suzmccarth wrote:

> > > > >> - there are only phonological and morphological
> > > > >> elements and a syllabic/phonemic continuum.
> > > > >
> > > > > I cannot see any "morphological elements" in English
> spelling (apart
> > > > > perhaps
> > > > > word spacing and capital letters -- but these elements are
> certainly
> > > > > not
> > > > > unique to English).
>
> What is meant by the term morphophonemic?

You ask me? I think this is the first time ever I see this term!

(I didn't even imagine that an English word containing the sequence "phopho"
could exist... :-)

> Does it not refer to English? - site/sight to distinguish
> homophones or no/know.

OK, but the expression you used was "morphological *elements*", which made
me think to elements of writing (i.e. signs) whose precise function is
making morphological distinctions, as could be

I wouldn't say that the *main* function of English letters "K" and "W" is
making morphological distinctions, although that is casually what they do in
the "no" vs. "know" pair.

> I cannot agree that this is only historic because teens instant
> messaging now use no/noe to disambiguate, a new non-historic
> morphemic differentiation.

OK, but I still don't see how distinguishing homophones would be unique to
English spelling, or how this would qualify English spelling as
typologically different from the spelling of any other western European
language.

My own language, Italian, uses the same two devices (etymologic spellings
and deliberate exception from the orthographic rules) to exactly the same
purpose (distinguishing homophones). E.g., "hanno" = '(they) have' is
spelled with an unpronounced etymologic "h" just to distinguish it from the
homophone "anno" = 'year'; "dà" = '(he) gives' is spelled with an accent
mark (which is of course useless on a monosyllabic word) just to distinguish
it from "da" = 'from'. And you would find similar thing in the spelling of
Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch and, of course, French.

What makes English spelling a little bit more intricate that those of
continental western Europe is that the English lexicon has an amount of
graphically unadapted loanwords from another language (French) which is
unparalleled in other European languages and, what is more important, the
English language underwent, in relatively recent times, a phonetic
earthquake (the so-called Great Vowel Shift) which is probably unparallel in
the recent linguistic history of the whole word.

> What about the bound morpheme -ed used
> for /t/ or /@d/ or /d/. Isn't that a set spelling to represent past
> tense. How was the term quasi-logographic intended earlier?

Again, I don't see anything so unique to English...

E.g., the Italian ending for the 1st person plural present indicative is
always spelled "-iamo" regardless that, after certain final consonants in
the verb stem, the "i" is unpronounced (e.g., "sogniamo" = 'we dream' is
pronounced /so'Namo/, not */so'Njamo/ and, consequently, it is often
misspelled as "sognamo").

> (Of course, I could not observe those who have Cherokee as their
> first language of literacy. However, Tamil and Cree are called neo-
> syllabaries by the French. Maybe that term is descriptive.)

Sorry, I can't see the link between what Tamil and Cree are called by the
French and what you or anybody else wrote about English spelling.

_ Marco