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there is a law inside the alphabet

There is nothing "natural" or "real" about an alphabet; they are all just human inventions that are meant to codify spoken languages. Once people start to construct an alphabet to represent speech, the alphabet will grow and change *cf runes, and many others), but it is still a representation of speech. There is a certain two-way communication between the two, since people sometimes start pronuncing words based on how they are written (in the mistaken belief that the written language is somehow more correct), but that is fairly rare.
 
It's not that rare with names around here. When type was introduced it didn't have a letter for the Scots "yoch", denoting a sort of "yuh" sound, so the printsetters used a lower-case z which (as it was at the time) was the closest "looks-like" they had for the yoch - assuming people would read what they saw and understand what was meant. Now we have all these names with a z in the spelling that isn't pronounced. Then people start pronouncing it...
 
Exactly! Many of our names have slowly lost their original pronunciations, and taken on new ones, that correspond more closely with the written versions. But even so, it's a rare phenomenon (and its nearly always proper nouns), when you look at language as a whole - changing the spelling, to try to make it tag along with speech, is far more common. And spellng used to be far less rigid; if you look at its history, spelling has not adhered to very many rules for very long in Europe - a handful of centuries, give or take a few. Rules are of course good, it certainly makes communication easier, but more fluid spelling rules meant that the spelling followed pronunciation more closely. So for those of us who are interested in the history of speech (we all have our kinks, so no need to shame me), written sources from, say, the 15th century and earlier, are a treasure trove!
 
theprestige said:
Here's a much better map of phonemes:

View attachment 66865
This is one that only covers the English vowels, but there are similar that include all the phonemes. If there's a law to be found in the kinds of noises people make with their mouths, it will probably be found by taking into account the geography of the noisemaker.
Click to expand...

Linguistics of today has no unified law for vowels and consonants, so linguists invented the term phonemes. What it has are things like phonemes, IPA alphabet, and family trees. Each language has a set of some said phonemes of it's own . The IPA association invented the IPA alphabet to leads the way for the everyone in a world. In recent years, I have seen a majority of people clinging to it like it is the holy grail for learning English. But there are resistance and rejection,
 
Dabop said:
Its the same shtick he has been doing for the last 5 plus years- dont expect any meaningful replies...
Just another forum to come and try and gain some attention at....
Click to expand...

Hey now...

It looks scholarly and deep. It could have some significance or possible great observations in something that could be useful somehow. Maybe to somebody, but definitely not to an unscholarly working class oaf as myself.

Even I can see that local dialect within a nation varies wildly in pronounced sounds and internationally muddled beyond repair.

But then navel gazing is a fun hobby too.
 
malbui said:
* smiles at the thought of English speakers trying to reproduce the sound represented by ‘-ouille’ *
Click to expand...
And if they’ve done that.
The Dutch sounds for ‘ei’, ‘ij’, ‘ou’, ‘au’.
And to finish. Let them correctly pronounce the words ‘gauw’, or ‘Scheveningen’. :cool:
 
alphabetlaw2018 said:
Linguistics of today has no unified law for vowels and consonants, so linguists invented the term phonemes. What it has are things like phonemes, IPA alphabet, and family trees. Each language has a set of some said phonemes of it's own . The IPA association invented the IPA alphabet to leads the way for the everyone in a world. In recent years, I have seen a majority of people clinging to it like it is the holy grail for learning English. But there are resistance and rejection,
Click to expand...
IPAs can be some damn fine beers, provided they use the right hops at the right balance.
 
alphabetlaw2018 said:
Linguistics of today has no unified law for vowels and consonants, so linguists invented the term phonemes. What it has are things like phonemes, IPA alphabet, and family trees. Each language has a set of some said phonemes of its own . The IPA association invented the IPA alphabet to leads the way for the everyone in a world. In recent years, I have seen a majority of people clinging to it like it is the holy grail for learning English. But there are resistance and rejection.
Click to expand...
So what's your point?
 
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