You know what?

[conuly]

I'm so tired of alphabet blocks and books and whatnot that look around for a word beginning with "x" and end up resorting to xylophone or x-ray.

Xylophones and x-rays are all well and good, I suppose, but using those images does nothing to teach children the normal sound of the letter "x", does it? Of course not!

Dr. Seuss' version was much better. "X is very useful is your name is Nixie Knox. It also comes in handy spelling ax and extra fox!"

(Of course, in an ideal world we wouldn't have the letter "x" because it can be more effectively written as two letters. In an ideal world, the same fate would await "q" (kw), and we would have letters for sounds such as "sh" and "th". In an ideal world, I'd get full permission to redo our alphabet.)

*sighs*

Having decided I was going to do more with Ana this year, academically, and told her parents that, it is now actually up to me to figure out what's appropriate for her age and then find a way to do it. So far, I've found a host of articles about how preschool is unnecessary (well, I already was saying that - note that unnecessary doesn't mean "bad") but not much that's actually, y'know, useful to me. Something tells me that my google skills need work.

Comments

[eofs.livejournal.com]

Isn't it hypocritical to argue for the replacement of x and q with clusters, then say that sh and th should become letters?

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

I'm not really up on my linguistics anymore, but I think it's because 'sh' and 'th' are actually single sounds that we make in one single part of our mouths, and 'kw' and 'ks' have two different points of articulation (so they'd be more correctly represented in orthography as two letters for two sounds, and 'th' and 'sh' by one letter for one sound.)

[dandelion.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was going to say that- and "kw" is not always what "q" sounds like (examples: Qatar, qi, queue, Tariq). Q, when not followed by a u, pretty much never sounds like "kw" (apart from in qwerty, of course). The replacement of X with "ks" falls down on xylophone and xenophobia (z) and x-ray (eks) while working on exact and example. Xerox could end up being spelt Zeroks as each x has a different replacement. Phonetic replacements are ugly and tend to contain more letters than their replacements...or, should I say, fonnettik riplaysmunts r (the a and the e are superfluous!) uglee. And dialect-specific.

If the pronunciation of each letter was standardised you might have a case for replacement letters...but then we wouldn't need them because you'd know *exactly* how to say each letter and clusters would be a needless complication.

[dandelion.livejournal.com]

more letters than what they are replacing, even.

[conuly]

http://conuly.livejournal.com/1139055.html?thread=8345455#t8345455

There we go, that sums it up.

This is actually the biggest reason I got a high grade in my intro to linguistics class - a lot of people never grasped that "sh" isn't a cluster but a single phoneme. These people also had trouble grasping that "x" isn't a phoneme at all, but a cluster.

As for the "q" thing, naturally we wouldn't replace "q" with "kw" in every situation. That would be amusingly pointless. It would be a phonemic system - one letter, one phoneme.

[conuly]

Those aren't clusters, though.

[conuly]

No. Because those aren't clusters. Those are individual phonemes, as seen by the fact that they have separate IPA symbols.

Try it. Say "sue" and the "shoe", or "said" and then "shed", or "sit" and then... nevermind. Notice where your tongue is. Does it ever make an "s" or an "h"? No. It makes an "sh", a voiceless palato-alveolar fricative.

Ditto with "th". Th actually is in place of two different sounds, one voiced, one unvoiced - neither of which is a cluster. They're dental fricatives.

[joeymew.livejournal.com]

Could we do away with the letter C as well? I never liked it, due to everyone misspelling my name with one.

[kittikattie.livejournal.com]

Yes. When I was working on my language, I later dropped the C and replaced it with an S and K; it only shows up as the "Ch"

[beetlebomb.livejournal.com]

http://zipcodezoo.com/Animals/CNX.asp

http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Xenarthra.html

[conuly]

None of which would help a child learn that the most normal and common sound the letter x makes is "ks".

[peebs1701.livejournal.com]

A common solution I've seen is to allow "x" as the second letter in a word and write it like eXcalibur.

[conuly]

I haven't seen that much, though it's something I'd support.

[leora.livejournal.com]

In second grade Braille, sh and th are single characters. As is ch. But then, so is also ing, the, and, you, ed...

But it does make for shorter words, which is vital with Braille.

[tsukikage85.livejournal.com]

And c would represent "ch", and never "s" or "k". ^_^

[conuly]

Of course, "ch" is *also* a combination sound, specifically between "t" and "sh". Following the IPA, I'd write "c" as "sh", and "ch" as "tc". J would get similar treatment, but voiced.

[marveen.livejournal.com]

Well, in Icelandic and sundry other Scandihoovian languages, they do still use the thorn letter for th, although I don't know how to make my keyboard produce one.

[eofs.livejournal.com]

Isn't it hypocritical to argue for the replacement of x and q with clusters, then say that sh and th should become letters?

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

I'm not really up on my linguistics anymore, but I think it's because 'sh' and 'th' are actually single sounds that we make in one single part of our mouths, and 'kw' and 'ks' have two different points of articulation (so they'd be more correctly represented in orthography as two letters for two sounds, and 'th' and 'sh' by one letter for one sound.)

[dandelion.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was going to say that- and "kw" is not always what "q" sounds like (examples: Qatar, qi, queue, Tariq). Q, when not followed by a u, pretty much never sounds like "kw" (apart from in qwerty, of course). The replacement of X with "ks" falls down on xylophone and xenophobia (z) and x-ray (eks) while working on exact and example. Xerox could end up being spelt Zeroks as each x has a different replacement. Phonetic replacements are ugly and tend to contain more letters than their replacements...or, should I say, fonnettik riplaysmunts r (the a and the e are superfluous!) uglee. And dialect-specific.

If the pronunciation of each letter was standardised you might have a case for replacement letters...but then we wouldn't need them because you'd know *exactly* how to say each letter and clusters would be a needless complication.

[dandelion.livejournal.com]

more letters than what they are replacing, even.

[conuly]

http://conuly.livejournal.com/1139055.html?thread=8345455#t8345455

There we go, that sums it up.

This is actually the biggest reason I got a high grade in my intro to linguistics class - a lot of people never grasped that "sh" isn't a cluster but a single phoneme. These people also had trouble grasping that "x" isn't a phoneme at all, but a cluster.

As for the "q" thing, naturally we wouldn't replace "q" with "kw" in every situation. That would be amusingly pointless. It would be a phonemic system - one letter, one phoneme.

[conuly]

Those aren't clusters, though.

[conuly]

No. Because those aren't clusters. Those are individual phonemes, as seen by the fact that they have separate IPA symbols.

Try it. Say "sue" and the "shoe", or "said" and then "shed", or "sit" and then... nevermind. Notice where your tongue is. Does it ever make an "s" or an "h"? No. It makes an "sh", a voiceless palato-alveolar fricative.

Ditto with "th". Th actually is in place of two different sounds, one voiced, one unvoiced - neither of which is a cluster. They're dental fricatives.

[joeymew.livejournal.com]

Could we do away with the letter C as well? I never liked it, due to everyone misspelling my name with one.

[kittikattie.livejournal.com]

Yes. When I was working on my language, I later dropped the C and replaced it with an S and K; it only shows up as the "Ch"

[beetlebomb.livejournal.com]

http://zipcodezoo.com/Animals/CNX.asp

http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Xenarthra.html

[conuly]

None of which would help a child learn that the most normal and common sound the letter x makes is "ks".

[peebs1701.livejournal.com]

A common solution I've seen is to allow "x" as the second letter in a word and write it like eXcalibur.

[conuly]

I haven't seen that much, though it's something I'd support.

[leora.livejournal.com]

In second grade Braille, sh and th are single characters. As is ch. But then, so is also ing, the, and, you, ed...

But it does make for shorter words, which is vital with Braille.

[tsukikage85.livejournal.com]

And c would represent "ch", and never "s" or "k". ^_^

[conuly]

Of course, "ch" is *also* a combination sound, specifically between "t" and "sh". Following the IPA, I'd write "c" as "sh", and "ch" as "tc". J would get similar treatment, but voiced.

[marveen.livejournal.com]

Well, in Icelandic and sundry other Scandihoovian languages, they do still use the thorn letter for th, although I don't know how to make my keyboard produce one.