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Consonants
There is
a great number of possible consonants in the world’s languages, but any
given language uses a much smaller set. Most basic consonants (i.e. consonantal phonemes)
in a language are pronounced differently depending on sounds that happen
to be adjacent to them. These environmentally conditioned variants of sounds
are consonantal allophones that appear on the phonetic surface, i.e. in actual pronunciation after application of relevant phonological rules. Such details ought be represented in scientific phonetic
writing, not in ordinary writing.
However,
Low Saxon has so far no standard spelling and is mostly written by people
that do not know the meaning of and difference between “phonemic” and
“phonetic”. Because of this many writers aim at representing phonetic details
of their dialects in ordinary writing. Added to this is excessive and in
many cases inappropriate
reliance on Dutch or German spelling conventions, probably mostly as
a result of generations of indoctrination that Low Saxon (“Low German”) is not an independent language but a dialect group of German and Dutch (depending
on the locations of the dialects). All this results in complex and inconsistent
spelling, a great impediment to teaching Low Saxon as a non-native language.
Nevertheless, certain principles are shared by all of the spelling methods
and we will here concentrate on those.
