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To: gregor_us who wrote (2003)	3/14/2004 8:40:20 PM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Respond to of 116555

OT-LP, thanks... my Thai and Korean students were particularly challenged in the pronunciation area. i don't know anything about Thai, but it is a point of pride among Koreans that their English pronunciation is MUCH better than that of the Japanese. hearing these claims, one tries to keep a straight face... the Korean writing system is very cool. handles their consonants admirably. it makes me think that in theory, a similar writing system could be employed for English to greatly increase literacy. the problem with English is that we have, depending on one's dialect, anywhere from 10 to 13 vowels, which we try to represent with the meager five vowels of the Roman alphabet. this is at least twice the number of vowels in languages like Spanish and Italian, and also more numerous than even French and German. matters are compounded by the fact that the actual pronunciation of English vowels changes according to context, as opposed to "constant value" vowels found in most languages. so even if English didn't have all the historical idiosyncracies in its spellings (things like spelling "night" but pronouncing "nite"), there's just no way to represent English phonetically with the regular alphabet. we would need a system which not only has at least ten unique vowels, but one which makes transparent the changes those vowels undergo according to environment. this is effectively what the Korean alphabet (Hangul) does, with respect to the consonant complexity of Korean. of course, odds on wide acceptance for a radically new English phonetic alphabet are not good. we would probably need an autocrat to impose such a system. the Korean system was imposed under a King (Sejong) many hundreds of years ago. quite impressive the way they analyzed the underlying structure of their sound system, and the resulting alphabet is remarkably easy to learn.