I’ve been looking through the 1916 manual, and I’m not really clear why the rules for expressing -er are the way they are, especially when it comes to word-signs.
You can either use can disjoined r. Or you can use a joined r. Or you can use the reversing principle if the brief contains the last consonant of the word.
Why not just have as a rule: Joined r unless you have removed the end of the word?
Like “former” if done the “proper” way, would be fme(reverse). Why not just fmr? It all seems awfully complicated. Or just have a blanket rule of disjoined r for all cases?
I’m also pretty confused at when you should use disjoined versus joined r. “Great” is gr, but “greater” is grr. But then “accept” is aks while “acceptor” is aks r?
The manual says the r can be joined when the “forms are distinctive.”. But there is no further detail into when circumstances these are.
The er suffix rules seem so convoluted, that it is hard to see how these could be applied at speed.
The r omission boils down to “discard the r, keeping the direction of the circle vowel the same.”. Is there any reason why the presentation in the manual is so convoluted? Later versions Gregg ditched this rule (I have the simplified manual as well), putting in ld and rd blends to compensate for this. What are the relative merits of doing this versus r omission?