From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Sun May 29 2005 - 13:45:52 CDT
At 13:33 -0400 2005/05/29, William J Poser wrote:
>I'm not aware of any trend for people to change their
>writing system due to the greater ease of using IPA symbols
>or other "exotic" characters.
I am not sure what your scope is here. But
worldwide, and historically, there are many such
trends. For example German can be expressed both
with letters ä, ö, ü and equivalents ae oe and
ue, and I think that the latter probably are used
mainly when the former are not available. The
Swedish letter å, (a with circle above it) was
introduced by a reform long ago; slowly, it has
been adopted in Denmark, even though they perhaps
prefer an AA ligature. I was just reading some
articles in the Swedish Academy Word Book, SAOB
<http://g3.spraakdata.gu.se/saob/> and notes that
some words have funny spellings to modern users
because of past failed spelling reforms.
So I think those language reforms are taking
place. Changes can take place gradually, so that
they may not appear as visible, and they can take
place quickly, via explicit reforms, if there is
a controlling language body.
-- Hans Aberg
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