XPost: alt.usage.english, alt.english.usage   
   From: naddy@mips.inka.de   
      
   On 2024-07-30, Peter Moylan  wrote:   
      
   > Some people will claim that English has no consistent spelling rules,   
   > but it does. (With, admittedly, some exceptions.)   
      
   So the big picture is that English spelling was codified at the end   
   of the Middle English period.  It provides a reasonable phonemic   
   representation of English as spoken c. 1400 in the area of London,   
   England.   
      
   The first systematic issue is that English orthography was limited   
   by the handwriting conventions and the typography of the day.  In   
   particular, this means the inability to distinguish u from v, and   
   uu/vv from w, a reluctance to use u near some letters such as n or   
   m, and a refusal to write ii.  This led to various contortions and   
   ambiguities that are still with us, although the limitations that   
   gave rise to them no longer are.   
      
   Another systematic issue is that English has then incorporated a   
   vast amount of Latinate and Greek vocabulary, which suffers from   
   poorly predictable stress position and vowel length because the   
   word shapes are different from the inherited lexicon that informed   
   the spelling.   
      
   I imagine people have written fine books on the history of English   
   orthography and its principles, but somehow nobody ever pointed one   
   out to me, so I've had to piece together a lot of this by myself.   
   Minkova, _A Historical Phonology of English_, provides useful   
   insights.   
      
   > It was a mistake to coin a word ending in -pic. We don't have many such   
   > words, but for all the ones I can think of there is a simple   
   > pronunciation rule: the stress falls on the penultimate syllable.   
      
   But "biopic" is a transparent compound and pronounced just as its   
   constituents "bio" and "pic" are.  The second element, abbreviated   
   from "picture", isn't interesting.  The first element derives from   
   "biography" /baɪˈɑgrəfi/.  The shortening to "bio" /ˈbaɪˌoʊ/ triggers   
   a change in pronunciation--why?  There must be a phonotactic reason.   
   It's easier to see for speakers that distinguish the vowels of   
   FATHER /ˈfɑðər/ and BOTHER /ˈbɒðər/.  For them, it's /baɪˈɒgrəfi/   
   and /ɒ/ is a so-called checked vowel than cannot appear at the end   
   of a word.  But that doesn't apply directly to speakers that have   
   merged /ɒ/ into /ɑ/.  Anyway, "bio" itself is an established   
   vocabulary item.   
      
   --   
   Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)