[Spellyans] fleece

[Michael Everson]

>> On 26 Du 2009, at 11:25, Michael Everson wrote:
>>
>> don't believe that your preference "lyw/livyow" is really "better"  
>> than the regular "liv/livyow".
>
> On 26 Nov 2009, at 11:30, nicholas williams wrote:
>
> No, but <lyw> is an attested form. *<liv> is not.

Nicholas, as you well know, KS isn't UCR. It is not merely an  
orthographic normalization of written forms in the texts. KS inherits  
this feature from the SWF: that in stressed monosyllables [iː] is  
written < i > and [ɪ] is written <y>.

If a word has a pronunciation [liːv] then the way to write that in KS  
is <liv> (unless it is a bÿs/bës word in which case it would be  
<lÿv>.

Since <lyf> is an attested form, we would regularly re-write this word  
as <liv> in KS. It's true that final -v is not very common in the  
texts (we might have preferred -f [v] and -ff [f]), but that was one  
of the compromises we made.

Yes, there might be liv/lyw pl livyow but it seems to me that the  
regular liv has more to recommend it.

liv, livyow 'file'
liv, livyow 'flood'
lyw, lywyow 'colour'
lyw, lywyow 'rudder'

is ambiguous enough without recommending lyw/livyow alongside.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/