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Orthography making grammar regular

  Tags: Spelling | Grammar
 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room Post Reply
11 messages over 2 pages: 1
a3
Triglot
Senior Member
Bulgaria
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 Message 9 of 11
10 December 2011 at 3:11pm | IP Logged 
In Bulgarian orthography has caused quite a hypercorrection
Ъ and йъ/ьъ in some suffixes are written а and я respectively. For the rest of part the orthography is completely regular. Quite a lot of people don't know about that exception, although they still pronounce the letters in the correct way. However in some occasions like formal speech or songs or even sometimes in everyday language they consciously pronounce а/я instead of ъ/йъ/ъь since they think everything is written as it is spelled.
This is not making the grammar regular, but its one of the closest things you can get.

Edited by a3 on 10 December 2011 at 3:12pm

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Hampie
Diglot
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Sweden
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 Message 10 of 11
10 December 2011 at 5:39pm | IP Logged 
Orthography can make a language look regular, yet the language would not be regular. We could mark all plurals in
English with an s in writing if we wanted, though mans would still be pronounced ad men by most speakers. It
would make the language harder to learn for foreign speakers, and harder for kids to learn. We could have ‹are› as
the form of ‹to be› for all persons, but pronounce it differently. I could even begin to spell and with an x and make
that into a rule. Orthography is a convention to represent a language, but, it’s only a representation and not the
entire language. Changes in orthography tend to, in the long run, due to hypercorrection in speech change a
language — but it do not make a language more regular the minute you apply it.

If the same letter is used for several different sounds, and that unless you nḱnow the word, you don’t know how to
pronounce it, I’d say that’s a very irregular orthography.
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Serpent
Octoglot
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Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
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 Message 11 of 11
12 December 2011 at 5:09am | IP Logged 
With your Polish example, I think it's because the spelling is based on etymology/history etc? I've seen a similar example, there are two Russian sounds that correspond to a Czech one. However, it can be spelt in two ways, native speakers have to memorize this but we Russians can just look at our corresponding words most of the time (:


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