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by em-bee
2738 days ago
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Orthography influences pronunciation. In time people will start pronouncing those words as the orthography suggests rather than deducing it from the context. is there any evidence for that? anecdotal evidence in english for example suggests just the opposite: light -> lite, etc however learning a language as a child growing up, vs as a second language later are quite different, and the dynamics that affect language change are hence very different too. http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/m.html explains how esperanto is unlikely to change, and also why that would be a good thing. back to your argument, i don't think the words with different pronunciation would be lost, but certainly the language would be harder to learn. |
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As such, people are aware that you just have to know how to pronounce every particular word, rather than relying solely on orthography.
Anyway, your example isn't very good: "light" and "lite" are homophonous anyway.
A better one would be "calm". The "l" is almost mute. Presumably, one could "simplify" the orthography to "cam". And you would pronounce "kom" or "kam" according to context.
I claim one of the pronunciations would eventually disappear, sooner or later.
If you're asking for a "scientific study", I don't have one and I don't even know where such a thing can be found.
But the country I'm from has had 3 orthographic reforms in the 20th century. The last one being all about removing supposed "mute" consonants - but which acted like accents in that they altered pronunciation of the word.