Re: The (UN)importance of pronunciation

Gary Shannon wrote:
> Out of curiosity I did a little research project this
> morning.  Here's what I discovered:
>
> In English, words of 4 letters or less are often
> distinguished by their vowel(s).
>
> ding dong
> king kong
> ping pong
> far fur fir for
>
> Words longer than 4 words (unless they are short words
> with suffixes -es, -ed, -er: baker biker, bakes bikes,
> baked, biked ) are not often distinquished by their
> vowels.  A few examples are alive-olive, broke-brake.
> Words of 6 or 7 letters or more are virtually never
> distinguished by their vowels.
>
> Thus if I take the word "elevator" and replace all the
> vowels with a single generic placeholder: -l-v-t-r,
> there is no other word in the English language with
> that pattern. There are a few close, but not very
> close, calls:
>
> elevator    -l-v-t-r
> elaborate   -l-b-r-t-
> illfavored  -lf-v-r-d  (treating the double LL as a
> single)
> ultraviolet -ltr-v--l-t
>
> So in longer words vowels don't matter at all. And in
> shorter words, where they appear to matter, they don't
> matter when you put them into a context.
That's actually an interesting argument in favor of an abjad for
English. I think you'd get the best results if you still wrote at least
the stressed vowel, however.

> If you were standing in the entry of an office
> building and someone gave you these directions
> verbally, you'd have no trouble understanding them:
>
> gay oop da stars ta zi tap flour, gay dune za hell ti
> di tard dur en za leeft, oopun za dour en gay rat own
> ensad.
This is sort of an argument against. I had a very harde time reading
that, although I sounded out the words as I went.

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