And Russian has been reformed before. Peter the Great did it, and so did the dirty commies. That's why it's pretty consistent now, but languages never stop evolving.By the way, it's not entirely a new idea.
mōdgethanc wrote:Oh, and one thing I want to make mandatory on pain of torture: the letter <ё>.
linguoboy wrote:I'm not sure it makes sense to change Turkish spelling so it's less compatible with other Turkic languages (most of which already use x and w to represent /x/ and /w/, respectively).
md0 wrote:If the goal is to make the Turkish spelling more regular
mōdgethanc wrote:I am totally for regularizing the oddities in Russian such as silent letters or cases where former /g/ is now /v/. That would be a pretty modest change, so native speakers might actually accept it.
Michael wrote:I prefer ğ aesthetically to the equivalent with the dot over it,
Michael wrote:but if there's one feature I could change about Azeri orthography, it would be to change ə /æ/ (Open E) to e, and to change e /e/ (Closed E) to ė. My rationale for this is because the open vowel occurs much more often than the closed one.
vijayjohn wrote:Vlürch wrote:Is hac supposed to be pronounced [hɑt͡ʃ]?
I didn't think so, but apparently it is. See e.g. 6:51 of this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0fYqwJtkPw
Vlürch wrote:vijayjohn wrote:Vlürch wrote:Is hac supposed to be pronounced [hɑt͡ʃ]?
I didn't think so, but apparently it is. See e.g. 6:51 of this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0fYqwJtkPw
Is there something wrong with my ears, because I hear it as [hɑd͡ʒ] every time?
Well, first of all, Turkish doesn't have /w/ or /x/, so it doesn't need those letters for those sounds. As for the values you proposed, those are pretty odd so they probably just didn't consider them. If you assign random letters to weird sounds, you end up with unpronounceable (to outsiders) stuff like Albanian and Pinyin.IpseDixit wrote:I was more like thinking why they didn't consider those letters back in 1928 when they were romanizing the language (maybe I'm wrong but I get the impression that Turkish was the first to switch to the Latin alphabet and then other Turkic languages followed suit).
Oh shit I forgot about that. Make this enforced at gunpoint.I think it would be great if they wrote the accent of every word like they do in Greek or if they came up with a Spanish-like rule whereby if the stress is on syllable X you don't write it, otherwise you do (although the latter would probably make less sense in Russian since the stress is mobile).
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