David Starner wrote:

>
> On 7/9/06, Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@...> wrote:
> > How out of touch are you? Have you never looked at the list of Penguin
> > Classics? at what Project Gutenberg has _already_ digitized?
>
> Actually, I have looked at what Project Gutenberg has already
> digitized, having scanned or processed about a hundred books for
> Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg has transcribed roughly 18,000
> books, dominated by works of the late 19th and early 20th century.
> Compartively, UMI has roughly 100,000 books in their Early English
> Books Online collection, which stops at 1700, very few of which are
> accessable in any form without a major library at hand, and those only
> in microfilmed forms. That count doesn't include the 18th century, an
> extremely prolific era in English publishing.

So you already know that there is a considerable library available of
Early Modern materials presumably in original orthography. But because
of the great snippage and the (still) inordinate delay in posting, I
don't remember what the point at hand was.

> Penguin Classics has 53 volume from 16th to 18th century English
> literature. I think that's cut off, and for those volumes, I'm
> possibly mistaken, but I do believe that they would be reprinted in
> any new orthography that looked to be dominant within a few years.
>
> > If the process would be automatic, then English
> > spelling-to-pronunciation is _already_ fully predictable and no reform
> > is needed.
>
> That's a non-sequitor. The issue is not that well-trained people and
> computers can't predict how to pronounce things usually; it's that
> children have a hard time learning the system and even well-trained
> people and computers sometimes make mistakes.

The vast majority of children didn't have a hard time learning the
system a century ago. What's the difference today?

> > We _have_ a system that reflects the complexities of English vowels
> --
>
> I am under the impression that English writing simplifies the English
> vowel system to fit the five vowel letters of the Latin alphabet, no

And where did you get that impression? You yourself cite the <ea>
digraph just below. For the full system of English spelling see Cummings
on American English spelling (pbk. rpt. just announced by Johns Hopkins)
and Carney on British English spelling (Routledge).

> matter what dialect or century of the English language you're looking
> at. Were, for example, bead and head, ever pronounced the same, or is
> there any systematic rule that could seperate the two?

I believe (and I'm no Anglist; see e.g. Lass in the Cambridge History of
the English Language, vols. 1-3) that those two words happened to get
fixed in the standard language after coming from two different dialects,
in either of which they would have rhymed with each other.

> > If one of those dialects -- with all its own peculiar phonemic
> > mergers -- was chosen to be the standard (Earl referred to the
> > cot/caught merger), then all the others would be short a representation,
> > and/or would have to deal with distinctions that meant nothing to
> them.
>
> Again, there's no reason to pick one dialect; in language
> standardization, a regularized form of the language corresponding to
> no one dialect is often used. And I think there would still be a great
> advantage to a more phonemic spelling, even if it meant remembering
> distinctions that others make or merging distinctions that you do
> make.

Exactly that advantage is exactly what we have now. See H. L. Smith on
the "morphophone" in the Bloch Memorial Number of *Language* in 1965.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...