LINGUIST List 14.160

Thu Jan 16 2003

Qs: Reference Grammar, English Letter-Phoneme Rules

Editor for this issue: Renee Galvis <reneelinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Baraby Anne-Marie, Reference Grammars for speakers
2. Kurt S. Godden, English Letter-to-Phoneme Rules

Dear linguists

I am looking for theoretical references (articles or other
publications) dealing with the problem of conceiving and producing
reference grammars for speakers of non-written minority languages. I
am particularly interested in Native languages since I have been
working exclusively in Amerindian linguistics, but work on other
minority languages would be equally relevant. Numerous reference
grammars describing non-written minority languages already exist but
these linguistic descriptions are generally destined for the academic
community and are not necessarily accessible to the general
public. Conceiving a well-documented reference grammar with the
specific goal of answering the needs of speakers of a non-written
language raises a number of questions and problems which simply do not
occur in the case of well-established languages having a long written
tradition. 

The type of work which interests me specifically is relatively recent
and seems to be poorly documented, from a theoretical point of view,
while the literature dealing with the creation of reference material
for European languages, for example, is quite extensive.

My question is the following: Does anyone know of any theoretical
model or guidelines for conceiving reference grammars for non-written
minority languages destined for a wide (i.e. non-academic) readership?
If so, I would deeply appreciate receiving the relevant references.

Many thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Anne-Marie Baraby

Can someone give me a pointer to a publicly-available set of English
letter-to-phoneme rules? For example, word-initial letter sequence
'ch' followed by a consonant (as in 'chronology') maps to /k/:

# 'ch' C --> /k/

Thanks, in advance.

Kurt Godden
kgoddenatl.lmco.com