Dear Erminia: the Germans too labour under the misapprehension that their
language is _totally_ phonetic. But there is no such thing as a _phonetic_
written language: the connection between spoken and written forms is purely
conventional, depends, that is, on practice. So Tarzan couldn't have learnt
to speak, however haltingly, in the way Edgar Rice Burroughs makes him do,
even if the language of the book he found in the hut had been the
admittedly consistent Italian instead of the inconsistent English, which
bears the marks of its very varied etymological history. If Italian or
German were totally phonetic, why do a Hessian and a Swiss, for example,
sound as if they were speaking only distantly related languages when reading
out loud the same text? And I'm sure there must be examples of this in
Italian.
Another point I would offer more hesitantly: it's pretty sure that Chaucer's
London dialect sounded quite a bit different from today's, so why are you so
sure that Dante's Italian sounded like the modern Florentine dialect?
I would like to go on, but time flies & we're going to the South of France
tomorrow for 10 days ~ which means I probably won't be around to admire &
reply to your stunning rebuttal! I'll catch up in June.
Best, Martin
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