Re: Western scripts

From: Chris Lemens <chrislemens_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2003 07:15:45 -0700 (PDT)


Peter Metcalfe replying to Peter Larsen:
>
> There's actually two examples, both which
> have been mooted in the past. The first is
> Latin, which everybody read in medieval
> times although they spoke their own vulgate.
> The second is Arabic, which is difficult to
> represent dialects without making it unreadable
> - hence the practice is to write down a dialect
> speaker's words in flawless arabic. The reader,
> supplied with the information of the speaker's
> origin, is then able to figure out what the
> speaker actually said based on his own knowledge.
> If he doesn't know what the speaker sounds like,
> he still can understand what the words say.

True (mostly) also of English today. It took me weeks to understand more than three fourths of what my Irish in-laws were saying. My limited exposure to English cockney indicates it was incomprehensible to me. African-American dialects in America are often intentionally obscure. And if you want me whip out my east Texas dialect, the non-Americans on the list will probably understand little.

Nonetheless, you still understood what I just wrote. The only big difference I see with Peter's statement about Arabic is that English is decent at symbolizing dialects. Not great, because of its limited notations for vowel sounds (Boston a vs. Texas a, for example), but decent.



Chris Lemens

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