The Great Turmerc Debate 623

On Thu, 20 Apr 2006 08:49:36 +0100, The Reid

Spelling was generally fairly phonetic when first established - it's the pronunciations that have since wandered all over the place. Yacht was from Dutch "jaghte" and would initially have been pronounced close to how it's spelled in English. Part of our problem is that sounds have changed. The guttural "gh-ch" sound doesn't exist in most dialects any more so pronunciation of words that were once guttural has moved in various directions.

I'm not sure that either spelling is close to what we actually say. Another problem we have is that our most common vowel sound is the schwa or murmur vowel but we have no way to represent it properly in our standard alphabet. I can't get the phonetic sign for it to print here but if I use ' instead then my dialect would pronounce the word as cull'. Rhotic dialects would have cull'r - still not very close to either colour or color.

It would be difficult to rationalise spelling (if we wanted to) because no one controls English and pronunciations vary. Unlike languages which were arbitrarily controlled by some authority - the Spanish of Valladolid the Italian of Florence - it just growed and growed. -- Phil C.