Steve Bett wrote:

>
> > Peter Daniels wrote: Who is Adam Brown, and why do you identify
> > him as "linguist"?
>
> SB: Brown has a degree in linguistis and teaches linguistics and ESL
> classes in Singapore.
>
> > PD: Is the blurb-writer acquainted with French? Korean? (Which,
> > by the measure that people criticize English for, is even more
> > disconnected from surface phonetics than English.)
>
> Brown wrote the blurb that appears on the back cover. I have no idea
> as to what his language proficiencies are.
>
> By the measures of phonemicity that I use French and Korean are much
> more phonemic than English. There are, of course, many ways to
> measure how well the writing system represents speech. I am very
> curious about the one that you use to come up with your counter-
> intuitive conclusions.
>
> One what basis do you conclude that Koren and French are less
> phonemic than English?

All languages are phonemic.

I referred to surface phonetics.

Are you talking about orthographies that record the surface phonemics of
a language?

Korean most certainly does not; look at any of the examples in Sohn's
*Korean*.

And French is as legendary as English for its difficult spelling --
which other languages have the institution of the "spelling bee"?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...