Came into part of an airing of "The Jerk" on the comedy channel
earlier this month and caught one of my favorite scenes since I first
saw the film sometime in the earlier 80s.
Its the scene where Steven Martin's character picks up a note on the
bathroom floor left by his girlfriend who has just left him. It has
become wet, the ink has run, but he reads it anyway. He starts off
reading it intelligibly but then as he encounters smeared letters he
changes his intonations to stretch out the sounds of individual
letters to match the smeared shapes. Its comedic because he still
tries to read the letters and does so as if there were a logical
system for reading water smeared text. The way he does so seems fully
natural as well, but I think I was already familiar with the comedic
device.
While I enjoyed it, again, it also got me wondering this time if there
are writing systems where legitimately the shapes of characters can
change (while remaining the same character) with some corresponding
change in enunciation? Lets not include the addition of diacritic
symbols as qualified shape changes.