EdwardÊrney94

Speech-to-text correspondences: encoding 229

The unit spellings <f>, <ff> and <ph> are all uniÄ…ue to lii in lexical morphemes. This excludes <f>s/v/ in of and <ph> at boundaries, as in hap-hazard and shepherd, where admittedly the boundaries are rather opaque.

The <gh> spelling is found in a few very common words after /a, d, a-J: enough, rough, tough\ cough, trough', draught, laugh. The earlier Germanie velar fricative which prompted the <gh> spelling seems to have become a labio-dental fricative in an acoustic reinterpretation rather than in an artic-ulatory drift from the back of the mouth to the very front. /f/s<gh> is there-fore a highly inappropriate spelling from a phonetic point of view; nor can it find much support from a wish to preserve the etymology. The spelling <gh> is not even peculiar to lii, siÅ„ce, apart from initial <gh>=/g/ (ghost), <gh> forms part of complex vowel spellings (hd in caught, /ao/ in though, laul in plough). Clearly the spellings of these words can only be acÄ…uired by rotÄ™ leaming. Needless to say they are high on the hit-list of all spelling reformers. If there were a citation rating for irregular spellings, the /£/=<gh> correspondence would outstrip all others in notoriety.

In dealing with <ph>, we need to look briefly at its origin in Roman orthography. The digraph spelling <ph>s/f/ is found in words borrowed from Greek, either directly or indirectly through Latin. The Romans them-selves used <ph> from the second century bc as a spelling of Greek /p^h/=<0> an aspirated plosive, later a fricative, that contrasted with unaspi-rated /p/=<Jt> (Allen 1978: 26). The point of this little digression is that the Romans did not merge Greek /p^h/=«J» with their own li/s<i> (facio, /lumen, etc.), so the two different spellings <ph> and <f> were institutional-ized in written Latin and preserved the etymology of the words.

If we know a word to be of Greek origin, then we can use the spelling <ph> with confidence. The most usable markers of §Greek words (see Â§2.9.2 p. 101) are a number of common elements: (anthrop), japo), jdia), (epi), (geo), {graphj, |oid), jortho), |phil), |phon), |photo|, Iphys), {sophj, (syn), (tele), etc. Given one of these elements in a word, we can use the correspondence /£fe<ph>: apoerypha, diaphragm. epitaph, etc. The only basis for literacy in technical and leamed vocabulary is to recognize a §Greek subsystem on the basis of such markers. However, there are occasional snags. Scientific terminology often blends Latin and Greek, so one may find a §Greek affix attached to a §Latinate stem to give a spelling such as fucoid, where, given (oidj, one would expect *phucoid. Such cases are obvi-ously rare and only affect a few technical users.

A reformer who wished to reduce plurality of symbolization at any price would obviously wish to respell <ph> as <f>. This would not, as we have seen, result in any loss of contrast within the §Greek word stock. It would, however, remove a common orthographic marker of Greek-based words. The advantages of having such a marker are difficult to assess, but they should not be dismissed lightly.

The spelling <pph> in sapphire is irregular; the first <p> is best regarded

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