The stereotypical view of English spelling as an awesome mess is no longer widely held by linguists. That view assumes that spelling should represent pronunciation directly and simply. Instead, spelling is currently understood as representing a more abstract level of language as well as reflecting etymology. Examples from a middle school spelling…

Responds to criticisms raised in John Coleman's critique of Charm Theory in "Charm Theory Defines Strange Vowel Sets." (GLR)

A continuation of the controversy concerning Charm Theory reexamines the theory through further critical analysis in the areas of right-branching expressions, elements vs. binary features, combination of charmless segments, charm and syllabic position, and unmarked vowels and vowel systems. (GLR)

Discusses the use of mechanical validation of formal, combinatorial theories in phonetics, and uses a computational tool in analyzing the implementation of the Charm and Government theory of phonology. (GLR)

It is proposed in this paper that there are two rules involved in Finnish vowel harmony--prescriptive and descriptive. The prescriptive rule requires a back vowel in the suffix whenever there is a back vowel in the root; the descriptive rule lets the value of the last non-neutral vowel spread to the suffix and additionally involves an analysis of…

Responds to counterarguments made by Haile and Mtenje (1988) concerning explicitness, arbitrariness, and complexity as it relates to earlier criticisms of an autosegmental analysis of Arabic verb morphology and the introduction of an alternative analysis presented in Hudson (1986). (eight references) (GLR)

In a brief analysis of Hopi consonant gradation, residual exceptions to Heath's generalizations about i-ablaut in Uto-Aztecan languages from Hopi are examined. In Heath's (1977, 1978) reconstruction of Proto-Uto-Aztecan verb morphophonemics, a consonant gradation is reconstructed when a final vowel of a consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (CVCV) root…

A practical orthography is presented for Kuuk Thaayorre, which is spoken by over 300 Aborigines in Australia. The phonemes in Thaayorre and the way they are symbolized in normal writing practice are presented. Frequent occurrence of six conventional digraphs for some Thaayorre consonants has given rise to complementary orthography as an initial…

Shows that the Scottish Vowel Length Rule supports Kiparsky's (1988) association of diffusing sound changes with lexical, and neogrammarian changes with postlexical rules, and to some extent, is a clearer illustration of Harris' (1989a: 55) notion of a phonological "life cycle" of changes and rules. (50 references) (GLR)

Four issues of "TESL Reporter" are presented. Contents include the following articles: "Feedback: An Anti-Madeirization Compound" by Henry M. Schaafsma; "Using the Personal Pronoun 'I' as a Compound Subject" by G. Pang and D. Chu; "The Consonant'L' in Initial and Final Positions" by Maybelle Chong; "Sentence Expansion for the Elementary Level" by…