On 05-03-01 20:16, Andrew Jarrette wrote:
> English is also unusual in other respects, as in its notorious
> spelling,
Notorious it may be, but what shall we say of Tibetan?
"... the name of Tibet's second city [is] spelled <gzhis ka rtse> in
transliteration, for which the following represent some of the phonetic
renderings in current use: Shigatse, Shikatse, Rigaze, Xigaze, Zhigatse,
and Zhikatsé. In addition, authors will often render words phonetically
according to their pronunciation in a specific Tibetan dialect, which
creates a second level of complexity and divergence. The result is that
readers cannot recognize Tibetan names and terms across different
publications due to the widely variant systems of rendering Tibetan
phonetically."
http://iris.lib.virginia.edu/tibet/xml/showEssay.php?xml=/collections/langling/THDL_phonetics.xml
In fact, any language with a long literary tradition and a conservative
spelling system may become like that. The good thing is that this kind
of traditional, non-phonetic spelling becomes independent of regional
accents and can be used for all the dialects and varieties of the
language in question.
> Curious that such an unusual language
> would become the current most widely spoken language in the world, in
> terms of geographical extent and numbers of speakers as a second
> language.
Not really so curious. It only shows that a neat spelling system is not
as important as whatever gives a language its political and cultural
prestige. The army and the navy behind it, for example ;)
PIotr