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Is Simplified Spelling Worth Reform?
digitalhermit writes "I guess many folks are of very little brain, and big words bother them... There's a push for simpler spelling. Instead of 'weigh' it would be 'way.' 'Dictionary' would be 'dikshunery' and so forth. Dunno if it's a joke, but it seems in earnest. Mark Twain must be spinning around somewhere." Twain is often credited with the satirical call for spelling reform called "A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling," though according to Wikipedia, Twain was "actually a supporter of reform," and the piece may have been written by M.J. Shields. Benjamin Franklin was another champion of spelling reform, and even came up with a phonetic alphabet to implement such reform.
You no what? It aint never gonna happen. People hate change, and unless you force them to (Like the communist Chinese switch to simplified) people will spell the way they want. (Kind of like trying to get Americans to switch to metric)
Windows Admin Tools
Nuthing fore u tu see here. Pleez mov alon.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
A chance to use the metric alphabet!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
We are great at spelin and stuf.
liqbase
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."
I've never had any problems with spelling, myself, but I have to agree with Mr. Jefferson here.
Bonsai Kitten: TNG
We should standardise on spelling so that we only need to use one tag: 'vapourware'.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
lol, teh dum
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
This is exactly what America needs: something that allows the populace to think even less in their everyday lives. The aversion to expending a little extra effort seems to be a uniquely American thing. We invent all of these machines to save us from having to perform manual labor. Then we all get fat and develop health problems from lack of physical activity. So now we pack it into gyms where we run in place, climb fake staircases, and lift heavy pieces of iron up and down for no useful purpose. Mindboggling. Taking mental shortcuts will be just as beneficial.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
(sigh) Don't they ever learn? From this page:
hookt ahn fonix reely werkd fer me
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
Hasn't American been trying this for a while? Night -> nite. Colour -> color. Laser -> Lazer. Licence, terrorize, etc. I don't even know how to spell licence the correct English way now. Damn you!
Get your own free personal location tracker
Let's just go ahead and dumb-down the whole friggin world to the obvious level of illiteracy that it really is... and advertise that fact profusely in all our writings.
Blechhh!
Dik-shoon-err-ee?
That's lewd-ick-rus.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Yu shud bi shur tu rid this artikel on speling riform. It wil mayk yu laf, i hop.
A simple solution involves solving these spelling problems around the world. It's a simple, six letter word.
It's called SCHOOL.
If we want to do major reform of the english language to simplify it's spelling we should perhaps restrengthen the germanic identity of the langage - reform pronounciation and spelling, bring bad solid language rules with almost no exceptions - use consistent pluralization rules
-a goes to -ae: ie supernovae, larvae
-is goes to -ii: virii, penii
some other things that I cannot think of at this moment
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the prefix + stem + suffix model is far better than this phonetic bullshit.
e.g. centre, centripetal, centrifuge are all connected concepts and share the stem "centr".
the American spelling "center" has the stem "cent" which suggests center is something to do with 100; a center is a machine/person that makes cents?
you only make things more difficult for yourself in the long run if you wimp out of learning things properly in the beginning.
I for one welcome our NuSpeak overlords. They're double-plus good!
Aggressive refactoring of the language would be nice. But IMHO you also ought to ensure words are unique i.e. the example given in the summary, changing "weigh" to "way", wouldn't work because then you've just introduced another meaning for "way" - you've just swapped one confusion for another. So we should eliminate words that are phonetic dupes, rather than rationalising their spelling.
Of course this'll never wash anyway, simply because people are used to the language as it is, and there's so much stuff already written that people would have to learn two sets of spellings for decades.
Oh no... it's the future.
its not about spelling .. its about simplification.
.. honestly, why not not just spell it 'wood' ? many languages have the same words for different concepts, and ou need to use the context of the conversation to determine which you should (shood?) use..
I for one would like to dump the 'i before e' crap, and all those damn silent letters..
Like 'would'
Man evry [sic] sentance [sic] wood [sic] look stoopid [sic] with awl [sic] thows [sic] sic [sic] notes.
Anybody want a peanut?
My memories vague, but I think the first pushes for general literacy in the American colonies, with McGuffies (?) readers, etc. tried to "improve" British spelling. This was described in a cable tv show I once saw on the history and evolution of the English language.
Due to the way that written was English developed, it is one of the few Indo-European languages to not be written in a phonetic manner (if you only know English, you may not completely comprehend what this means). That being said, now that English is an international language, and a huge portion of the world's population is already familiar with the way it is written, fragmenting and reforming it at this point is an asinine idea. Furthermore, there exist languages which are even less phonetic than English (e.g. Mandarin ("Chinese"), the Kanji portion of Japanese) and those people manage to do fine.
P.S. Implementing this idea would also mean that people would soon lose the ability to read the vast body of works already written in English; a huge translation effort would have to be undertaken, and a lot of works would still remain untranslated. Such a loss is not acceptable (unless you have Orwellian intentions in mind).
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
http:\\www.twainquotes.com\19071210.html
It's a NYTimes article from 1907, with Twain commenting on Andrew Carnegie, who was for spelling reform. A snippet:
... skewl
Sig: I stole this sig.
Get it right....
And in the future for Valentine's day we will be handing out hot dogs and weiners instead of candy....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
We are already living with the effects of this from the first time they tried it. The Red Sox and White Sox get there odd-ball spelling from the simplified spelling of "socks", i.e., "sox".
One of the problems I see with Franklin's alphabet is that there are a number of letters that, to me, look way too similar. Take a look at 'h' (as in "Hi") vs. 'longer serif h' (as in "THin") vs. 'longer serif but straighter h' (as in THey) vs. 'curly h' (as in "SHare"). I understand that all of these combinations involve the letter 'h', but they'd be awfully hard to discern, especially in my sloppy handwriting. Couldn't he have made a few other shapes instead, or at least made them somewhat relate to the other letters they are joined with -- e.g. for "THey" maybe make an 'h'-type shape with a cross through it, as you would a 't'?
This may push down on my skrable skores..
Our spelling of words inherits from their roots. English is the kind of language the hunts down other languages and corners them dark alleys to nick their vocabularies, and that history is in the spelling. If a words is unfamilliar, its spelling is a clue to its meaning. "Simplified Spelling" robs us of an ability to learn new words easily.
TFA says that these weirdos claim that illiteracy rates would drop if spelling were simplified. Not likely. The reson folks are illiterate is that we refuse to fund our schools sufficiently, or pay teachers enough to hire qualified ones. Not to mention that (and I wish I had a cite for this handy) the fact that junk food is cheaper than fresh food with plenty of veg means that kids in the poorer parts of America tend to have diets that reduce their ability to concentrate and learn. The problem isn't the language, it's social.
Metric on the other hand was regected out of misguided nationalism, and because people tend to refuse to acknowledge a good thing when they see it.
People who have a problem with English spelling should be thankful that the Welsh didn't take over the world.
xe intirnet alredy did xis! Soon we wil al use simbols insted of leters. 1!|3 7h!5
... That the written language "should" reflect the spoken language. We make the unconscious (but unsupportable) connection that "written English" and "spoken English" are the same language, but they're not. They just happen to have easy mappings -- not as easy as these folks want, apparently, but nonetheless, not too difficult.
For example, when you speak, what do you do to separate words form one another? The surprising answer is, nothing. Take a tape of ordinary conversation. Run it through an oscilloscope. Look for the breaks. You won't find them. We "blur" words together in sentences. (I suspect this is why anyone speaking a different tongue always sounds like he/she is speaking very quickly... your brain hasn't learned to put the "spaces" back in by context.)
And that's for words. It's worse for letters. In an oscillograph of the word "bat", you won't see discrete units for "b", "a", and "t". It's just one sound. Heck, the "letters" we pronounce depend on what comes before or after.
The people behind this movement also act as if pronunciation is fixed, while of course, it is not. Some of the "nonsense" words they offer up as looking the same but not rhyming did rhyme, once. Then the spoken language evolved and, since the written language is considerably less plastic (an advantage, I would maintain), the oddness is frozen in.
Finally, when we adopt spelling that "looks like" the pronunciation... whose pronunciation will it look like? Bostoners and New Yorkers and Atlanteans pronounce many words in different ways. Who gets to be the official "correct" one?
Moving in favor of spoken English won't help literacy. I suspect, albeit without proof, that such a move would hurt it.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Hah, does anyone see the irony in the submitter complaining about shorter spellings... and then he goes on to use "dunno"? :-P
"I guess many folks are of very little brain, and big words bother them... There's a push for simpler spelling. Instead of 'weigh' it would be 'way.' 'Dictionary' would be 'dikshunery' and so forth. Dunno if it's a joke, but it seems in earnest. Mark Twain must be spinning around somewhere."
Awltho English iz awlredy prity standord, artikl iz ryt, it cood b improovd.
Yay for Nuspeek!
Well, I don't know if you noticed but the word "dunno" was used in the posting instead of the phrase "I do not know." Apparently, short hand language is more commonplace than the author of the post realized.
Those in favor of simplified spelling say children would learn faster and illiteracy rates would drop. Opponents say a new system would make spelling even more confusing.
This is clearly not a serious attempt at arguing for "simplified spelling": this one line alone is a paradoy of the "won't someone think of the children!!!" argument (argumentum ad libererum? Seriously, there's got to be a recognised logical fallacy here with a latin name. If not, there should be. Dagnamit.)
The ways of gods are mysteriously indistinguishable from chance.
Last I checked, reading and writing (including spelling) is taught in the US at around 6-8 years old. There's no education excuse in the US for ANYBODY not being able to spell. Proper spelling is not a college course.
I gave this a lot of thought one time. Everybody wants this and thinks it's a good idea, but there's a fundamental reason that it's simply impossible to reform spelling into a logical phonetic system:
People pronounce words differently.
Think about it... would it be to-may-to or to-mah-to? And that's just for starters. Factor in regional dialects and different vowal pronounciations. It simply can't happen.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
And, while we're at it; lets redo the entire alphabet, but instead use symbols now. ... ... is the letter formerly known as A " (I'll bet Prince is big on this!) *LOL*
So now when I say the alphabet, I can say
" and
... as long as you realize that words are spelled the way they were pronouced back in the 15th century, before the great vowel shift
I mean reely. Its rich white conservatives with there natsi spelling - their to worried about preserving power for they're corporations.
But seriously folks: this smacks of the silly ebonics episode. If someone were to really have a go at removing the leftover Germanic, Scandinavian, Gaelic, Italian, Olde English and other bits of slightly complex spelling from the language, that would just be the opportunity for everyone with a political axe to grind to... well, grind.
Spelling variations in phonetically similar words provde instant visual context. Consolidating things like "weigh" and "way" is nothing more than lowering the intellectual bar and our collective expectations for what a young mind can (and should) do.
If they think it's unfair to expect people to understand that "cough" sounds like "koff" instead of "koo," then imagine how unfair it is that millions of people in the country that only speak Spanish are having to learn to conjugate verbs in English. Or, not, actually, in my neighborhood. I'm starting to feel more like a conjugal visitor every day.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Because it wouldn't work anyway. Spelling requires a knowledge of the roman character set - which is where like 99% of illiteracy begins.
Now, my spelling stinks. Partially, because I type at an incredible rate of speed, partially because I don't care to check over my Slashdot posts. But my ability to spell "word" and "wurd" still require an introduction to the language, understanding the phoenetics of the language, the letters, basic sentence structure, etc.
Changing the spelling of wurds isn't going to suddenly eliminate illiteracy.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
I know this is off-topic, but can we STOP CITING Wikipedia as a reliable authority? Wikipedia has been proven to be riddled with inaccuracies, which is only natural since half of the editors are in middle school.
s/bad solid/back solid
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It's way cool!
I have freaks! I did something right...
Because it's better to educate people than leave them in ignorance. That's why we have public education.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
"Why should we have one more barrier..."
Because the barrier often manifests itself between those people who give a damn, and those who don't.
As for the rich/poor thing, shouldn't we be looking at bringing them up, rather than dumbing the rest down?
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Sometimes I think the various languages came about, not by trying to simplify communication, but by trying to obfuscate and hide meaning from outsiders, like a code, like children or gangsters creating a code language to talk about things without parents or authorities understanding it.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
By DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press Writer Wed Jul 5, 3:11 AM ET
WASHINGTON - When "say," "they" and "weigh" rhyme, but "bomb," "comb" and "tomb" don't, wuudn't it maek mor sens to spel wurdz the wae thae sound?
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This is the country that refuses to adopt the metric system out of nothing but stubbornness, and you expect them to actually reform the english language into something more sensical? PLEASE! at least the article is honest and all the "reform" example paragraphs are actually quite hilarious.
This is totally absurd. Simplifying English spelling would eradicate the link between words and etymologies, causing words to become mere signifiers of sounds. Words possess heaps of cultural significance that implicate literature, poetry, performing arts, and even visual arts. And practically speaking, what are we to do w/homonyms?
The simplification of Chinese characters represents a similar reformation, but at least traces of etymology remain in tact. A more accurate analogy to this proposal would be if the Chinese were to exclusively use Pinyin instead of Chinese characters -- simplified or traditional. Ask any Chinese-speaking individual what she'd think of the idea, and she'd say it's malarky.
If Americans really wanted to do this -- simplify spelling to eliminate inconsistencies between words and sound -- it would be a slightly better idea to make everyone use the IPA at least.
The core problem of spelling reform is that English spelling is not random. It's a code that has a dual purpose - as a phonetic reminder (not a purely phonetic encoding) and as an etymological hint. English words carry data on their origins and hints as to their meaning, very much like the Chinese system of Hanzi, such that a word can be at least partially guessed. A lot of that is in the spelling, rather than the sound. (Also, again like Chinese, regional pronunciation can vary, while the spelling stays constant.)
In believe that the richness of multi-contextual information in English spelling brings it closer to the way the words are conceived and stored mentally than any pure phonetic rendering. Have you ever read prose presented in a dense, spelled out accent? You have to "sound it out" to understand it, and some words may evade parsing until you finally guess them some minutes later. You can't anymore just scan with the eye, and read as fast as you can see.
Problem is that people say English words in different accents, and these accents change over time. So if you have phonetic spelling it will make less sense to someone with a different accents. Also, the standard spellings of a word tells you a lot about its history and therefore its meaning.
There's absolutely no sense in doing this. The proponents of such reform are ignorant of the fact that a "phonetic spelling" would depend largely on the particular speech dialect used. English is vastly used and varies widely. There's rhotic and non-rhotic accents of varying kinds in the United States, Canada, England, Wales, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland... not to mention all the places English is spoken regularly as a second language. It's both ignorant and arrogant to assume that one can "correct" the English language oneself after hundreds of years of natural evolution.
There have been attempts to reform German spelling, and they have not entirely caught on. This is despite a few advantages that attempt has over any potential English spelling reform: 1) There are recognized organizations responsible for the language, at least officially, and they got together in a big conference, agreed upon it, and got all the relevant governments to agree; and 2) the reform was relatively minor, not nearly as enormous a deviation from established spelling norms as these proposed English reforms.
If many German newspapers and normal people simply ignore the reforms under those circumstances, what do you think the chances of English spelling reform ever catching on are?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Try starting with the metric system first. There's much more to be gained by switching to the metric system than by the further dumbing down of the English language to accommodate a bunch of dolts.
I say itsha about tyme people started learning to spell the simple waysh!
Yeah, there's no need for people with 8-hour desk jobs to go to the gym. You get much better cardio and weight-training holding your computer and running while you type, fat American desk-jockeys!
Insightful? Really?
Spelling often clarifies context/meaning. Phonetic spelling is awful vague in many cases.
I have to to many to choose from.
I have two too many to choose from.
Or how about this?
I killed the bor.
Do I mean I killed the Boar (wild pig), or Bore (someone who is boring?).
The problem is phonetics don't keep the word origins in mind. English is a conglomeration of Germanic, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Celtic, Gaelic and many other language families. It is both, its strength and its weakness.
I know right by looking that "Plumb" comes from the Greek word for lead (the element Pb) used in pipes. Whereas I know that plum (the fruit) comes from some other language. It also helps us track the changes to the cultural meanings of words through the years. If we go with phonetic spelling for everything, much of that might and probably will be lost.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Who was it that said American will always do what's right, after they've tried everything else first?
Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson - Not the esteemed Thomas Jefferson.
Seriously. Look at the explosion of diacritical marks. Spelling reform (in the limited sense of having only one way to write each sound) was carried out in the 1800's. All spelling reforms will cause words to look funny, if not stupid. This is because, to the chagrin of middle schoolers, people judge your intelligence and content based on spelling.
Reform isn't a mental shortcut, its a good idea to encourage correct communication in a language with world-wide significance. If the Anglosphere could promulgate a change in spelling, it will improve commerce and reduce misery for students around the world. It isn't just an American thing, it's a rational thing.
But coordination is key. A change must be made by England, Australia, India, South Africa, and America simultaneously for best effect. The difficulty is that the question of which letter groups make the same sound depends on accent, so any change will require compromise. It's doubtless this is the reason why languages such as Croat could change spelling quickly, while English lags behind with an unravelling of standard spellings and a profusion of meaningless letter groups.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
Avoid the problem by calling the people who point it out dumb. The English Language is in serious need to be fixed. It is not about dumbing it down it is about making it consistent. Right now the people who pat themselves on the back and go how smart I am because I mastered the English language and I can spell correctly, they get all the A's in school, are normally the ones who are good at memorization and regurgitation. While the other children who are suffering more are classified as learning disabled because they can't memorize and regurgitate information. But giving them a good consistent set of grammatical and spelling rules then they will have a better chance of showing their true selves. Education Professionals don't want to change it because it requires more work for them and also most Educational professionals are good a Taking information and spitting it back out without processing why. And the kids who get frustrated learning English go Why is it like that and getting some lame answer that this is an exception and memorize it is just a lame excuse for a broken language. English especially American English as combination and bastardization of many different languages and many of the rules are inconsistent. Fixing it is not an issue because of people with small minds and are to lazy to memorize the exceptions to the rules and all the nuances while the standard rules can create a phonically equivalent version of the word. This is different then dumbing down requirements. Dumbing it down would be allowing words to have multiple correct spellings (Not one that consistently follows the rules) or allow Slang terms in formal writing so "Y'all" can get to the next grade. Fixing English will allow more time for teachers to teach other topics (like the Neglected Math and Sciences) and other topics Arts, Music... that expand the brain and not hold people back to constantly struggling and working out why words are they way they are and having to go back and fix all the spelling mistakes they make and sometimes forced themselves to use less elegant vocabulary words because they are unable to get a close enough spelling of it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What is different between this approach and Ebonics? Or any of the other attempts as phoenetic spelling that have been floating around for the past 30 years?
i fur wun, welcum ower simplifide speleng ohverlords
firestream.net
It's obviously a joke, I mean Dictionary isn't even pronounced 'dikshunery'. 'Dikshonary' perhaps.
I do at times wish English were more consistent in spelling and pronunciation, but I don't think there's a fix for it.
Ah the first steps to simplification.
War is peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength.
We have always been at war with terrorism.
Choose European pronunciation when deciding the spelling. It's a pain in the arse when letters are pronounced differently in english and most of the european languages. Not only do you have a different language, you have a different pronunciation for the same letters.
Deleted
So ... rather than try to get people to think about the words they want to use and rather than educate them on the proper spelling of words, we're going to dumb down the language because people don't want to learn how to spell difficult or similar-sounding words correctly.
Uh huh.
This movement appears to be indicative of the propensity of lackadaisical or indeed preposterous individuals to repudiate the necessities of encouraging a proper enlightenment of the intricacies of linguistic comunication. Unquestionably, this preposterous recommendation can only be indicative of a desire to bring forth an ideology resulting in the reduction of the instruction of responsibilty upon one's self. One must ponder the disappearance of intellectual progress when considering why our many progenitors incurred no difficulty in the attainments of the identical language. Yet for reasons unknown the current populous has in some way been deemed too intellectually challenged to educate themselves of the same vocabulary. This indicates a very bankrupt, mental capacity with respect to the educational capacities of my fellow homo sapiens and should not be looked upon favorably.
This is just proof that we are getting lazy and stupid...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
We could learn something from the Chinese efforts to adopt a romanized spelling. Chinese has 20,000 characters but only about about 1,300 distinct syllables. Each character is pronounced with a single syllable. This means that the number of characters way exceeds the number of syllables. The result is that when you write them phonetically it is very difficult to know which of the many characters with the same sound is meant. This has doomed pinyin (the most recent system of romanizing Chinese) to use by foreigners.
English has the same problem to a lesser degree. We have a very large number of homonyms that are distinguished by their spelling. If we spelled them all phonetically it would become more difficult to tell which was meant.
Also we would cut ourselves off from 500 years of printed material in English.
to ask this question? Spelling won't be simplified enough until we eliminate all written languages. If a picture says a thousand words, then we should all learn to draw, not spell. But then again, text takes up much less disk space, at least until we invent better compression techniques.
What?
Perhapss these goode chaps hath not had the same chanse that tho's of us who art more educated hath had to reade the grayte works of those noble English poets like Chaucer, whose spellings were quite atroscious by moderne standards of lyteracie.
IAALS.
You don't think it likely that the rich might get to learn both methods and the poor find themselves distanced, if not severed, from the majority of previously published English text then?
As a person who can't spell well, I think that this is a horrible idea. As a previous poster mentioned, written English isn't the same as spoken English and have almost never have been. Also, if we made obsolete the current system, it would still have to be maintained, just like Americans still have to know what colour and honour are. As another poster mentioned, WHOES, English? In Pittsburgh our and hour sound exactly alike, yet in other places they are very different. English cannot be taught fully phonetically (as the school experimented with my class and failed). My bro and sis were taught with different methods and can spell exceptionally well. I believe that the earlier spelling reform (in the colonies) was to separate us from the Brits, by removing mostly silent letters. There were some non-silent changes, but I don't recall many of them.
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm." - S. G. Colette
It's an earnest effort, but an Ameri-centric view.
The argument for more phonetic spelling ignores the question of "Which phonetic version is our model?"
American's pronounce words quite differently than the British do and even -- in some situations -- Canadians.
Try this one: Pasta.
In the U.S. it's predominantly pronounced P-aw-sta
(This is not the case in, say, Alabama where it's pronounced "Macaroni" in my experience.)
In Canada it's a hard "a" sound. P-a-sta.
You say "Lou-ten-ent" and Canadians say "Lef-ten-ent"
I say since we set fire to your White House we get to choose the spelling. In honour of the colour, I pleaded at the theatre for a more concise judgement.
(Ok. Pleaded is a linguistic pet peeve of mine whereas the others are words that are spelt differently.)
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
"Simplified" spelling is a grave error, because the constant shifting of language rapidly overwhelms any benefits that might be had. The inconsistancies in a formal spelling system accumulate O(1), but the changes required in a phonetic system will accumulate O(n). Periodic re-alignments may be useful, but loosening the spelling system would be a disaster.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
that this artikle ees ay lowd ov krap
"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else." It's in the current issue of The Week.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
...simply because it would rid of us snobbery that people with higher education have over the uneducated as spelling would not have to be an exquisite skill anymore. Why should we have one more barrier between the rich/poor or educated/uneducated?
Snobbery is as snobbery does. I've been to poor, rural parts of West Virginia where the exact same form of grating human behavior is deployed over issues such as Quality Of Pit Bull. Or, I've seen the same thing - stark, abrasive class stratification - among equally literate people in high-end Ivy Leaque schools, where only Closeness To Current Model Year Of BMW differentiates one person from the next.
That poor, poor Abraham Lincoln - raised in a cabin and couldn't write a lick. Or that wretchedly illiterate Bill Shakespeare... raised in stinking, toothless, no-running-water 1600s England.
Even the poorest in the US enjoy a better standard of living and more opportunity than pretty much all of humanity ever has, especially those who gave rise to the very languages that combined to form modern English. The only thing that keeps a kid from the trivial task of tackling that small percentage of a solid vocabulary that actually requires a little counter-intuitive memorization is the dumb-is-cool culture. And that's currently propped up by the usual villain: popular entertainment.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
From the Wikipedia article:
-mls
after learning Japanese I realized just how messed up English really is.... there are only two tences, it has a phonetic alphabet and best of all, Japanese only has 2 irregular verbs (I've used more then that already in this post). It makes thier grammer and spelling a thing to behold.
English on the otherhand has more excptions then rules. I have a lot more admeration for people who can learn English, truely the hardest language on earth.
I found the article a pain in the ass to read because she kept switching between the two (which was probably her intent). I have a lot of European visitors and all of them tease us about our spelling system. They find it impossible to learn when they come from places where words are always spelled as they are pronounced. I think that the only way it's going to happen is slowly, word by word (like the example that was offered - night for nite). Get me a spell checking pen and I won't care.
www.wildpad.com
No no, I think you got it wrong, Ignorance = bliss!!
No Jesus, no pees. No Jesus, no pees.
Did anyone else find it funny that this article thought that the semi-logographic forms "l8r" (later) and "u" (you) were a *simplification*? I mean ... here's to adding several hundred logographs to the ol' spelling bee!
U se tometo, I se tomato.
Regionalized dialects that for the present at least share words will be completely lost, and communication will fall apart as the written English language devolves into localized written dialects that are effectively indecipherable to anyone who doesn't "hear" with that intonation pattern.
It's like an Evil Genius plan for world domination -- "Well, I'm heavily invested in China, and the effectively English-dominated markets really have too much sway. I know, I'll make it so that no written communication can take place between different area of the United States! All of a sudden, Rhode Island will be a separate market than Connecticut! London will be separate from Surrey! Wales will be a complete write-off!"
This is completely retarded. What about regional accents? If I say toe-MAY-toe, and you say toe-MAH-toe, what's the phonetic spelling of the word?
hey, there isn't a real problem with the way we spell other than the stupid ways english handles its vowels, like : BIOS (Bee-Os) and BIOS (Bye-Os) [wish i had a phonetical character map] but i think you get the point, the word could be pronounced either way, [but i prefer Bye-Os because it is more respected tword the acronyms meaning]. but you can get rid of a few consonants as well, and about the double letters, just adopt like a greek symbol, maybe theta to replace it. anyway, i have friends from other countries and the hardest part about learning english is the spelling and pronunciation(written), so sad...
I've never heard it pronounced in any way except "pahstah"
Clear, Dark Skies
American Sign Language is considerably different from both written and spoken English, but there's no written equivalent for ASL except written English.
ASL isn't just a word-for-word translation of English. It would be extremely tedious to sign that way; you could more-or-less do it, but you'd sound very stilted (just like if you spoke in the same way you wrote). It's not even just an abbreviation; there are syntactic structures used in ASL that have no exact word-for-word correspondence to either spoken or written English.
We all learn at least two languages, one spoken and one written. They're usually closely related. Orthography is hardly the biggest difference between the two.
Excelent point, and if I could mod this I would. Spelling can give meaning to words that you may have never seen before, whereas the same would be harder to get from phonetics.
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm." - S. G. Colette
to differentiate among the homonyms.
Koreans had the same problem when they went to a phonetic alphabet.
We should keep in mind that what's phonetic today may be not phonetic
100 years later. Languages WILL evolve.
If we reform English to be easy, how will I tell the 12 year olds from the rest on IRC?
On a more serious note...will this make multiple spellings for the same word all be legit due to regional accents? If not, whose accent do we use?
Unpleasantries.
I've always pronounced it dikshunary.
Clear, Dark Skies
For a sample,
Back in third or fourth grade the teacher told us about "i before e except after c...." Somebody asked if the rule always worked, and the teacher said there were no exceptions. Another kid says "are you sure?" and pointed to the word "Science" on a poster hanging over her desk.
She must really have hated her job some days.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
I can't support anything that Everett True disapproves of.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Finnish has a phonetic spelling. Its great for learning to read.
The basic reason why its great is that it removes some of the things you need to write allowing you to concentrate on other issues. And it takes away things you need to learn in school and gives you time to learn other things. Our language has other complications, but still the concept of removing need for some of the learning for school kids is great. However if you DON'T put something usefull in its place in curriculum the benefit of simplifying the spelling is lost.
However as in terms of language the any change is extremely hard to get through in huge scale. In Finnish where there is only one small country where its majority language and that there is official standards body for Finnish language makes it possible for alter any spelling.
As for the change, the real question is, how much it cost in time for *ALL* the living older generations to learn new spelling, and how much is saved by new future generations by not needing to learn the old spelling. Fact remains that the cost of change is FAR bigger in the short term than the benefit.
Also going for the phonetical spelling creates problems for americans, aussies, and people living in britain to comprehend each others writing. And in worst case, only Americans go for new spelling and rest of the English speaking countries don't. The end result is that the languages grow to separate from each other more and more, and the amount of learning required to understand the writings of English speaking countries around the world increases.
The BEST case would be that there would be a STANDARD english that is taught in every school with phonetic spellings, all English speaking countries agree the spelling of the different words and there would be ONE phonetic standard which to translate said spellings to pronounciations so that there would be one correct way of pronouncing each word. The local dialects wouldn't be used in official documents, and education would teach the one standard.
©God
With their Simplified Chinese, which made sense back when people had to write them down to save the number of strokes required, but doesn't make sense now that people just type it on the computer in the same number of keystrokes.
I prefer those who are deficient are brought up rather than dropping everyone else down to match them.
You don't "make" language, you process it. And in doing so change it. Any linguistics student will tell you the "Academe d'Anglais" is doomed at the outset. Usage will put pressure to change on what is accepted (dropping or transforming homonyms, etc.) Obsolete usages will vanish, new ones evolve. It has to be meta-flexible and self correcting or you'd still be licking termites off a stick.
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
Can you spell that?
Misa no botha with yousa.
How about they work on getting people to speak proper English first, mmmk?
Someone hates these cans.
If you want to simplify the language, go to a more standard (as in other languages that use a roman alphabet) way. 'Weigh' would actually be 'we', 'we' (first person plural) would be 'wi' or 'oui'. 'dictionary' would be 'deicxaneri'. 'alphabet' would be aelfebet'. 'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious' would be 'supercaelefrajeilisteicekspialeidousous' ;)
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
I don't know about anyone else but I think Dictionary is far easier to spell than dikshunery. Also, dikshunery sounds like a deep south accent.
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
Seriously, it's just a way to make blacks and tards more literate.
It is not that hard to understand A nice example of how easy it is.
Tried to copy and paste it, but I got an error on too few characters per line.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
everything is spelled like it sounds, no confusion there!
Why is it always Fucking Americans that come up with this crap?
Yes, because there will be no idiomatic or dialect-based differences in regional versions of the language that will screw up the uneducated in a purely phonetic spelling system, no, sir.
And poor neighborhoods never have an altered dialect from the standardised version of the language shared by those that take the effort to educate themselves, nope.
Okay, sarcasm aside, the educated have a better command of the language because they put a lot of work into making it so. Anyone can do it without formal education by reading a lot of known proper english, so there's really no reason to sympathise with the purposefully ignorant.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
If you want to spell words the way they sound, you should learn Finnish. And BTW.
wuudn't it maek mor sens to spel wurdz the wae thae sound? should actually be:
vudunt it meik moor sens tu spel vöörds tö vei tei saund? from a Finnish standpoint. Doesn't that sound better? No? Okay then...
I demand the Cone of Silence!
For example, when you speak, what do you do to separate words form one another? The surprising answer is, nothing. Take a tape of ordinary conversation. Run it through an oscilloscope. Look for the breaks. You won't find them. We "blur" words together in sentences. (I suspect this is why anyone speaking a different tongue always sounds like he/she is speaking very quickly... your brain hasn't learned to put the "spaces" back in by context.)
... younger ... Shatner ... would ... disagree.
A
This is not my sig.
And raze ewe won Tweeze Denied Beef Worker Isthmus.
bring bad solid language rules with almost no exceptions - use consistent pluralization rules [...] some other things that I cannot think of at this moment
How about capital letters and full stops? Actually, perhaps we should just take things one step at a time. You already have received plenty of other good suggestions.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
...would be cake!
>>-a goes to -ae: ie supernovae, larvae
>>-is goes to -ii: virii, penii
>>some other things that I cannot think of at this moment
Virus doesn't end in -is. It's actually a funny word because IIRC it doesn't have a classical plural form. "Vir," latin for man, becomes "viri" when pluralized, so it seems "virus" (which I'm sure is somehow etymologically related, someone please help) can't become "viri" as well. It makes more sense to use the modern english pluralization of adding -es to words that end in s. Besides that, penis is pluralized "penes." I understand you were trying to propose a simplified rule for pluralization, but wouldn't it have made more sense to at least pick one of the classical rules if you weren't going to use the standard s/es suffix found in modern english?
If you'd like to see a chart of (most of? all of?) the many classical pluralizations compared with acceptable (and equally correct) modern english pluralizations, click here. It's about a quarter of the way down the page. Actually, the whole page is pretty interesting and I only just stumbled upon it today when looking for a source to point to when correcting your proposed rules.
Huh huh huh dick-shunnery....dick shunnery......huhh huh hhuhh huh
I'm all for this, but why stop at English? When I was at school I found loads of subjects hard, primarily because teachers were always looking for the 'right' answers; but why must we always worry about what's 'right' when it could be easy?
...
Take physics for example, all those complicated formulae and such. How about rather than 'E = mc^2' we just have 'E = energy'? Now isn't that so much easier to remember and understand?
It would also be a far fairer system, as rather than having some people who are just seen as being more inteligent than the rest of us, we could all just be idiots!
Ignorance is bliss and all that
Sure, if you wanted to canonicalize one particular dialect. IPA is excellent at capturing the differences between accents, and if you decide to define a single IPA spelling of a word, you'll make all of the other accents invalid. And make it damn hard to spell.
The received pronunciation is being spread through TV, and the differences in accent are becoming less marked over time. My own accent is pretty close to the received one (I grew up in suburban Maryland), but you can find people living 50 miles from me with accents so different I have a hard time understanding them over the phone.
Personally, I think the diversity of accent lends tremendous charm to the language. I'd hate it if everybody spoke the same way.
Eether wae, the consept has yet to capcher th publix imajinaeshun.
Absolewtlee - "th publix" never duz fonetic speleeng - I meen, luuk at all thuh guud speleeng in blog coments and tekst mesuhjez...
Wayk up, man. Nobody uses fonix becuz it's not user frendly and nobody no's how to suport it. That's y smrt peepl liek me u's Windoz!
I was always fascinated with rock 'n' roll, or girls, or something like that when I was a kid. - Gary Sinise
whiny, spindly eurotrash males playing a suburban white girls' game = soccer
Since schools dumped phonics-based reading in favor of whole-word memorization, it's been harder for kids to spell things. You can't "sound out" words, if you've never learned how... or use the sound of a word to guess at its correct spelling. That's what words are right? Symbols to construct sound.
The English language is already phonetic, but it takes a few years to learn. The problem with our alphabet is the way it's learned, not the complexity. Slaves, who often learned in secret, could spell and read better than kids of today. I think a big reason is that they used effective and simple learning techniques (phonics).
That said, I'd love to get rid of duplicate letters, like "c" & "k". For me, it's all about having less letters on my keyboard.
What, you mean like 'circ-leh'?
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
Of course there's an elegant solution, get back to the original pronounciation of these words.
English once sounded like it's now written and that's how it's ment to be!
OK, probably never going to happen :)
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Good idea, take one of the most successful languages of all time and force major changes to it, just so little Timmy can spend more time at "the Wal*Mart", buying WWF toys, rather than at school.
English's great success is due to its flexibility and its ability to integrate other languages. The downside is its obscure spelling.
I'm brushing up on my Cantonese, awaiting the new leaders of the world.
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)
(Stupid fucking Slashcode...)
Of course the written language should be a written representation of the spoken language. That's it's primary purpose. The pronunciation it represents should be an "official" pronunciation. For example Received Pronunciation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_pronunciati
The spelling for the English language was set almost completely by a single person; Samuel Johnson. He created the first really comprehensive dictionary and fixed the spelling of the spoken word at that point in time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson
Deleted
>English is the kind of language the hunts down other languages and corners them dark alleys to nick their vocabularies
English is kind of like Gormenghast.
My linguist wife responded to that comparison by saying "English is more useful than Gormenghast", which is so funny out of context that someone may want to use it as a sig.
Apart from kanji, which are spelled like Old Chinese used to sound, as misheard by Japanese people!
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
Anybody else find that the so-called "leet" speak or whatever it is, is really annoying? Like the "Fatal1ty" gamer dude, and anybody else who likes to say "pwned" a lot? Pretty innocuous on its own, but just another degradation of literary tradition. Here's a thought: misspelling isn't cool.
...welcome our spell-it-as-it-phonetically-sounds overlords!
Ask any first to third grader, he/she will tell you that it is worthwhile... Likewise for folks learning English as a second language.
It needs to be reformed because it's awfully inconsistent. Also reform does not have to mean wholesale changes, it can be done incrementally.
The English language is not the property of America and the yokels proposing this change are hardly the guardians of the language. If such a change goes through I suggest naming this "new" language 'mercan or 'mercaneez instead of English. If these people think English is hard to learn try learning written Chinese.
And don't know why you were modded troll, but I completely agree with you. Switching to metric would make so much sense, and it's not going to happen for a long time, if ever. Spelling reform is going to face the same obstacles (just like it has every other time it's been proposed).
Damn those Washington spinwallahs. Their president cant spell half the words he speaks and does not understand what he could spell. So in a evil Microsoftian way they declare the misspellings by Bushes and Quayles to be the standard. :-)
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
It's possible to avoid this problem with a new alphabet, but is that what we want?
I don't like it, especially because current English spelling encodes etymological structure that conveys meaning and relationship between families of words.
It's already been pointed out that simplified spelling would cause problems with homophones (words that sound the same). Homophone problems can only be solved by adopting different spellings, so as to cause different pronunciations. Under 'simplified spelling', different spellings means longer spellings, because bandwidth is limited to the character set. Just look at Hawaiin, where all the words are long because they only have like 11 characters to work with. Longer words means less overall efficiency. The loss may be comparable to the gain from simplified spelling.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
This will never happen...
We couldn't even change to the metric system, which makes a hell of a lot more sense.
Now that I think about it, not making sense actually improves it's chances.
While were at it, let's just go with emoticons and not have to spell at all. That should appeal to the masses. Kind of a modern day hieroglyphics...we'll have come full circle...Oh, I forgot, Cingular owns the patent on those...I'm supprised someone hasn't patented writing.
But it's a recent idea. Shakespeare's name got spelled about two dozen different ways by his contemporaries (http://shakespeareauthorship.com/name1.html).
In other words, the situation didn't need to be even as good as it is now. (Imagine trying to use Google without standardized spelling).
George Bernard Shaw was so pissed off about the English language's anarchic spelling methods that he left money in his will for the design and promotion of phonetic alphabet that leaves the old Roman characters behind. The Shaw alphabet features logical grouping of letters, uses similar shapes for similar phonemes, stuff like that.
A phonetic alphabet -- even if we did it with conventional Roman characters, maybe augmented by digraphs or accents for certain multi-sound letters -- would be a good thing. Look at Korea, which has an astonishingly high literacy rate. The Korean alphabet was designed, and is 100% phonetic. There is no such thing as a spelling bee in Korea, and if you can speak Korean, you can learn to read Korean in about two weeks. And dyslexia is almost unheard of.
The problem with phonetic alphabets is phonetic drift. Accents change over time. The Shavian alphabet, for example, would present problems in the U.S. because while it is phonetic, it is phonetic for Received English, which is used in the U.K. but not here. For example, Americans drive a car that has a final "r", but Received English doesn't pronounce that "r" at all. Likewise the butter an American puts on his toast sounds more like "budder." So a phonetic alphabet fails when you cross a dialect line, and a hundred years from now when pronunciations have drifted even more, we're once again stuck with a set of words that are spelled nothing like they're said.
This is not my sandwich.
Since the US became a Crown Dependency (except for Utah) the following apply (extracts): 1. You should look up "revocation" in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then look up "aluminium." Check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it. The letter 'U' will be reinstated in words such as 'favour' and 'neighbour', skipping the letter U' is nothing more than laziness on your part. Likewise, you will learn to spell 'doughnut' without skipping half the letters. You will end your love affair with the letter 'Z' (pronounced 'zed' not 'zee') and the suffix "ize" will be replaced by the suffix "ise." You will learn that the suffix 'burgh' is pronounced 'burra'. Edinburgh. You are welcome to respell Pittsburg as 'Pittsberg' if you can't cope with correct pronunciation. Generally, you should raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels. Look up "vocabulary." Using the same twenty seven words interspersed with filler noises such as "like" and "you know" is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. Look up "interspersed." There will be no more 'bleeps' in the Jerry Springer show. If you're not old enough to cope with bad language then you shouldn't have chat shows. When you learn to develop your vocabulary then you won't have to use bad language as often. 2. There is no such thing as "US English." We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take into account the reinstated letter 'u' and the elimination of "-ize."
>The people behind this movement also act as if pronunciation is fixed, while of course, it is not.
That was once the case, but no longer so.
Now in the age of mass communications, the level of isolation needed for languages to drift have largely
disappeared. Nowadays, regional accents that formed in the US are slowly receding, and most people have
generally softened to or wholly adapted the US comman accent and sound.
The levels of isolation needed for entire new languages to formed dissappeared at the dawn of the industrial age, with fast ships able to cross the globe, the required several generations of isolation needed simply did not exist on the planet any longer.
Regional dialects continued to form, such as in the US, as waves of immagrants did not fully assimilate.
But telecommunications, television, radio, and the vast storehouse of recorded words, voices, and movies have
reversed this trend, and the languages of the world have begun normalizing.
If there was ever a use for standardizing english pronunciation, now is a better time then ever before.
I've thought about this long and hard because, for some odd reason, this subject interests me a great deal. I agree with the arguments that our current system:
- Allows dialects/accents
- A common platform that accomodates regional/cultural differences
- Imbues meaning to words by prefix, suffix, or spelling of the root
- Huge bodies of existing work
But I also agree with all the arguments of the detractors:
- Illogical, nonstandard, requires rote memorization
- 26 symbols for 42 sounds, but there are 400 (!) combinations in use
- Contradictions and exceptions
I simply feel that we need a first step. Our current English system can be given some sort of academic name like "neo-classical." Then we could adopt a truly different, well-thought out phonetic script such as the Koreans did. The Shavian alphabet or QuickScript could be easily adapted for this task. I would recommend that Latin characters are dropped completely in the new system to prevent confusion.
Since the new system will be dead simple and written as spoken, there is no need to teach spelling. Students can still study "neo-classical" English in school, once they have mastered simplified "modern" phonetic English (which should not take long at all). Scholarly work could still be done in neo-classical English, if necessary. Gradually the simplified system would replace the old system, as is happening in Korea.
I prefer this to simplified spelling, since that is mixing two things of similar ilk and really could cause confusion and frustration.
Are there any non-English spelling bees (other than for logographic systems)?
Whether you want to change English or not, we have to admit that English is HARD.
Dubya would certainly be pleased.
Norwegian is pretty much spelled as it's pronounced, which we other Scandinavians often mock them for. Speaking and writing are two very different forms of communication; if I spoke Danish like I write it, people would think I was a lunatic.
meh
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
In my opinion, absolutely not. Totally, utterly, completely a bad idea.
The world is moving towards making things "easier" for the mind to comprehend. Phonetic spellings... What good does that do us?
What is the problem with using language to challenge our minds every day? If we make things easier on ourselves on such a massive scale, it might just make us "dumber" as time progresses. I feel that a large amount of small trivial complications to our mental life make our minds stronger. It's been said a ton of times, the mind is like a muscle: if you don't use it, you lose it. What is the difference here of dumbing down our main mental expenditure?
Humans have an amazing capability for language. Many humans even speak a number of very different languages at approximately the same level of proficiency- though for many English speakers this is a difficult concept. But this, like people's inability to spell, is related to unfortunate educational systems in the English speaking world. When English spelling was first fixed, most of it was phonetic, but pronounciation shifted. It was standardized without most accents, except in borrowed words, where the accent is optional (e.g. role) and of course back in the day when Shakespeare was living it up (dude), the accent on the final syllable (which has been lost, highlighting how written language shifts just like spoken; sometimes hand-in-hand, and sometimes not). The so called "silent" e at the end of the word replaces the lost accents- e.g. "ay" instead of "ah" in "Shane" or "change" and/or signifies a softening of the preceding consonant (this also occurs within words- again e.g. change or outrageous). Fine, these concepts are sometimes superfluous, but they carry historical information which would be lost by "simplifying" the spelling. And it's not difficult, unless you have an actual spelling disorder. In which case simplification wouldn't make much of a difference anyway.
It sounds like the first step to Orwell's Newspeak to me.
no they don't
Constructed languages like Lojban start from the ground up and actually make sense in how they are put together. For instance, in Lojban's case, it's audio-visually isomorphic and it has an unambiguous grammar - words are spelt phonetically and a computer can parse sentences into their constituent parts without having to understand what is being said. There's none of this "X flies like a X" nonsense. And tense is achieved with particles - you don't have to remember the different words "flew"/"flies/"will fly" to express the same concept in a different tense - you just remember the one word "vofli" and apply the same tense particle that you use for every other word.
Natural languages are like the spaghetti code database your PHB handed you out of nowhere. It's so fundamentally broken that fixing it makes no sense, it's better to start from scratch.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Long answer is: we've had it in Germany. The reform was led by an arbitrary government committee (group of ministers for educational affairs) and led to changes that were simply wrong etymologically, or grammatically.
Basically: if you don't really really know what you're doing (and with a grown language that's hundreds/thousands of years old, almost nobody really knows everything), don't change a language.
After a while in Germany, most newspapers reverted to either the old writing, or their own writing (mixture of "official" new writing style, and the old one), while most authors simply continued to use the old style. Design by committee doesn't work.
At the tender age of 17, I signed up to go to military college in St Jean, Quebec, just south of Montreal.
:)
I had the opportunity to go to Royal Roads, in my native province, or to go to RMC, in Ontario, but I was talked into going to CMR by a recruiter with a quota to fill.
Anyway, I had been taking French for upwards of 6 years and had always received good marks. I could understand the typical spoken examples on language tapes, and figured I was in good shape.
Ha!
It took a good six months before I could even hear the breaks between words; everything sounded like one long, unbroken stream of syllables. I wound up memorizing what individual streams meant and working out the constituant words after the fact: "Revvyayvoozmusurgransackrifiss!" which meant "Mr Grant, I am very unhappy with you!" was in fact, "Reveillez-vous, Monseuir Grant! Sacrifice!" (Wake up, Mr Grant, goddammit!)
Even more suprising was the day I met my first Bayman Newfie, ostensibly an English speaker, with whom I had the same problem: "Wharsyatdarebuy?" was, in fact "Where's you at there b'y?" (Where are you/what are you doing?)
I had an extended, 10-min long smile-and-nod session with one Neuf, and I don't have the foggiest clue of a single word that he said.
Incidentally, while I departed CMR officially fluent, I have a light Anglo accent on top of a Quebecois accent. Imagine someone from China learning to speak English in Kentucky, and that's what I sound like to a francias pur laine.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Umm... I've had a COLLEGE PROFESSOR use "thru" in formal writing.
Yeah, it's great. Glad I paid the big bucks for the whole college education thing.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
1. Since a LOT of foreigners in the US are lazy, etc.... It is CLEAR that Americans are FAR from the worst. After all, there are OBVIOUSLY a lot of FOREIGNERS here advocating changes to make things easier for THEM! 2. English is NOT the only language lacking phonic only spelling. FAR from it! In fact, I will show you a popular word that seems to be closer to phonic in english! THEATER! In German, and some other languages, it is pronounced Tayahter(SAME SPELLING OF THEATER!) In English it is pronounced THeeahter. Yet many of you would just IGNORE the TH. And w and v ARE different! It is not our fault if, for some unknown reason, people seem to want to get rid of the W and replace it with V. I was just starting to get "used" to FIE! FIE is the new foreign bastardization of FIVE. They just throw the V out! HEY, GREAT IDEA!!!! Some people HATE non latin characters! SO, we must get rid of EVERYTHING but the English alphabet!(Look at foreign languages using the "latin" alphabet if you don't believe me!) Some people HATE vowels, so we can get rid of AEIOUY! Some people hate possible confusion, so lets get rid of the second closest sounding letter! So more K,S, w,x,z! Some people are confused by certain sounds! So we can get rid of H,J,c,t,u,r! Of course, our combinations will be limited, as consonents together may be hard to pronounce. Maybe someone can figure out how to have TRADITIONAL english with these requirements! I DOUBT IT! GOOD LUCK! BTW While you are at it! Look at those foreign alphabets! Danish has like 6 new letters! German has a few new ones! French and Italian do ALSO! So does portuguese! EVEN SPANISH! Why don't we simplify THOSE ALSO! After all, they ADDED to the complexity! Apparantly English only added the idea of the TH sound. What do you know about that!? They AREN'T more phonetic AFTER ALL! They just added more rules, and letters! German has rules about dipthongs ie,ei,eu,ue, and special characters such as umlauted, and the etset(sp?) which may or may NOT be equivalent to a double s! Steve
Sorry, but spelling it dikshunary just means your a dumb uneducated hick.
I agree that the English language has lots of words with complicated spellings, and often whole strings of consonants, which are irrational or unexplainable. Worcestershire sauce is pronounced wuster. My philosophy has been to pronounce it the way it is spelt, so I say wor-chester-shire sauce, which irritates my British and snobby English major friends.
The problem is that this will lead to a lack of formalization of the written word. If suddenly there is more then one correct spelling for a word, then people will just start to write the way things sound in general, without caring about the proper spelling(s) of the word. I mean, people are starting to use "teh" as the, and wikipedia seems to consider it an acceptable form of the word. I just think its a obviously lazy construct because people don't learn how to type properly, or review their messages.
What I am suggesting however is that all these spelling and grammar Nazis that jump down your throat over a misspelled word or improper grammar need to get a life. If you can understand what someone is writing or saying, then they have made their point. If you can write it with 100% proper spelling and grammar, then good for you, you passed remedial English.
There is a difference between formal letter/document writting, and the kind of "typing" slang that casual web user employs. Its only been in the last decade that people have used a computer and text messaging as a major form of communication. Instead of spoken slang, people are adopting typed word slang. The keyboard is a confounding method of text entry, and not everyone can type properly. However, if I was writing a thesis, and I used the word dikshunary in it, I wouldn't be surprised if I never got my doctorate degree.
I don't think we need to formally dumb down the English language in order to ensure the spelling Nazis have nothing to complain about. Just give people a break that either they are too lazy to be formal when writing quick messages to friends, family, or blogs, or that maybe they are not people where English is their first language, and are able to get their point across without proper spelling and grammar.
Lastly, I am writing this using Google's Spell Check tool bar, and thank God, because spelling is one of my worst skills. There is a prevalence of spell checking in most applications (hell, even Visual Studio checks your spelling, or at least keeps your variable names consistent). Put the alternate misspelled forms of words in the dictionary and have it auto-translate to the proper one and only spelling.
It is funny that this article is mentioned at a time when George W Bush, a person that bastardizes the English language every chance he gets, is president. Its almost as if the president is imposing that we change the spelling of words to make him appeaer educated and smart. Would this article be mentioned if the US had a smarter and more eloquent president?
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Mod points! Mod points! My kingdom for some mod points! Translation: People are looking for an excuse to become irresponsible and stupid. Our parents, grandparents, etc. had no problem with the language, yet for some reason our generation is (somehow) too stupid to learn the language, so we need to dumb it down, which should not be encouraged.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Simplifying the English language like that is simply going to destroy it. You want a simpler language with phonetic spelling to make "learning" a language easier? It's called Esperanto. The both scary and funny thing is, I know almost nothing of Esperanto (or any other language really outside of the most basic, rudimentary concepts mostly learned from English root origins), but actually find it easier to read and understand than the "simplified" spelling cited in the *ahem* article.
(OT: Do American bibles still use the archaic language forms e.g. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's spelling system", or have they been "modernised"?)
Just because it makes sense now is not a reason. Things are made unintelligable with time. People attempt to draw distinctions between things and change them subtley. Time compounds the issue. A significant advantage must be shown before doing this. Even simple reality makes things change. China is reforming the written language out of necessity, because becoming literate in classic Chinese takes almost a decade. Latin is easier... Shaving a year or two off of this schedule means more time for real learning. Words are pronounced differently a year from now, in different places, even by people who attend different schools. I wouldn't want people with 'Harvard' accents dictating spelling, I live in Texas. I'm sure people at Harvard would equally hate the idea of someone from Texas like Bush dictating the dictionary.
For example, months in many languages are counted. First Month instead of January, second month instead of February, and so on. This used to be the case in English. But, the start of the year was changed to reflect the solar calendar instead of a lunar calendar, and the months no longer made sense. What was the seventh month of the year, was now the 9th month of the year and so on. The names September, October, November, and December each mean seventh month, eigth month, ninth month, and tenth month respectively. Even though they are in fact the 9th - 12th months.
Adding 'engineered' changes only add to the confusion long term. Not only do people have to deal with tense and style changes, but forcing more changes on top of it only makes problems worse. Words gain meaning with time. This will happen whether we try to temporarily fix it or not.
This is no better than the political correctness debates. A word which may be proper and make sense one year quickly gains meaning in both positive and negative connotations until many are unwilling to use a word. The end result of not accepting this additional meaning is that old written language quickly becomes unintelligible. Forcing change makes the issue worse. The Chinese had riots when they briefly tried switching to the latin alphabet in the 50s.
A big part of the reason the Chinese stopped switching to a phonetic alphabet is it would in many ways destroy their national identity. Mandarin is spoken very differently from Cantonese. But, they largely can understand each others writing. If they had switched to a completely phonetic system, there would be very little tying that nation together. Written Chinese is more like spoken Mandarin from a few hundred years ago. Not even regular Mandarin speakers would be able to read a phonetic version of what was spoken a few years ago.
English is an evolved language. Because of this, it is easy to start but hard to master. It will continue to evolve.
Here's to losing my Karma Bonus again....
Cool! I see finally Newspeak from "1984" is slowly being proposed. Next revision we'll remove some useless words, so we can make speak and write much simpler. ;)
Ok this was just meant to be funny
I love how every time there's an article about spelling or grammar, the writer runs out and uses every big word they know to try to sound intelligent.
Your date's a little early. A few years later he DID change the way words were spelled with one of the reasons being he wanted an American dictionary - more precisely, differentiation from England for no other reason than nationalism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webster's_Dictionary
It can, and has, happened within the last 200 years.
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
Mom must have one hell of a hot plate, seeing how pahsteh is the correct pronunciation.
It might also be relevant to know that mom hasn't cooked me a meal in a quarter century.
Clear, Dark Skies
...that Benjamin Franklin's writing sample in his phonetic alphabet displays a markedly different pronunciation of several common words (such as "of" - it appears to rhyme with "grove") than what is commonly pronounced today. So, what is the point of changing the spelling to be phonetic today, when that pronunciation may very well change after 50, 100, 200 years... not to mention that there would have to be some agreement on which pronunciation is "standard" to begin with. Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston and lived most of his life in Philadelphia. I'd hate to imagine how the word "water" would be spelled!
This proposal sounds eerily like what the book 1984 referred to as Newspeak. Basically a reduction of the number of spellings and words used in the language. The goal of the process was to slowly but surely reduce the chances of dissenting thought by elminating the words that promote critical thinking and opposing viewpoints. In one part one of the characters brags that the new version has dramatically reduced the verbal set by eliminating negative words like "bad" and replacing it with prefixed words like "ungood".
We've already taken enough steps towards that possible future, thank you kindly. Besides, what the heck would poetry sound like in this new lexicon? It's like telling an artist he or she can only use primary colors because "beige", "periwinkle" and "mauve" are too illustrative. No thanks.
lang=en-gb: We all know color Vs colour, neighbour Vs neighbour. But from a bank I have a cheque book. Not a check book. Checking is to verify. Shesh.
...as states, still a large number of Americans have not learned that we now have 50 states. What brainiac thinks we can teach all American people an entirely new spelling system if just the correct number of states, just one change nearly 50 years ago, has proved nearly impossible to teach to all?
It's a girl!
This kind of tripe is marked by breathless Chicken-Little descriptions of semi-anonymous "sources" who say things that are vaguely unsettling. A dead giveaway is the passive and imprecise language in the summary: "There's a movement..." There is? Define "movement". Some other key phrases are "everyone knows," "some say," etc. Another clue is that there are (surprise) two sides of the argument, and there are quotes from people you have never heard of supporting both. That takes care of the "conflict" ingredient in the hack journalist recipe book.
Google Paul Graham's take on "the suit is back" for how PR firms exploit the media's appetite for this crap.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil
Control freaks are always trying to mess with a good thing and make it their own.
Talking about alphabets, I wish the eth and thorn were still part of the english alphabet. "TH" looks nothing like it sounds.
That, and I wish it weren't so painful to write accents on QWERTY keyboards. (I use the US-Int Alt-Gr key setup, but sometimes it mysteriously stops working... and makes using quotes and apostrophes a pain.) The standard US keyboard layout was fine in the days before international communications through the internet, when everyone was isolated, but now it needs a serious redesign in order to make special characters more easly accessable.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Errrr... there's no such thing. While some people prefer the traditional King James version (I'm pretty sure that would be an English version) most people use one or another flavor of the New International Version or one of twenty or thirty other translations.
Clear, Dark Skies
Illiteracy, such as not caused by brain disfunction, would disappear almost overnight if English was spelled phonetically. Everyone knows how to speak and hear English; it's the spelling that's broken. Excepting dialect, most illiterate people could become literate in a week by simply learning the phonetic alphabet. And think of the time wasted learning how to spell in school! Years!
It would make learning English an order of magnitude easier (still have our insane conjugations and other grammatical nonsense to overcome - fight, fought, bring, brought, what the hell).
But, dream on... one would still have to learn old spelling to read everything previously written. That's why Esperanto exists; a fresh start.
Man is not a rational animal, but a rationalizing one. We'll still be on soapboxes insisting that "right" (originally sounded like "rikt") be spelled the way the Anglo-Saxons woulda spelled it as the waves rise over the shores and over our heads in that big meltdown a-comin'.
Gesundheit!
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
These countries have LOTS and LOTS of misunderstandings because the subtle differences in context.
If you really want to cripple our country, this would be one good way.
As others have pointed out we have a fantastic language in English. I did not find it hard to learn, but that's really beside the point.
The reason to do this is supposedly to help some people... But it does not help anywhere as much as it harms. Communication is the building block of society. To cripple it because some are too lazy to learn it is not the way to solve their problem.
The moment a society's aim becomes to be like the least competent, then you undermine peoples will to reach competence. And THAT is the end of that society.
This does not at all mean you cannot care for and help those with problems, but we need to have high goals or we'll go the way of the Romans.
The Roman Empire was fantastic. Amazingly advanced. If you study their history you can see how they started to lower and lower their standards, after having been so successful, and one day they were no more.
No, let's not lower our language to what is more like a baby language, just because some have a hard time with it. Let's invest in education instead. Let's make sure kids actually learn by being able to demonstrate what they study. Let's do away with glib tests where you can get top score for memorizing but not being able to APPLY what you supposedly learned.
THAT would be the way out!
grammar error was on a protesters sign (they were protesting against a factory closing):
"Get government off are backs."
No doubt they blamed everyone else but themselves for their low skill job leaving town.
What amazes me is that people fail to proofread before they send in resumes or college applications - the word processor's built in checkers miss may common mistakes; and if they can't be troubled to ensure the one piece of paper they send in to convince me to hire or let them into school, well then I won't waste my time since there are plenty of other applicants who do take the time to craft a well written resume or application.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Given the general standard of spelling and grammar in postings on most message boards (Slashdot excepted) it is hard to not come away with the conclusion that average US people already have a much lower acceptable standard of grammar and spelling compared to posters from other countries.
That factor combined with the US's general attitude of slob-like convenince at any cost might explain the mentality behind this horrible proposal.
I don't see what that has to do with Tourette syndrom (spontanious motor ticks and/or speech). Did you mean some other syndrom?
This is a problem that I have put a lot of thought into, and a lot of posters in this thread have already put forth some of the problems in changing the way things are spelled. I know of exactly one change that I would make to English spelling, that ties together two loose ends nicely: In words with a "hard" ch, like chemistry, I'd replace the 'ch' with 'q' while leaving words with soft ch alone.
In the general case, I'm in favor of not changing how things are spelled. However, history has shown many cases where a written language initially comes up short in telling us how its words map to the related spoken language. For example, the Egyptian writing systems and some systems from Semitic languages generally omit vowel sounds. This is fine for people who know the words already, but centuries later we needed the Rosetta stone and some clues from Coptic to re-learn how to speak ancient Egyptian, and nobody knows how to speak the tetragrammaton. The Greeks solved this by reapportioning Phoenician letters that represented sounds not used in Greek to vowels, and this practice spread with each subsequent adaptation. Meanwhile, since languages like Hebrew didn't have infant writing systems to reapportion or add to as necessary, after a false start with the Aramaic practice of reusing consonants for some vowels, they added diacritics to disambiguate the way that different words are pronounced. The Arabic script also follows this tradition.
A similar thing happened with the development of a Latin-derived script for Vietnamese, and the romanization of Chinese words from its various spoken forms. There was nothing in the Latin alphabet to represent the various inflection forms, so marks were added to these systems to represent these things (in some cases, numbers at the end of each syllable to classify them).
In keeping with this historically sound idea, I propose that English speakers and writers should allow themselves the use of a diacritic system to mark the different ways a letter or letter combination can be sounded. This can also mark silent letters (though my favorite method of a slash through the letter is hard to accomplish with current typefaces unless composing in LaTeX) and stressed syllables.
I'm not saying that it will be easy to develop a system like this. But since diacritics have been almost completely dropped from English (in the early 20th century a diaresis was sometimes used to mark the separation of vowels in words like cooperation) we have practically no restrictions and plenty of common marks to work with (acute, grave, umlaut, hook, circumflex, caret, caron, cedilla, macron, dot, etc.)
Esperanto is the simplest and most consistent language I've seen.
There have been dumber things proposed that actually made it.... ...
the DMCA
the FCC ... and now it is looking like the Broadcast flag may be close behind
In times when you can be sued for content you left out of software because somebody hacks it and puts it in, no ideas are TOO stupid to make it through congress
Right after all keyboards are Dvorak and we measure everything in metric.
Bostoners and New Yorkers and Atlanteans pronounce many words in different ways. Who gets to be the official "correct" one?
This is totally off topic, but this drives me insane -- creating names to identify citizenry. A few places have names that lend themselves well -- "New York" to "New Yorker", but most do not. I cringe whenever I hear someone muse over questions such as "A bunch of Balti.. Balt.. uh, what's the word for someone from Baltimore? Baltimorian? Baltimoron?"
The answer is that there IS NO WORD. There is no such thing as "Atlantean" (how do you know it's not "Atlantan"?) or Bostoner (why not "Bostonian"?)
Instead of inventing ridiculous, made-up words, this sentence could have read, "People from Boston, New York, or Atlanta pronounce many words..."
Drives me nuts.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Aoccrding to rscheearch at Cambdirge Uniservity, it dseon't mettar in waht oedrr the ltteers in a wrod are. The olny imoprtant tnihg is taht the frist and lsat lteter be in the rgiht palce. The rset can be a ttoal mses and you can stlil raed it witohut plobrem. Tihs is becasue the hmuan mnid deos not raed evrey lteter by itlesf, but the wrod as a whloe.
:-)
Now, hnviag siad all taht, I porpose taht form now on, evreydoby sholud jsut spmily inculde the frist and lsat ltteers of ecah wrod tehy wirte and flil in all the mildde lettres wtih undcrseore cearacthrs olny. If antyhing, at lesat it wlil mkae eveoyrne beocme mcuh betetr at gusseing 'Wheel of Fotrune' wrod puezlzs.
Now let's everybody see if Josh Nimoy's server can take it
I don't really think that our goofy spelling has that much to do with our country's literacy and folks with spelling problems. Consider Japanese. It has two phonetic syllabaries with 46ish characters each, so that's easy enough. But then you have to know 2000ish general-use kanji, almost each one with at least two completely different pronunciations, to read the newspaper. And Japan has historically had one of the highest literacy rates in the world, though I don't have a citation. And I've heard that recently the kidlets are having trouble keeping up with the kanji, as they become as lazy as Western students.
There is no benefit to a change like this.
The illiterate will still be unable to read.The functionally illiterate will continue to be so.
Those who have worked hard to reach a good level will find themselves back at the start.
The well educated will find themselves with the reading level of a third grader.
In 50 years, 20th century literature and even newspapers will be as easy to read as Chaucer is to 15 year olds now.
Perhaps these clever people would like to change our musical system too? Surely it would be more logical to have 10 semitones in an octave! And we could get rid of that horrible musical notation stuff and replace it with something more modern looking...
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Speaking as someone who wants to bring back "thou" as the second person personal pronoun: No way!
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Is this parent post a joke?
double-plus-ungood
Unfortunately Dallas schools are rated poorly. Sixth out of six in Texas - http://tinyurl.com/mh4zc
There is enough money for football coaches though - http://tinyurl.com/rfblv
This district should be the laughingstock of the nation and illustrates that money is not the problem.
It is almost never the amount of funding that is the problem. It is the use of the funds available.
The purpose of language is to communicate ideas. An effective language is one which its rules are easily learned. It should be well structured with no exceptions. Anyone, knowing these rules, should be able to pronounce any word encountered correctly by following these simple rules. 'Keep it simple, stupid.' The easier it is to learn a language the faster it will be adopted; which leads to faster disseminate knowledge; which leads to the ascension of society as a whole. The English language is a mass of contradicting rules with a poor foundation. I before E, except after C, except in science? Inconstistent characters in a syllable? It is contains unnecessary letters (usage is arbitrary), lacks letters for common phonetic sounds. It is a complex language that impedes communication. You should not need to study a language for 12 years + college only to encounter an arcane word which an even more arcane rule has been applied to. This complexity impedes progress. It also assaults a mind that demands logical, consistent, structure. Children are taught rote memorization of words because phonetic reading cannot work in such an illogical system. It is so complex that text to speech programmers have struggled to get where they are today. A phonetic language with fixed character lengths per syllable is simple. It promotes easy readying and easy writing. It removes the barrier completely and allows one to get on with the communicating. Official movements to retrofit the language will make little headway. Academic/emotional/commercial/inertia resistance. But slowly the language will evolve. We will toss away the unnecessary elements and stream line it. The text message generation will be more forgiving with infractions against proper English. It would be nice to see the kings English fall into obscurity and be replaced with something better suited for the purposes.
"I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way."
-Mark Twain
The BBC of course!
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Well I was right about 500 comments. Looks like it's going to go well over 1000 if the current rate keeps up!
Oh, I love articles about spelling! It always gets the conversation going.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
You can check it out at www.truespel.com . If you click the "Converter" button you can convert any web page or text from English spelling to Truespel or back. Full disclosure, I wrote the two-way converter which can be adapted to simplified spelling systems.
There is a set of four books describing the system written by Tom Zurinskas, creator the system. They are available on the website
Lets just take the spellings that 8 year olds give during Spelling Bees and make them the standard!
The U.S does not adopt the metric system for the simple reason that there is absolutely no need to for day-to-day use. The fact that there are some bass-ackwards number of feet in a mile matters to me not a bit when I am looking down at the dash of my car. Likewise the number of square feet in an acre, or any of the other wacky measurements. When I measure myself on a scale, it is enough for me to know that I weigh 150lbs. The fact I have no idea how to convert that into grains or long tons is really not a problem. Yes, a user of U.S measurements must remember a few of the unit-to-unit conversions for day to day use, but these are not so many that it is a huge problem. (oz/lb, in/ft, ft/yd, oz/cup, cup/pint, pint/qt, qt/gal, t/T, boiling, freezing) This is not much harder than remembering the different SI prefixes.
The only one that pisses me off is the fluid oz. vs. the mass oz. It also annoys me that U.S. recipe books specify dry ingredients by volume instead of weight. This is so imprecise for easily compacted ingredients, it is not even remotely amusing, but this is the fault of cookbook authors, not the measurement system.
For scienctific use, of course we should all use metric because it makes the math easier, and I don't know of any school that teaches science past elementary school using anything but metric.
The British still use miles for long distance measurements, and for weights (of people anyway), "stone" is the most common I have read.
SirWired
English is a huge language with a vast amount of momentum, It needs to be replaced. Esperanto or LogLan seem to be a very nice seed to build a replacement language. In the long term this is a very good move. Of course this is a pipe dream, as America cant wean itself off standard weights and measures. There is no reason to believe that the world will wean itself off English as a common trade language.
Storm
This is even stupider an idea than ebonics. I'm sick to death of repeated attempts to make culture ever more common, coarse, and unrefined. Standards for academic, intellectual, and literary achievement can't be made low enough — there's always someone who will fail to meet the standard. By lowering standards and expectations, all we achieve is further dumbing down our country and culture, which is already quite coarse and crude enough as it is, thank you very much.
Now would be the time. They've finally got a president who would be sympathetic to gutting the English language in the interests of 'simple words for simple people.' Maybe he'll make it retroactive so he's always been right when he said 'nucular'.
It's not SCHOOL, It's SKOOL!
DOOM to all non-/.ers!!!!
Learning the arbitrary rules of spelling should be the least of our concerns in education since it's an exercise in rote memorization, not logical analysis. Plus, even if children are adept at picking up new words, adults aren't, so if we want English to remain as a dominant language in other parts of the world, we should make it easy to learn. Finally, arguments in favor of keeping our idiosyncratic spelling system in place are becoming less relevant since people are relying on spell checkers. But then I guess Slashdotters would be deprived of one of their least useful comments: criticizing someone's spelling.
So what is the rule for forming the adjective? We can form (at least) two hypotheses:
- Add the sound -ly to the end of the noun except in various exceptional cases. In particular, crumb is a really weird one-off exception because you add a -bly to the end.
- Add the sound -ly to the end of the noun except for various exceptions. Crubmly is not an exception but we have to adopt the general rule that -mb at the end of a word is pronounced with a silent 'b'.
The second rule is probably better because it doesn't make a special case exception of crumb. And what's nice is that the spelling of crumb, despite having a silent -b, makes some kind of logical sense. If we spelled 'crumb' as 'crum', we'd be reflecting the first rule, and 'crumbly' would be a weird exception.The point is that English spelling often reflects some underlying regularity when you look at the bigger picture. If you wanted to fix English spelling you'd probably need to 'fix' English grammar in order to remove a bunch of spurious spelling rules. That's pretty unlikely to happen, and neither should it.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
clap clap clap clap
I could not have said it better.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The parent possibly is a troll, but it expresses a common wrong belief. English speech continues changing. Do You Speak American? was an entertaining look at how it has changed. http://www.pbs.org/speak/ In particular, look here.
We already have a standardized phonetic way to spell English words. It's called "Shorthand".
As a republican I feel it my responsibity to manufacture criminals. People need punished!
It can join the ranks of spellings such as "color" and "optimization" in the American Dictionary.
Sorry, I couldn't resist
There's been spelling reform after spelling reform to 'simplify' things. With each reform, new exceptions to the rules were introduced to prevent words from 'looking weird' (or whatever reasons they came up with). Result: Due to all the exceptions to the rules, nowadays it is a lot more complicated to get your Dutch spelling right than before. In fact, right now I have less trouble spelling English right, than doing so in my own mother language. So, bad idea. Don't change the spelling rules; the language is already messed up enough as it is.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
A Language is not a static thing. It evolves over time. People has been complaining about simplification for centuries. If they where right, we should not be able to put two words together by now.
I don't hear a lot of poets complaining about the dropping quality of the language.
Ugh argh oh no..
Max M - IT's Mad Science
Figure out the whole i before e except after c .... or in whatever WEIRD word i am trying to spell ......
;p
:(
:(
hehe, just give us a new vowel or drop one
Mostly the whole thing seems a bit overdone. Some will creep in and a few could use a push tho. Maybe we need to change some pronunciation.
You are never gonna just change it all en masse, anyway, no matter how confusing some of it is
Oh well, just wanted to slap the teacher that taught us the i before e thing as it fails as often as it works
This is a plot by the RIAA to simplify the language, so that they can produce automated rap generators to seel music from. Oh wait, what? It's been invented... 50 what?
For the record...I think it's stoopid.
As for me, I demand nothing less than total disambiguation. We need sufficient variation in spelling to make sure that the sense of each word is clear. I shouldn't have to depend on context to infer what you mean. If you reply to this post and call me "slipshod," I want to know that you are referring to the sloppy, careless reasoning of my post, and not to the looseness of my footwear (for which I propose to the new substitute "slipshoed"). Likewise, trademarks using common words will be disambiguated from the meaning of those words - popular word game Scrabble would need to be renamed, as this spelling is already in use by at least four other meanings, each of which will need its own variation anyhow. We can keep "scrabble" for "to scratch or scrape," but make subtle changes to the rest; "scragble" for "to struggle toward a goal," "scrubble" for "to climb over" (as over rubble!) and the sense "to scribble" should simply be eliminated, as "scribble" is already too close to "scrabble" anyway and might as well be handled as a variant of pronunciation. The game itself might be renamed B-3, after the second letter in the alphabet and its point value in the game (A-1 having been used for the tasty steak sauce and several thousand local plumbing, towing, and other services companies vying for the first spot in the telephone directory, each of which will celebrate its uniqueness with a new, never-before-seen name). Each town with the same name as another will also need to be reborn under a new moniker (surely a cause for revelry in the Midways, Fairviews, and Oak Groves of the world!). Finally, each of us whose name unfortunately coincides with that of another, shall have to make the tiniest of adjustments, on a first-come, first-served basis; thus, the eldest John Smith on record shall keep his spelling, while the next shall have to be subtly altered (Johnn Smith), and the next altered only the tiniest bit (Jahnn Smith), and so on (Djahnne Pschmiythe). For completeness, the birth and death certificates, tax and census records, and headstones or memorial plaques of some few billions of our ancestors shall likewise need to be "tweaked," possibly according to some fractal algorithm in cases where no living relatives can recommend how John might have preferred it, if only he'd taken the opportunity.
Has anyone tried to search for articles on C language using search keyword as 'C'?
Isn't it a lot easier to find stuff for Python? The point is a weird spelling in a name or word helps a lot in computer searches (say in Google). That's yet another point in favor to retain existing traditional complex spellings.
I beg to differ. Phonetic writing may not have worked for the Norse, but that doesn't mean it's not practical. Finnish language is practically phonetic; if you ignore the new words coming from English, French etc. all the Finnish words are pronounced like they're written. (With the sole exceptions of words with 'nk' and 'ng' in them but even there the correct pronunciation isn't very far from what you'd expect) For a Finnish person English feels almost chaotic as you can never be sure how a new word should be pronounced. In Finnish you can. But I do agree that trying to simplify English is a pretty futile task.
Holding on to antiquated spelling is ridiculous. I think it's mandatory to rethink our language and rethink how we spell words based upon the sound rather than some obscure "i before e" philosophy. Words should be spelled like they sound! People who are against this are probably the reason why we haven't moved to the metric system in the US.
The point is that not only are things spelled wierd but also that there are multiple words that sound the same and have differnt meanings so what people should say is "In which manner would you determine the effect of gravity upon watery milk byproducts?", cause then they are saying what they mean and not some confusing crap. But while we are at it lets get rid of standard weights an messures so that they can just say, "How did you determine the mass of the whey."
Fascinating. No Really.
No != know.
Aint Never = double negative = is not never = will occur.
Congratulations on your $8 an hour life.
I'm sure you'll be very happy together.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Well that wud just suc. I alredy lerned how to spel everiething and now thay want two change it?
We see absolutely nothing wrong with our English. If the population has difficulty with spelling, then let them speak "leet"!
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Americans have already started this with their spelling mistakes.
....The list goes on
colour
favourite
honour
enrolment
fulfil
skilful
analogue
analyse
centre
Instead of "reform" of something that doesn't belong to them why don't they get thier own fucking language, then they can "simplify" it to a level where thier tiny little brains can handle it.
God Be Gone
While I am not familiar with shifts in the instruction of spelling/reading since I was in elementary school twenty-ish years ago ,(I dimly recall phonics books in 3rd and 4th grade, but spelling books during and after that time) I can tell you that proficient readers don't read phonetically. Phonics can make English easier to learn, but in my experience it can be a huge crutch in learning to read at any decent speed.
:-) Typing has nothing to do with spelling.
Also, if you learn by whole words, then misspelled words don't "look right" when written. I sucked in my elementary school spelling bee, but if I write a word down, I usually have no problem telling if it is spelled correctly or not (although guessing at the corect spelling can be tough). Since so many English words are NOT phonetically spelled, it can make it harder to catch misspellings, or spell correctly to begin with, for that matter.
If you read by sounding out each word on the page in your head it takes forever to read anything for the simple reason that the eyes/language system of the brain can process words MUCH faster than your speech system can render them. If you learn to recognize words by sight, without sounding them out, your reading speed increases dramtically. I am something of a speed reader and have progressed from a word at a time to comprehending written text about a clause or so at a time. I don't even see individual words anymore.
My 12-yr old Niece is a terrible speller, and reading anything she wrote takes me forever because she spells so many things phonetically. I can sound out what she wrote easily enough, but the part of my brain that usually handles reading screams in protest since so many words simply aren't recognized.
Interestingly enough, for whatever reason, the part of my brain that handles typing seems to run phonetically (I type out the wrong homonym all the time), while the part that reads does not... I guess I don't type enough.
SirWired
P.S. No cracks about the inevitable typing mistakes in this post
Oh Please god no.
This because Americans have the most diabolical pronunciation of English. If they get their greedy, Americentric hands on spellings of English (not American, please note!) words, then they won't be spelled phonetically at all: they'll be absolutely particular to US usage (and then, WHICH US usage is the question!) and therefore other English speaking peoples will only be able to have a stab in the dark at the "korekt" spelling unless they know how "Amereekans" pronounce it.
No, this is as dumb as the Imperial System of weights and measures.
Oh - and I love the fact Americans use the Imperial System. It seems to be rubbing off on you...
Oh, And While I'm At It: Why The Fuck Do Americans Stupidly Capitalise The First Letter Of Every Word When Writing Headings And Shit? It Makes It Hard To Read. Sweet Baby Jebus.
Note: English is a language which not only "borrows" words from other languages, it will chase them down dark alleys, knock them over the head, and then go through their pockets, to see what they've got.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
This reminds me something that happened to me a few years ago. Believe it or not but this is actually a true story. I repeat... this really IS a true story! I am not making this up!
... she had to give a presentation of her work ........ yes ..... you guessed it .... in either English or English.
... yes ... you guessed it again. She prepared a speech in Spanish and I translated it into English. Now, those of you that are bilingual or speak good Spanish know that in the latter language EVERYTHING with about 1 exception (que?) is pronounced exactly as it's written. Spanish has very few vowels (A, E, I, O, U can each only be pronounced in one way), so it occurred to me to translate a 3/4 of an hour presentation from proper English to English-like pronounciation using the very simple Spanish rules.
A friend of mine, who is a sculptor, comes up to me one day and says she really wants to go to a conference in Norway. Lots of famous sculptors, opportunities to meet relevant people in her sector, an opportunity to learn lots of new things...
Next thing she does is give me the forms etc. etc. to fill out for her because she is Spanish and doesn't know any English. When I say "she doesn't know any English" I mean she doesn't even know "yes" or "no". (Well, she does know "no" because it's the same in Spanish, but you get my drift)
So what I did is translate the forms into Spanish and have her fill in the replies. I then filled in the forms for her in perfect English.
To her surprise she was accepted, and invited to the conference. They were so impressed with her work that she was invited at no cost (they even paid for her flight) with one condition
Of course I had been a bit cheeky and put on the form that her English was "quite good" (because it was a prerequisite to be accepted).
I thought she'd give up but no...
Guess what we did
In the end it became so easy for me that I could just write:
"Elou jau ar iu tudei. Ai am duin fain zank iu. Zi uezer tudei is veri nais."
without even thinking about it.
Next thing my friend did was practice for about 2 weeks... after which I set her loose on a few English speaking friends of mine and... believe it or not they actually understood what she was reading.
So, of course, she set of to Norway, went to her (free) 5 star hotel and next day gave her speech. She tells me that, what happened next is a follows:
1) a big round of applause.
2) about 30 minutes for the audience to ask her questions.
I don't know what happened next, she never told me.
To say nothing of other relative advantages/disadvantages of these languages, the spelling is much more straightforward. My wife is a native Spanish-speaker, and she constantly tells me how much harder it is to spell and read English. Moreso, now that my son is learning how to spell, I find myself talking about the exceptions to an inordinate degree.
The thing is that Spanish (and Esperanto, I think) have additional letters in their alphabet that make the sounds that we attempt to make by smooshing letters together in odd formations. "eigh", "ay", etc, all make the "long a" sound, for example. Why don't we use a distinct letter for this sound, and another distinct letter for the "short a" sound? That's how dictionaries do it -- they even already have the symbols worked out. Just look at the pronunciation key.
If this were to happen, I believe that the answer is not in "spelling phonetically" -- at least with the existing alphabet. I believe the answer is to expand the alphabet to include the dictionary's phonetic symbols (or substituting them where appropriate). We'd end up teaching kids 35 symbols instead of 26, but I think that's a hell of a lot easier than teaching them myriad spelling exceptions, double letters, phonetic groupings, etc.
The only real drawback I see is that the alphabet song would need a new tune.
Our schools are fine.
At least, they were until people (politicians) started dicking with them in an effort to solve the education "problem".
The problem is cultural. It's us.
If they were serious about fixing schools, they'd just model them after one of the dozens of systems in other countries that are always touted as being so much better.
But then, when that failed to improve things, we'd have to admit that it's the society and the parents who are at fault.
Now, we've got the two parties in some sort of misguided war over our public schools, but it's got nothing to do with education. It's become an ideological war, and its effect is that our schools actually are kind of messed up now. They're a battleground, and they're getting the shit shelled out of them. It's like if India and Pakistan were to go to war over the Kashmere region--sure, one side might get it, but it'd be a deforested, cratered wasteland.
Shit, one side doesn't even want the schools to exist at all. Look at No Child Left Behind, talk to some teachers and administrators about it, compare what schools are like now to what they were like 10-15 years ago, and maybe take a look at the state of schools in certain Republican-majority states (*cough*Texas*cough*). There are enough people out there willing to saboutage our schools in the name of privatization that even when someone (in EITHER party) actually has the balls to stand up and try to restore some level of sanity in our education system, someone else just comes along a year or two later and breaks it again, before any of the GOOD reforms can even have much of an effect. And NO ONE is willing to tell people "it's not us, it's you", so ALL politicians feel the need to screw around with the schools when they're seen as not performing well enough, usually resulting in something that's no better, if not worse.
Then they get on TV and talk about how broken our schools are, and how the HOLY MARKET is the only way to save them, and how we must act quickly because all of those students in Europe and Japan (most of whom went to public schools) are SO MUCH SMARTER.
And then we're back to: there was nothing wrong with the schools in the first place. We need a cultural revolution or we can forget about improving those good ol' test scores, because it's not going to happen, no matter what we do or don't do to our education system.
So, no, I'm not even sure that changing the use of the money provided by the current level of funding would change anything, let alone that it would definitively fix the problem. Hell, I think that we could cut a bunch (and give a lot more of the resulting, smaller budget to teachers than we do now) and still be fine. What we need to do is to stop deliberately fucking with the schools, and to start emphasizing reading and learning in our homes and in our culture. Anything else is political masturbation.
Sorry for the rant. This whole topic just really pisses me off, because it's all so stupid.
I don't remember who it was, but there were (are?) proponents of modifying the english language to look/sound like Sanskrit (with it's 50 basic syllables/alphabets/phenomes) which cover then entire range of sounds that emanate from the human mouth (with the tongue striking various parts of the mouth).
:)
As a result of Sanskrit basic structure and it's algebraic grammar, it is an ideal role-model for how a good language should look/sound like.
As a result, one could write, spell and speak the language without abberations/distortions (we call them accents these days)...
So "but" and "put" would sound alike (or be spelt differently)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit)
<rant>
Really? But 10/4 = 2.5. 10/8 = 1.25 10/3 = 3.33 (OK, that last one is only, as Intel would say, good enough for non-technical people) and if you prefer to work with integers, just switch (e.g.) from metres to millimetres. People just don't think that way, because they have been brainwashed by the fractions mafia.
The problem is that to really embrace metric you need to embrace place notation and kick fractions out into the long grass of mathematical curiosities. At least stop wasting hours of valuable school time trying (and usually failing) to teach kids to add and multiply the bloody stupid things - and put it to a better use - such as teaching the decimal system properly.
Now, the last time I needed to add fractions... lets see... Oh yes, I was writing a calculator emulator that had to do "proper" addition of fractions... D'oh!
Sorry - I have a chip on my shoulder, as I belong to the generation of UK citizens that was never taught the stupid imperial system in school and am proud of neither knowing or caring how many feet there are in a mile. We'd just gone to decimal currency, and anybody with a brain cell (i.e. not in government) assumed that the foot and the ounce would shortly be following the shilling into history. Of course, they still tried to dress it up to sound like the old units with silly rhymes like "10 millimetres once centimetre, 10 centimetres one decimetre..." instead of teaching us what the bloody prefixes actually meant but it was a start.
</rant>
Next up, why all the hot air about KB and MB versus kibblebytes and mugglebytes (or whatever they're called) when we should be using 2^8, 2^16, 2^32, 2^64 to match computer register sizes...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Besides, in the USA we have already reformed the English language.
And after the world cup, we'll all be learning French. Or Italian.
Very annoying spelling. Most anyone online knows how to read English, and spell properly. There is no reason to reform. Try to learn French and then you'll see illogical spelling (silent h's, e's, s's, even ent's (ils form), etc). I only disagree with ch, sh, and th; none of these make any sense t + h when split does not make th (Voiceless Dental fricative that many foreign language speakers cannot do quite right unless they speak Arabic). C + h does not make the ch sound (Voiceless postalveolar affricate), and s + h does not make sh (voiceless palato-alveolar fricative). I would not mind using the the thorn letter () for th, for ch, and for sh; it makes way more sense.
The other issue is that a spelling system works much more effectively if homophones can be spelt differently. In Chinese, this problem was solved by making a different character for every word, even if they sounded the same, and much was done the same way in Japanese, but the downside is how much longer it can take to read this way. In French and English, this is of course done by spelling differently (their, there, they're) and in French (moi (me), mois (month, s is silent)).
Spelling is changing all the time but not in a major way. Through is becoming thru, and you maybe someday might be u (although I would hate this). The other problem with English, unlike Spanish, is that there are many dialects in a sort of close area. Boston is only 40 minutes away from me and I'll start hearing words like car become simply kaah and park become paak, then I could go to Lowell not too far away (pronounced Lohl in Lowell, I pronounce it Lo-wull). In Spanish, the problem is not there because everyone was given the same spellings a long time ago and they read with their accent, which of course we do, but anyone learning Spanish would see how much more logical the spelling is.
I think the major reason for this is because the spellings were simply set whether people liked it or not, and not much has changed since then regardless of accents; there were not that many speakers at the time (just Spain) that it could make an impact. In English, it's far too radical to tell 515 million speakers (Englishtoday to spell differently. We all spell the same (mostly) and pronounce according to our dialect. Changes will occur, but nothing major will ever happen in English spelling.
Also note that unlike many other languages, English shows the origins of many words. Yacht is a strange one to anyone who doesn't know where it comes from, but it comes from Dutch, and of course in Dutch the ch is pronounced (like a k). Knife and knight used to pronounce the K sound. Today the K in knight helps majorly to anyone reading because then they automatically know the word is referring to a knight, not a night.
I studied english by myself, and learned the grammatical rules. The rest comes with experience. I became very frustrated when I began chatting with people over the internet, and found aberrations like "should of".
The word "of" denotes posession, it's NOT a verb, and cannot possibly go in front of "should". Why is that so f***ing hard to learn? The first time I read "should of" in a chat, I was caught completely off guard and couldn't understand what people were trying to tell me, until they explained.
So, who's right? The people who learn grammar rules properly, or those who don't?
The truth is that kids DO NOT LEARN these rules at school. Why? And why are teachers so tolerant with people who don't learn to spell "should have" properly?
But if what you're telling me is true (that spelling and grammar isn't taught until 4th grade), then school education is truly f***ed up.
Actually, it is "Bostonian". Every city has one generally accepted name for the people of the city. Despite what you claim, yes, there is a word. These words have in many cases existed and been used regularly for hundreds of years, so I'm wondering, what does a word have to do to actually be valid in your eyes? Evey word had to be made up at some point.
I could understand your complaint if people from Boston were called "Yarkenfargers" or something, but in this case, words like Bostonian, New Yorker, Pennsylvanian, etc. are concise and intuitive to whoever hears it.
Yes, instead of saying "New Yorkers", one could say "people from New York" every time. Likewise, instead of saying "northerner", one could say "people from the north", and instead of saying "orwellian", we could just say "in a manner similar to that portrayed in the works of George Orwell". How are these examples any more valid as words than ones that describe inhabitants of a place?
The only reason everybody doesn't know the name for someone from every city is because they don't have to; it doesn't come up. If you live in San Francisco, you aren't talking about Bostonians very much at all, you are talking about Californians and Oregonians. But for people who live in the New England area, the word "Bostonian" comes up quite often!
Similarly, those who aren't in the medical field might not know all the terminology a doctor uses, but the words are still quite useful to doctors on a daily basis.
In short, get over it. In terms of longevity, these are much more firmly established words than, say, "computer" or "airplane" or "light switch". They are real words. Just deal. At least these words convey something meaningful.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
is going to looose.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
if marklar would marklar all the marklar from marklar on top of marklar with the marklar previuously referred to as marklar, would then marklar have to marklar all their marklar to marklar?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Bah, screw that coordination crap. We're Americans, we don't play that game. In any event, I've long been a "living language" proponent. This causes my wife no end of consternation as she's a spelling purist. While watching the Scripps spelling bee on TV last month, she remarked, "by your logic it would be impossible to lose a spelling bee." Exactly.
I'm sure it happens in more places than just Dallas. I used to be buddy-buddy with the librarian at our high school. I saw some of the crap she bought, and that was even for the school. But like a lot of corporate America, you are actually punished for being frugal - if you don't spend your whole budget this year, you get a smaller one next year, when you may actually need it. So, better to buy a bunch of crap so your budget doesn't get cut.
As a republican I feel it my responsibity to manufacture criminals. People need punished!
===================
I am one of those people, and it may be luck or early grounding, who does not find it difficult to spell in the dictionary fashion, and I have some grave concerns about the concept of freespeling.
First of all, as someone who uses technical documentation every day, I believe that freespeling will introduce ambiguities. If I cannot rely on people always to spell the same word in the same way, how can I be sure that they actually mean the word I think they mean?
Secondly, it is my experience that freely spelled words are not, in fact, easier to read. I am not an educationalist, but I understand from limited reading that when one reads, one does not, in fact, construct the sound of the word by translating the page letters into phonetics. Rather, you learn the shape of a word, and the pattern 'yacht' is read and understood for its meaning without some intermediate step of working out that ach has the sound of a short o in this context. Dyslexia is an imperfection in this mechanism, and I don't think freespeling is going to help.
I distinctly remember, as a child, reading the word 'Colonel' and not knowing that it was the same word as the military rank, though I did know that word. It wouldn't have helped to have had it spelled Kernel, though, because then the abbreviation Col. throughout literature would have been obscured. That brings me to a third point - if freespeling becomes widely adopted, people unfamiliar with the dictionary spellings will find it much harder to read the vast literary legacy which has arisen since the standardization of spelling. (And yes, I know that might have been standardisation!). I fear that we shall be in a situation analogous to the everyday reader trying to get to grips with Chaucer, or even Shakespere in his original spellings. It's not easy to do; at least I can't do it.
I am sure that Shakesperian spellings are a product of pronunciation at the time of writing - Shakespere wrote 'dye' for the word we write as 'die' (or I do, in any event) because he pronounced it with two vowel sounds - dy-e. Will freespeling track the changes in pronunciation? If so, for which national or regional accent? In Bristol (UK), the speech pattern is often to add a terminal L sound to words ending in a vowel - should it be acceptable for Bristolians to write 'good ideal' when they want to convey 'good idea'? Or read Uncle Remus, written gloriously but phonetically in the speech pattern of a US slave at the turn of the nineteenth century. It's freely spelled, but it needs a good deal of intellectual effort to extract the meanings.
Finally, I am concerned about information retrieval. At the moment, much information on the World-Wide Web, and in electronic document repositories is automatically indexed word by word. (This is on the false premise that the words in a document tell you what it is about). If words are freely spelled, then the task of retrieval becomes so much harder. To find documents about 'building', one will need to search for 'bilding', too, and in many cases you won't even be able to guess how someone with an accent very different to your own might have spelled the word you are seeking.
I shall continue to correct spellings wherever I think that an error is a barrier to understanding.
=================
I'd also like to add that the Austrians attempted a simplified spelling of German, contrary to the article stating that German is already simply spelled, and have reverted in considerable measure. Sorry, no citation for that.
- the language is ENGLISH. Not American.
If there's any alteration to be done, WE will do it. Not you.
You've already made enough of a mess, with your 'gotten' and 'color'.
You want a language to ruin - make one up yourself. Or perhaps you could adopt Spanish?
Tear or meany different kind oaf pee pull who visit thus sight. Sum oaf ewe half a reedy disorder culled "dyslexia." Thus disorder mucks it hoard four people two reed. They half too pick the words out on bye on in try to fig you are out whet the words owl mean. Folks wit thus disorder half a very hoard thyme in school, in meany drop out.
Sum oaf ewe half "hyperlexia." Eye am won oaf those people. Hyperlexics reed very fats, in retain must oaf what they reed. Four tease people, reading aye novel is butter tin watching a flim on television. Owl the action is awl around the reader, wit awl sounds in even smells present.
Four thus oaf us who are hyperlexic, a internet page tat half meany words spilled wrong is berry frustrating. Two reed a page wit a hole lots oaf words spilled wrong makes it like ewe or dyslexic. This is a god read son two pee view you're post.
Owl sew, meany oaf ewe or to dependant own tea spill chucker. Sew please remember tat tear is a page called dictionary.com wear ewe kin go two sea wow a word its supposed two bee spilled. An remember that an apostrophe is four a possessive oar a con track shun, an is never used four a plural. On list it's aye plural con track shun ore a okural posie its have.
Sew in conclusion, owl way bee sore you are words or spilled right an your punctuation is correct. Unless, oaf coarse, ewe or a dyslexic who wounds wee hyperlexics two sea what id is like too bee dyslexic, oar ewe or a maroon.
-------
This post was spell checked
-steve
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Why stop at spelling, lets simplify the whole language! Less is more I tell you! Destroy as many words as possible! What use is the word bad when its just a form of the word good, ungood would suffice to protray the same meaning! I tell you, Newspeak is the future, and the future is doubleplusgood.
Why is this sad? "Thru" is more economical than "through", sounds the same, is in common use, and is unambiguous in meaning. Language should be allowed to evolve.
If language did not evolve and we did not allow for changes in the English language we'd be making posts that sounded like a Elizabethan era play:
"Thou art privy to mine code licenseth henceforth as GPL! Thou art forbodden to present ye argument that henceforth BSD is superior to our tavern keeper!"
But seriously, trying to make English a permanent static monolithic thing will limit us when we come across new ideas that we cannot express with our current language.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I blame the guy that spelled duv d.o.v.e. This caused millions of english students failing grades. A simple sentence, "John dove into the water", would receive the red circle "sp" -50% from hell. Why you ask? Because of that bastard that spelled duv d.o.v.e! I have it on good authority it is the same guy that caused the left leaved debocle too. Elvis might have leaved building but don't put it in writing! See! Nooooo!
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Kublai Kahn mandated a phonetic alphabet, but it ultimately failed. It is just too difficult to change. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_alphabet
Favorite Sumo Move:
Hataki Noi (Frontal Slap Down)
IIRC, Dyslexia has to do with the processing of serialized patterns to/from "language". For visual problems, this is Dyslexia, speech problems become speech impediments, hearing becomes Auditory Processing Disorder, etc. It has nothing to do with reading instruction, literacy, intelligence, writing systems, grammar, etc.
SirWired
Ever heard of the Unifon Alphabet? http://www.unifon.org/
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
1. French have done it. See this. Microsoft was one of the driving factors.
2. Russians did it in 1917 by dropping the "hard sign" in most places and getting rid of the letter "yat'" as well as changing the spelling of some words, which made everything more readable.
Hauever, if Inglish woz tu bi chen'gd intu a fonetic len'gwich, it wood soon bikam eether simil'ar tu Dzhermun or Dutch in spelin'g were it origineited.
I speak/write/type Russian, Ukrainian and English. The hardest part about learning English was the vocabulary and getting the patterns of spelling (through, though, etc.). Once that and the grammar rules were down, it wasn't hard from that point forward. Moving to the US at a young age also helped.
I think simple changes such as through=>thru, though=>tho, borough=>boro should be widely adapted as they're easy to implement and people already use them widely.
If big changes were made to a language, we'd experience a couple of problems:
1. Current speakers won't be able to read the new spelling (we read words, not syllables, remember?)
2. Kids in school now will have trouble learning the language their teachers don't know. Then, some teachers will force students to learn the new spelling, while others will prefer the old spelling, and given the fact that we don't have a standardized educational system we won't have a single standard for a couple of generations(why does everything have to be individualized??? France and Russia got right, why can't we adopt their system?!?!?!).
3. Gradual implementation will have to take place. You teach kids spelling from day one in first grade and you go through with it until they graduate from school. You teach the new spellign every in subsequent year, but you don't touch the kids that have already learned spelling and let them re-learn it later, or not learn it at all.
4. For 50 years we need to be willing to accept both types of spelling.
People will have trouble typing using the new spelling. I constantly have trouble typing transliterated words in Russian, using an English keyboard because I know how to type using a real Russian layout and constantly want to switch - think of Dvorak vs. Qwerty - you'd need to change the layout to make typing easier. Even if you don't change it, it will still be harder to type.
As for the metric system - it's much easier. Everything has to be industry-driven. First places that need to change are city planning departments and construction firms. If things change from feet to meters (or metres, if you prefer) everyone will follow. Again, this will have to be done gradually and to an extent it is already done in some industries. Personally, I have a big problem with feet. I can't picture how long 2000 ft is but I can picture 600 m... but that's a matter of preference. I can see it happening the other way around too. Don't get me started on conversions. In the end, it's hard to do reforms and what you need is an event for the reforms to happen suddenly (like a revolution) or a gradual implementation over a number of years (something we in the US don't seem to be able to do since we like instant gratification so much and we don't like to use our brainz).
In eni kejs, itz never too erli to start so wi better start nau wi litl ings.
-Palal
- English spelling is all over the map. It's difficult to learn. Simple spelling reform makes sense.
- The fact that so many people nowadays have bad grammar and worse spelling is due to a failing education system, not the fact that English is complicated. A simplified system will not fix this.
My wife is a native Spanish-speaker, and she constantly tells me how much harder it is to spell and read English
...
I'm a native English speaker, and I told my Spanish teacher how hard that Spanish was to read and write all the time
But, seriously, our alphabet does make things a pain. I'm trying to think of a scenario where the letter 'x' is actually something other than a replacement for 'ks' or 'z'. And then there's the confusion of what 'c' is supposed to sound like. There's a whole paragraph in the appendix of The Silmarillion clarifying how it's supposed to work, because you can't guess not knowing the word (ie, to figure out the pronounciation of a made up word using the English alphabet, you need to ask the person who made it up).
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
C'mon, with simplified spelling, and the gazillion different ways you could "simple spell" just about ANYTHING would lead to a MASSIVE page-count increase in English, "* to English" and "English to *" dictionaries. And with the changeover, the dictionary makers would become MUCH more important in our lives. And a bunch of otherwise idle spelling nazis would become rich.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The King James is the only one using obsolete English - the others, being modern translations, use modern English.
Clear, Dark Skies
Simplified English is doubleplusungood.
What is it with people in this country? Is it too damn difficult to use your brain anymore?
My cousin was diagnosed with dyslexia in his senior year of high school. He got his B.S. degree in English. ANYONE can learn to spell and read. As others have pointed out, the problem, like so many other problems in our society, is that parents don't want to be involved in raising and educating their kids. It's like as soon as their kids can walk and talk, they feel like they've done their share and the rest is the society's responsibility.
This attitude really needs to change around. People need to start reading to their kids more and help teach their kids to read early on. My mother got her degree in English and my father got his in Journalism, so the standards of "functional literacy" in our house, growing up, was a bit higher than average. To some degree, I probably don't really understand how people can grow up not learning to read. Most of my friends growing up didn't seem to have problems learning English either. So, unless children today simply have less brainpower for some reason, there's no reason they can't learn English as well. They just need their parents to get a bit more involved in teaching them English.
I lived in Mexico for 3 years. Spanish is SIMPLE in terms of spelling, but you'd be surprised how poorly people write, in general. My Mexican girlfriend had a degree journalism and I still had to correct her spelling from time to time. I suspect the difference is, her parents didn't teach her to read as a child because they couldn't read, a problem many Mexicans of that generation face. So, parents, take your kids to the bookstore, buy them some books, and spend the evening reading with them. It shouldn't be a chore. It's your child. You should enjoy spending the time with them.
Rather than the numerous ways we write the SH sound, just make all of them s'
-Tion becomes s'on, -Cius becomes s'us. Or the same with Th -> T'. Or having a seperate symbol for long vowels (bars seem like a natural choice).
Something like:
I went to t'e skool to get an edUcas'on.
I don't see it ever happening. And frankly it might be better to scrap English in favor of some kind of Interlang anyway.
also because the U.S./companies/organizations tend to facilitate the needs of those who speak only one language other than English. It gives them no incentive to learn the language. It's not about tourism/tourists or preference when an employer provides applications in other languages.
Blame the user, not the software.
Spanish has had successful spelling reforms. As a result, Spanish is incredibly easy to pronounce. There are some regional variations to pronounciation, but these are fairly easy to remember since there really only the z/soft c and y/ll sounds vary much. This makes it so people that would be illiterate in English can stumble through Spanish (although some have a hard time retaining anything because they have to concentrate so hard). On the other hand Spanish isn't necessarily easy to spell since several letters have the same sound (especially in Latin America/Andalucia). If you go to a hospital or school in the Western US where they have signs in Spanish as well as English then the chances are excellent that there are several spelling errors on the sign.
By what standard? I have studied Japanese for years, and they have far more than we do. This results from the fact that they have far fewer sounds to build from. I have encountered plenty of Japanese words with more than ten independant meanings.
...I think I'll skip the "+5 Funny" posts this time around. I think I can see half of them coming.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
You should switch to spanish... almost no ambiguous spelling
That article on Yahoo was neither cute nor funny.
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
...especially if you can make it through the following: I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs psas it on !!
This is another symptom of the pussification of the United States. No child left behind, lawsuits over exit exams, basically whenever a kid is doing poorly in school, rather than look for a root cause or accept responsibility, the parents call a lawyer.
My kid is so dumb... it's not fair... English is too hard.... Waaaaaaaah.
President "I'm so fucking retarded" Bush was voted in because people find comfort with dumb people. We honor them. We idolize them. Our girls aspire to be Paris Hilton.
Oh my God we're doomed.
Yes kids. It's time for ebonics part two.
I see a lot of posts claiming that engineered writing won't work and that simplified phonetic writing is somehow damaging to the language or impractical for several reasons, but before delving into too much speculation let is try to examine real world applications. My main example is Korea's hangul writing. I actually have taken the time to learn it myself, and it's a wonder to behold and use. Be sure to read up on its history and usage. :)
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
And therefore it is his responsibility to LEARN that he made that mistake and be cautious not to make it again. It is NOT his responsibility to say, "Hey, I can't (or don't want to) learn that, so I expect you to treat my spelling as accurate!" That's what this whole thing is about, isn't it?
Come back and see all of us when you achieve perfection in all things. Considering that you don't even have the balls to post with your real account, I'm guessing that you won't be claiming perfection any time soon.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
While this might be helpful for many /. posters, it's completely irrelevant navel-gazing. We all need to be learning Mandarin Chinese now anyway.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
You dumb Americans have already started it - keep your pollution of the English language
Because we are still bearing some of the scars of our brief skirmish with II-B English, it is natural that we should be enchanted by Mr. Bernard Shaw's current campaign for a simplified alphabet.
Obviously, as Mr. Shaw points out, English spelling is in much need of a general overhauling and streamlining. However, our own resistance to any change requiring a large expenditure of mental effort in the near future would cause us to view with some apprehension the possibility of some day receiving a morning paper printed in - to us - Greek.
Our own plan would achieve the same end as the legislation proposed by Mr. Shaw, but in a less shocking manner, as it consists merely of an acceleration of the normal processes by which the language is continually modernized.
As a catalytic agent, we would suggest that a National Easy Language Week be proclaimed, which the President would inaugurate, outlining some short cut to concentrate on during the week, and to be adopted during the ensuing year. All school children would be given a holiday, the lost time being the equivalent of that gained by the spelling short cut.
In 1946, for example, we would urge the elimination of the soft 'c', for which we would substitute 's'. Sertainly, such an improvement would be selebrated in all sivic-minded sircles as being suffisiently worth the trouble, and students in all sities in the land would be reseptive towards any change eliminating the nesessity of learning the differense between the two letters.
In 1947, sinse only the hard 'c' would be left, it would be possible to substitute 'k' for it, both letters being pronounsed identikally. Imagine how greatly only two years of this prosess would klarify the konfusion in the minds of students. Already we would have eliminated an entire letter from the alphabet.
Typewriters and linotypes, kould all be built with one less letter, and all the manpower and materials previously devoted to making 'c's kould be turned towards raising the national standard of living.
In the fase of so many notable improvements, it is easy to foresee that by 1948, 'National Easy Language Week' would be a pronounsed suksess. All skhool tshildren would be looking forward with konsiderable exsitement to the holiday, and in a blaze of national publisity it would be announsed that the double konsonant 'ph' no longer existed, and that the sound would henseforth be written 'f' in all words. This would make sutsh words as 'fonograf' twenty persent shorter in print.
By 1949, publik interest in a fonetik alfabet kan be expekted to have inkreased to the point where a more radikal step forward kan be taken without fear of undue kritisism. We would therefore urge the elimination, at that time of al unesesary double leters, whitsh, although quite harmles, have always been a nuisanse in the language and a desided deterent to akurate speling. Try it yourself in the next leter you write, and see if both writing and reading are not fasilitated.
With so mutsh progres already made, it might be posible in 1950 to delve further into the posibilities of fonetik speling. After due konsideration of the reseption aforded the previous steps, it should be expedient by this time to spel al difthongs fonetikaly. Most students do not realize that the long 'i' and 'y', as in 'time' and 'by', are aktualy the difthong 'ai', as it is writen in 'aisle', and that the long 'a' in 'fate', is in reality the difthong 'ei' as in 'rein'. Although perhaps not imediately aparent, the saving in taime and efort wil be tremendous when we leiter elimineite the sailent 'e', as meide posible bai this last tsheinge.
For, as is wel known, the horible mes of 'e's apearing in our written language is kaused prinsipaly bai the present nesesity of indikeiting whether a vowel is long or short. Therefore, in 1951 we kould simply eliminate al sailent 'e's, and kontinu to read and wrait merily along as though we wer in an atomik ag of edukation.
In 1951 we would urg a greit step forward. Sins bai this taim it w
English is not the hardest language to learn. There aren't nearly as many rules as other languages (no masculine/feminine, except for people, and no subject-adjective agreement issues) and it is easier to understand poorly spoken/written English than in other languages. If you think there are a lot of exceptions to rules in English, try French, which has far more exceptions, and far more rules.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
...and we can spell nuclear, "newkewlar" for all the idiots who think this is a good idea. It isn't spelling that needs simplifying, it's simpletons who need to learn spelling.
You beat me to it... I was going to say:
>>rather arbitrary use of "a" vs. "the"
>I know that, when I use the word 'the' I intend to point out a specific instance
>of the word the; it is possible that a general instance of the word 'the' may be
>referred to with 'a', not 'the. But I disagree with your claim that it is arbitrary.
The smurfs seemed to smurf their smurf just smurfy, and they smurfed their smurfy smurfed smurfs without to much smurf.
y wood eny1 bootcher the anglesh languidg that badlee. Speleng isint that hard, it just taks practis.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Pörsønøli, ai fiil dvät inglish häs lost träk ov its ruuts änd shud ri'introdjuus dvø gud ould nors käräktørs. DVis wud, in mai øpinjøn, meik it mutsh iisiør tu lörn tu prønaons før non-neitiv spiikørs. Ät dvø seim taim, wii cud duu sumðing øbaot ool dviis sili kombineishuns ov konsønønts bai stiiling sum letørs frøm iistørn Juurøupiiøn längwidshis.
DVø bladi Slashcode mesd ap mai juus ov speshøl käräktørs, sou ai häd tu sabstitjuut sam daigrafs. Ai houp dvät dasnt bovør juu tuu matsh.
Melvil Dewey, famous for inventing the Dewey Decimal Classification system for books, was a big proponent of spelling reform. He was somewhat successful, being responsible for many of the differences between "British" and "American" spelling, like catalogue vs. catalog. But what I find to be most amu^H^H^Hinteresting is that he actually legally changed his name from "Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey" to simply "Melvil Dui". So the Dewey Decimal system really should be the Dui Decimal system.
Join moola.com, play games to earn money.
Don't forget the Decibet (decimal alphabet)
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/75/75rdecabet.phtml
As long as we're reforming spelling anyway, why don't we make the English language conform to the HTTP standard?
Old spelling: referrer
New spelling: referer
A strong understanding of the relationship between letters and sounds is fundamental in learning to read, but phonics isn't used continually into adulthood to "sound things out." If kids are still sounding out words by middle-school, then there should be some concern. The "sound," by this time, should be automatic.
A quote from Wikipedia:
"The final attempt to determine what approach made the most sense was undertaken by the National Reading Panel (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2001), which examined quantitative research studies on phonics (as well as other areas of reading instruction). Their meta-analysis of hundreds of studies confirmed the findings of the National Research Council: phonics is a more effective way to teach children to read than is embedded phonics or no phonics instruction. They found that phonics had particularly strong benefits for students of low socio-economic status."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonics
Researchers have noticed that, initially, kids read much better with whole word reading. That's what created so much excitement. After a few years, the vocabulary of some whole-word readers hits a plateau, while the phonetic reader's vocabulary continues to expand. This isn't universally true as some individuals can succeed with either method.
One of the downsides for whole-word readers are common misspellings for words that they rarely encounter. There was a study, for which I have no reference, that showed whole-word readers had a harder time in technical professions where new vocabularies had to be learned. Specifically, medicine, law, engineering, and I.T. If the words hadn't been encountered frequently, it took much longer to learn the new word. Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule.
Statistically, 30% (+/- 5%) of whole-word readers have troubles. Some are moved into remedial reading classes, which school districts get additional funding for. These are essentially expanded ESL (English as a Second Language) classes, which did not exist before the "big switch."
As far as the speed reading... you can learn how to speed read with either method. I don't "hear" words either and can read whole sentences. Just as I learned how to multiply 4 x 4 by adding 4, 4 times... I no longer do it this way. Had I learned my multiplication tables without the basic understanding, my math would suffer. I think the same can be said for reading. Phonics isn't so much a method, as it is a foundation.
BTW, I am not employed by hooked on phonics, nor do I use their products. I also strongly believe in reading to your kid.
If words are pronounced like they are spelled, then it is easier to learn to read, write and speak that language. It's kinda silly that writing and speech are not more equal. Is written and/or spoken english supposed to be some kind of guessing-game for those who want to learn it?
Naturally, if there are to a change, it must be very gradual, to minimize transition complicatons.
As a norwegian, I'm happy that the way we write our words almost always are the way they are spoken. We have three extra letters (æ ø å) that represent some of the sounds within the english language. The english language does not have letters that matches all its sounds. (nor does Norwegian, but we have fewer sound-"holes")
Examples:
Written: All = åll. (Spoken)
Written: I am = I æm. (Spoken)
Written: Love, slang luv = løv (Spoken)
Me fail English? That's unpossible!
"Make cyberlove, not cyberwar!" -Khaed(544779)
Don't knock it? The result of Webster's reforms was an unnecessary split between American English and 'International' English. I'm pretty sure most English-speaking countries outside of the US still spell those words 'colour' and 'programme'. Australians certainly do (although in the context of computers, 'program' is common... most likely due to the dominance of the USA in early computing.)
I wash mah-self with a rag on a stick.
While I do think that some spellings are a bit peculiar and could be simplified, overall I think this is a bad idea. To use a computer analogy, think modems. It used to be that around 90% of modems, whether internal or external, copied the so-called Hayes standard (and the internal ones evened faked the implicit "your hanging off a com port" part of the standard). Sure this wasn't necessarily optimal, and yes they had their individual quirks (rather like, say, UK and US spelling standards), but for practical purposes they were pretty much universal and interchangable. Then, over time, they got "improved and simplified", till now they (especially the internal ones) pretty much all speak their own non-compatible, poorly documented dialect.
I suspect any sustained effort to "simplify and improve" spelling would meet the same fate. For example:
- solder: some (most?) USians don't pronounce the 'l', but the rest of us do. Do we develop different standards?
- lieutenant: UKians pronounce this leff-tennant, USians loo-tennant, and the rest of us oscillate. Divergent standards again?
- castle: again, at least 2 pronounciations I can think of... cars-l and cass-l.
and on it goes. If we go down this path, I'd give, say, 10 years before interprobility becomes a serious problem (compared to around 200 years or so if we stick with natural language evolution).
Still in reality it aint gonna happen, so I'm not too worried.
I know it's petty. But it took me 2 extra years to master our current reading/writing standard. There are some of us that phonics are a nightmare for. Easy for some, hell for us with broken peepers.
Regional dialects continued to form, such as in the US, as waves of immagrants did not fully assimilate. But telecommunications, television, radio, and the vast storehouse of recorded words, voices, and movies have reversed this trend, and the languages of the world have begun normalizing.
Sounds nice, but I don't buy it.
I regularly speak to Indians in India and Filipinos in the Philippines - both countries where English is an official language (in the Philippines all college level courses are taught in English only).
Not only does each group have significantly different pronuciation and cadence, they also have a whole different vernacular from American English - lots of meanings and double-meanings to words that would never be used in the US, or in each other's countries.
Perhaps the dialects are converging, but right now they are so far apart that it doesn't sound like it.
Japan has, let me think, in excess of a hundred million people who spell through "through"? English doesn't just belong to people who grew up speaking English anymore -- its the language (or one of the main languages) of international commerce, politics, science, and essentially everything. Catastrophically large changes to English which make "our" English mutually unintelligible with "their" English just won't happen.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
that this was already happening; I don't think language waits for the go ahead from any one individual or group before changing. What propels language is the acceptance between the transmitter and the receiver that meaning has been understood. Without the tansmission of meaning the meme can't replicate and so dies off. If this is the only constraint then it's understandable that, with no loss in the efficacy of their message, people are reducing the complexity and redundancy in their communications; especially in restrictive formats such as text messaging and email.
i really don't see what the big deal is... i'm an immigrant and esl speaker. i didn't fine any problem spelling any english words (especially the common ones). i can spell any words you throw at me just find. anyone can learn to spell properly using a few noted patterns and tricks you'll fine in any dictionary.
;P it'd be easier to just remember the single form of eat.
grammar... now that's a toughie, we should get rid of it altogether. that effects me the most. and the affect that will bring from having to use brain cycle figure out the proper grammar to communicate your message for non-native english speaker would be positively er.... positive.
say instead of saying i ate pizza yesterday, where one must learn to conjugate eat, ate, eaten, have eaten, have had eaten, have been eaten
i eat pizza yesterday, eat mango two days ago, eat porkchop onemorrow night, eat bacon twomorrow, eat tuna threemorrow, etc.
now that's simple. just qualify everything with the time dimension and voila! grammar-be-gone.
"Though coughing and hiccoughing, he fought through the tough boughs." In ten words, seven distinct ways to pronounce ough.
That said, the problem with phonetic spelling is that not everybody uses the same phonemes. How do you pronounce route? Roof? Centimeter? Status? Aunt? Praline? Species? Tomato? Amen? Do you make Irish stoo or styoo? Should chamois be spelled differently when it refers to the leather instead of the animal?
And it's not just the sounds. To me, protein is a three-syllable word, because I learned it in the late 60's, but to most people today it's two syllables. Listen to people talk around here: squirrel is a one-syllable word; chocolate, every, and syllable have two syllables; athlete has three. How do you say them?
Shall southern and midwestern children continue to find spelling difficult because the spellings are based on California or New England pronunciations? (Daddy, why does my spellin book keep puttin a "g" on the end of words? Why isn't there an "r" in warsh or horspital?) Shall the British find American English even more incomprehensible because nothing is spelled the way they say it?
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
You'd be suprised to notice that there is some legacy gender nouns about - many more than I thought when I started looking out for them after learning french. You have to look around a bit to find them - kind of like looking for unix/vms legacy support in Windows XP.
I ate your fish.
Clearly, I am talking about words that have entirely unrelated meanings and different writings, but sound the same when spoken. Just for fun, I tried to guess one on the first try. Just pick any two common kanji readings and stitch them together. My guess was "seikou", which indeed did have ten different, unrelated meanings in my dictionary. My second guess, "kansei" had eleven.
English words rarely have more than three or four.
Before we convince the whole English speaking world to change, how about we wait for the US to convert to metric instead of using the old English Imperial system?
Then once hell has frozen over we can think about changing english spelling.
One other problem with changing spelling is we are purposely removing connections to the roots of the words. Often the spelling of a word tells us a lot about it's meaning (if we are unsure) and hints at subtlties that will be lost if we move to phonetic spelling. In fact often the "odd" spelling of some words is because of the original derivation of words.
English is very good at "absorbing" words from other languages and with that often comes unusual spelling which, however, provides valuable insight into underlying meanings.
pithy comment
How many of you stumbled through TFA's weird spellings? I certainly did! The loose correlation between written English and spoken English is a great teaching aid for youngsters! If we decided to re-spell all of our words, every adult would need to re-learn to read, because all of the words would have different shapes!
Another problem with "Fonetik" spelling is that it blurs distictions between subtle pronouciation differences. In reality, "Fonetik" and "Phonetic" sound slightly different. Even the words "Enuf" and "Enough" sound slightly different!
Perhaps the only real way to improve spelling is to be slightly more liberal with common words; popular changes will stick.
No, I will not work for your startup
Winston, have you seen the latest edition of the newspeak dictionary?
Thoughtcrime is doubleplus bad.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
That is patently untrue. It makes a number of mistakes. Firstly, even if language does not drift apart, it still changes. Secondly, the conditions still exist for language varieties to become more different and the language of different communities to diverge. There is not even evidence that the rate of change has slowed, let alone stopped and reversed!
On the first count, language has continued to change. For instance, the sound of long "oo" as in "spoon" is changing in most English dialects from being a sound somewhat like French ou/German u (IPA [u]) to French u/German ü (IPA [y]). This has been occurring at different rates in all of Australia/New Zealand, most of the US/Canada and significant parts of England. The purpose of language change is not that we're too stupid to reproduce accurately what our parents said: Otherwise very quickly all languages would become mutually (un)intelligible and have one consonant, one vowel and one syllable type. Language change, just like fashion/music changes, occurs to distinguish ourselves from our parents, but is a largely subconcious process. Now, obviously a complete change of one sound into another isn't going to affect how phonetic an orthography is/require spelling reform, but there's certainly plenty of changes occurring even now that are resulting in changes that do affect the orthography; but as these tend to be dialect-specific, I'll discuss them in another paragraph.
You do not need significant isolation for languages to drift apart. In the past century, New Zealand English has gained more and more difference from Australian English, and Australian English has began separating (for instance, Victorians provably speak differently from New South Welshfolk; (younger) Victorians pronounce "celery" and "salary" alike, and generally render "el" as "al"). Likewise, in parts of America, two or all of "merry", "marry" and "Mary"; or "pin" and "pen" are becoming homophones: But exactly the progress varies in different areas. Now, obviously these changes aren't enough to make the dialects different languages, but already I find it difficult to understand some Americans or Scotts, and it will simply be the addition of these small changes that cause the dialects to eventually diverge. Furthermore, it's worth noting that languages have separated since the dawn of the industrial age, one example being Serbo-Croatian.
Now might be a better time than ever for standardising English pronunciation, but only in the same way that summer is a better time to try and catch the sun by jumping than winter. It is not something that can ever occur; the only languages with a fixed pronunciation are dead.
Look out!
"fell on" is a verb construction that demands an object (satellite-framed verb). You can't omit the object of the preposition in that case.
"reading" is a verb that implies an object (text, books). Therefore the pronoun is implied (book mentioned earlier in the sentence).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA
Useful for expressing human sounds in any language.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
I'm a linguist and an English teacher in Japan and frequently have to deal with the irregularities of English spelling, however apart from the occasional problems with 'l' and 'r' and 'b' and 'v' most of my students master English spelling fairly quickly.
While researching for material for my Masters a few years ago I came across this: Yntrodxkshxn tu Nuspelynh
While the writer seems to have an understanding of the topic is is writing about he has missed a very important point; not all English speakers sound like Americans. Hell, not even all Americans sound like Americans; there is significant regional variation in pronunciation throughout that country. To simplify spelling so that pronunciation and spelling matched we would either have to force EVERYONE to pronounce words the same way or all English speaking countries will have a different way of spelling.
When doing undergrad Anthropology I learnt that one's way of speaking is central to one's culture. Early researchers in Australia came upon cases of groups that intentionally changed the way they spoke. As I recall (and it was a bloody long time ago, so don't quote me on this) a group from the Gold Coast area split into two tribes, one moving to Stradbroke Island. The group that moved changed the way they spoke to clearly differenciate between themselves and the former tribe they were a part of. Enforcing the idea of 'us' vs 'not us'.
So, if we standardise and simplify spelling, who is going to give up their way of speaking? I know that I have no intention of EVER sounding like an American, nor do I want to sound like a New Zealander, or a Canadian. No offence intended to people of those countries, but I am NOT one of you and don't wish to be thought of as one of you. Of course if this were to happen there would no longer be a case of 'us' vs 'them'.
What we have no may be difficult for some people to learn, but that is the point. It demonstrate the diffeerence between those who put in the effort to learn and those who don't. For those who can't (surely a minority), we shouldn't lower the bar to help accommodate the weakest, we should find ways of enabling everyone to achieve the same level.
Simplifying English spelling would eradicate the link between words and etymologies, causing words to become mere signifiers of sounds.
Considering English spellings like "could", "delight" and "island" bear no relation to their etymologies in spite of their irregular spellings, anyone interest in the etymology of words must use the etymology section of a dictionary. Why then should we half-satisfy the needs of one group, and leave everyone with an orthography that's useless for that purpose? (Those three words had their spelling altered on the basis of "would/should", "light" and "isle", sometimes in full knowledge that there was no etymological link, only a phonetic one.)
OTOH, everyone gets by just fine with "pronounce" and its derivative "pronunciation" being spelt differently, and probably everyone knows they're derivatives of each other! Or "join" and "junction" are likewise spelt differently. The English orthography is not a record of etymology, any more so than it is a record of pronunciation.
Ask any Chinese-speaking individual what she'd think of the idea, and she'd say it's malarky.
All Chinese-speaking individuals are female?
If Americans really wanted to do this -- simplify spelling to eliminate inconsistencies between words and sound -- it would be a slightly better idea to make everyone use the IPA at least.
That's even more malarky. Using the IPA as the basis for an orthography could have some value; but given the variability in pronunciation between different groups of people, and over time, it would not be much use. Their particular proposal looks really bad, but a nifty regularisation of the orthography could be achieved that gets rid of the worst aspects while still largely being the same in different regions; some variation will need to have different spellings based on different pronuncation. (We already have different spellings based on etymology for pairs like "color" (from Latin) vs "colour" (from French), and we can understand someone when they say "tomaito" so it shouldn't make it any harder to read than currently.)
Look out!
Have you noticed that when the authors tried to write in a phonix based "english" they each created their own version of the word? I found that amusing. If we where to create a phonix based written language for english who would get to determine the spelling. From some of the articles based on the location of where these authors live and how they speak influenced their choices for phonix based spelling...
this is the sort of explanation up with which i will not put.
(don't blame me, blame Churchill)
Please start spelling words however you like. I beg you.
It'll make it infinitely easier to decide which resumes to throw out and which posts to ignore.
Even if it was "official" I would still disregard anything from someone who couldn't take the time to spell something "correctly"
Do you understand that every kid needs, what, a man year to learn how to spell? Maybe more? What a complete waste of time! How can you be so incredibly egocentric that you will put them through it so that you don't have to recompile your decrepit aging brain. It's not like it would take you more than a week or two to get used to it.
;-) ).
So many kids are discouraged from being able to write as well as the middle class, because spelling is too hard for them. Don't give me any nonsense about dumbing the language down, because I ain't no dumber than you are. Let the kids learn how to structure their essays instead of spending that time learning how to spell.
Phonetic spelling is a good idea because it is the clean way to engineer the language. As for how to deal with accents, well, let written speech convey accents, hallelujah, fiction writers will rejoice.
Eliminate burdensome memorization of spelling, and more programmers will write documentation (err, ok, maybe that is a bit optimistic.....
Andrew Carnegie proposed this a long time ago, and Teddy Roosevelt favored it, and then some twit of a journalist at the New York Times laughed at it, and thank you twit for wasting a big chunk of my childhood on spelling. Oh, and I was naturally gifted at spelling as a child, but I think it is stupid that so many of my friends won't be writers because they could not spell they could just talk and think.
When the twits laugh at it, what they are really doing is saying, look at how different this logical and coherent spelling is from what I am used to, it must be wrong. Shallow brains rule the world. Sigh.
As for the transition, well, let any person over 12 today spell the old way if they want for as long as they live, and only require that all government/school documents written by persons younger than 12 today be phonetic. Further, allow anyone who likes phonetic to use it without complaint from school/government officials. You'll soon find that all the people who don't like spelling start to use it, as well as the people who just like clean logical design in languages.
This is an area where American culture is just inferior to other countries. Yup, I was born in the USA.
Wasn't that the whole reason behind Esperanto's creation? To create a universal language that had letter combinations that be pronouced in one way only.
Look what happened to that language.
This space for rent
Heh, you obviously did not have an English grandmother. I was perpetually arguing with teachers about why it was alright to spell colour and several other words with the "u," and trying to remember that "Americans spell grey 'g-r-a-y'." I always liked Jefferson's remark, "I have nothing but contempt for a man who can spell a word in but one way." Twain expressed a similar sentiment and in fact I think he was barely paraphrasing Jefferson.
JWD
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
The start of the parent should read "Colour", "centre", and . I'm never mentioning HTML on Slashdot again.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
Bah, Shaw's phonetic alphabet is way more fun than Franklin's crap.
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
At least according to the textbook - in reality, Japanese DO emphasize syllables, and it is not consistent from place to place...for example "kumo" means both spider and cloud, and is pronounced differently depending on which you mean. Worse yet, which pronounciation is which flip-flops from Tokyo-style to Kansai-style. Same with "hashi", which means bridge or chop-sticks.
However, all of those words are written with different kanji. It just happens that "ka" "kan" "sou" and "kei" are the Chinese readings of a disproportionate share of kanji, and hence appear in a lot of words. Of those 21 words, I don't think more than seven or eight are spoken words. The rest are written combinations only, and many native Japanese wouldn't even "pronounce" them in their heads when reading - they go directly to the meaning, from what I understand.
Generic phonetic spelling only works when everyone talks the same way. Otherwise, you alienate everyone who doesn't talk the same way you do.
Stupid idea... the spelling of language combined with a high literacy rate fixes dialect in place and slows considerably the natural evolution of language. What, you all want to drop the pronounciation of our 'r's? Maybe drop half our syllables altogether like the Brits do? Or, perhaps you want to advance the evolution of the language another 1,000 years or so and end up with a language like Chinese, that has no verb tenses, and only makes sense based on context, and where half the words all sound the same?
--A.A. Milne,
Interesting section on the government being behind just this kind of move to "simplfy" spelling and words so that people wouldn't have to think about it. Creepy. Very Orwellian.
So there are two options for a written language.
(1) Phonetic spelling. Each letter denotes a sound, and you can pronounce an unknown word just by reading it.
(2) The Chinese system. Each word has a picture associated with it that is not related to its pronounciation in any real way. Completely different spoken languages can use the same written language, and people who can't speak to each other can communicate with this written language.
Each has its pros and cons. I much prefer option (1). Perhaps due to just being used to it, but I'll assume (1) is better than (2) in the following.
The long term problem with (1) is that, while it's easy to make your written language phonetic when you first define it, pronounciation will change over the centuries, and if you don't make spelling reforms every 100-200 years, your spelling will be less and less phonetic. And the end game is very clear here. Without maintenance in the form of periodical spelling reform, what started out as phonetic spelling will eventually devolve into the Chinese system! The written form of a word will lose all relation to how it is pronounced, and the sequence of letters will just serve as a picture, symbolizing a concept. Some parts of English is already there.
If you want to avoid a Chinese type system, it is necessary to go through with spelling reforms. As many have rightly pointed out here, it would be quite disruptive when it was implemented. One of many many cases where long term gain can only be achiever through short term pain. And since this maintenance has been mostly neglected for 500 years, it would be extra painful this time. All the more reason to get started.
'dikshunery' - it's not simpler, just dumb. I'm not implying the book is dumb, it's a pretty good read once you figure out what the characters are trying to say.
AC
I only learned 'sep_a_rate' in my twenties at a three week job with desktop publishing specialising in real-estate copy. I'm sure I'd still be confused otherwise.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
I can see this causing a bigger divide between children that have been educated phonetically and their parents who were taught the "old fashioned way". This will always be viewed as simple, "dumbed down" english. As it is now, incorrect spelling makes my parents skin crawl. They'd positively explode if this came into being.
Task Mangler
The real problem in the US is ...
Yearly sugar consumption in the United States has increased from 12 lbs per person in the early 1800's to 175 lbs per person in 2005.
Plus we gerneraly eat like crap. One of the richest countries in the world with the worst diet.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
Some words do not exist in modern English - "shew" (show, past tense) is essentially extinct, which means that you've got to watch context to ensure that what you think might be a difference in pronounciation isn't a different word altogether. Shew was still used in popular novels and science texts in the mid 1960s, but I believe it was dead by the time the 1970s rolled around.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's precisely BECAUSE words are spelled the way they are that we can make sense of them. Their spellings and structures preserve their etymological origins in many cases. If we spelled it "wain", then words like "vinyard", "vintage" and "vintner" would make NO sense (not the best example but it's all I've got on short notice like this). No child would ever have any idea why the word "extraordinary" is used the way it is if we spelled it "ekstrordinaree". I can't stress enough the IMPORTANCE of our current spelling system in learning associations between related words. Besides, if you spell things "how they sound", then you'd have to determine who's "right"? I live in Georgia and if we went by how the people down here talk, the house would have a "ruf" and a radius would be the distance from the edge of a circle to its "sinner". In Georgia, when you lose a "pin", it means that you can no longer write. Don't even get them started on "pecans". And it even goes further than regional differences. I speak with what most Americans consider a neutral accent. But the British would disagree. If we changed our spelling based on neutral American English we'd have a SIGNIFICANTLY larger library of disparities with British English that children would have to learn. Basically, this is just another example of the bottom 20% or so trying to muck things up for the rest of the population that GETS IT.
The sounds are superimposed - much like oe and ae tended to be (which is why, in archaic scripts, those letters are superimposed). The elimination of joined characters (evil typewriter mafia!) and the absence of accents makes things needlessly complicated. I reject utterly the arguments of the Campaign for Real Spelling (which seems to have existed from the day spelling was formalized in England), but rather believe that correct markup would greatly assist in the understanding of sounds.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's "Cyrillic", not 'Cryllic'.
There is generalization that can be applied - the fewer letters you have, the more complex the rules need to be in order to express the same number of concepts. Thus, as the rules for English have become more powerful, a lot of additional symbols used historically no longer exist. If you have fewer rules (say, by having phonetic spelling) then you need more characters to compensate. British English has 20 vowel sounds (American English has 17) and 24 consonant sounds. In order to have a "pure" phonetic language, we'd need to go from 26 characters to 44! Anything less would be incapable of literally presenting what was being spoken.
(Well, maybe it's not quite that bad. Most phonetically-written languages, like Finnish or Old Futhark, have around 30 characters, but that's only because multiple sounds can be assigned the same character, depending on context, and multiple characters can represent a single sound in some cases. However, if you eliminate both of those possibilities and go to a purely phonetic system, 30 characters is NOT enough just to cover the sounds in general use today.)
In either case, pity the poor child who has to memorize a 44-character alphabet. Rules can be picked up as you go along, but the alphabet is the basis, the foundation, for everything. You can look up obscure rules, but there is no such thing as an obscure character - particularly as we use most of those 44 phonetic characters in everyday speech. For that matter, can you imagine what it would do to QWERTY keyboards? It would need to be 5/3rds its current size to retain proportions and fit the rest of the phonetic alphabet in. You want to be in a typing class for that? Didn't think so.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
An example might be some of the sounds coming from Welsh such as the double "d" which is not terribly close to modern pronunciation of "D". It was probably an outgrowth of the Anglo-Saxon thorn which, although it looks like the greek letter for "pi" is actually a semi-hard "th" sound.
Welsh, by many accounts, is the only language that can correctly and phonetically spell a sneeze.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
...to think there is only one pronunciation of each word! What are we going to do, have different spellings in different regions? You buy a "hot dwog" in NYC, "pak ya caa" in Boston, "pok you coh" in the UK, "park yer car" in Texas, etc.? The Chinese do it right, in my opinion: the dialects are all different, but the writing is the same (except for in the same instances an author would choose to spell an accent out in a novel in English -- think Huck Finn).
In any case, we do have a system like that: it is called International Phonetic Alphabet, and it'd be a bitch to have English speakers learn it; English has so many different vowel sounds, and so many are so very close to the same sound for most people, that it's much simpler to keep things the way they are. Now, if English was a language with only five vowels (all of them pure) such as in Italian, Spanish or Japanese, then we'd be OK. As it stands, the idea to use "simplified spelling" (which would be anything but) is just idiotic.
Using phonetics to represent our written words would have worked effectively only if we had no homonyms. Since we have many, many sets of words which sound alike but have very different meanings (even for those words which may be related in context, such as 'past' and 'passed') a phonetic alphabet will introduce even more ambiguity to the language. To use phonetics exclusively in a way that leaves no ambiguous words and ideas, we'd need to introduce a transitional vocabulary which does away with these homonyms.
In addition, what would we do with conjugations and contractions? What will become of "you'll"? Will it be really be written with the same phonetics as "yule"? Will "would've" become "wood of" or "wood uv"? And will "I'll" become written with the same phonetic spelling as "aisle"? Imagine the confusion arising from this.
Try reading this aloud:
"Eye wood of bot there car but aisle half two get my lye sense first."
If heard verbally, someone else would certainly understand that you need to get a driver's license before purchasing a car. The written words, whether phonetic or simple homonyms, make absolutely no sense when separated into their respective sentence fragments. Bots have eye wood? Where is aisle "half two"? And what does a sense of lye have to do with anything? How will all these ambiguities be addressed with a purely phonetic vocabulary, if we have so many completely unrelated words that sound alike already?
We're only dealing with writing and spelling now, not grammar. Besides, French is indeed more complex, but English isn't far behind.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
While not yet mentioned in the Wikipedia article quoted above, the authors of the original reform of the German language have since started to backpaddle on their original concept and a reform of the reform has now been passed for lack of acceptance of the original reform concept by the general public.
I love listening to arguments from engineers about language. It's funny. Here's some good reading about the thru/through type arguments from the language log, everyone's favorite linguistic blog. Their conclusion: seriously--it' ain't that wrong.
I fer won well kom ow-er fonetic over lords
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
Why does this remind me of the book "1984"? The concept is disturbing to me.
Alas, alack, them poor folk what cain't spell. I suppose now that means no metrick system eyether. What a shame, what a shame. And here I was born with ten fingers. And ten toes. Maybe wee can have a ten letter alpobet. Yes please sir may I have another.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
We're only dealing with writing and spelling, not grammar
So, when you write you don't have to use grammar? Huh. I guess I've been doing it wrong this whole time then...
The wii is the revolution, comrade!
It took me years to 'get' the language because I already spoke half a dozen languages when I started. One day after three years of frustration and limited results I was looking at an incredibly simple sentence "sid'et' za stol", sitting at the table, and the whole language gelled for me in an instant. I have been sitting behind the table ever since. Russian is much easier if you approach it as an engineer rather than a language student.
Interestingly I had a similar problem with Tagalog but that fascinating language has never gelled for me and I eventually lost interest when I saw the way Pinoys were more interested in doing the right thing for their families rather than doing the right thing. I had no expectations to lose when studying Russian but I did when studying Tagalog.
Grammar is how you use the words. Spelling is more about how they look, and how easy they are to read and pronounce.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
already.
.
You should be reforming back to the Queens English, in fact with your current ability to elect competent leadership you should be handing your entire country back to the queen (except Utah, nobody wants Utah). But back to the subject at hand.
Words such as colour and neighbour must have U's in them, your love affair with the letter Z (that's pronounced "zed" not "zee") will end so all "ize" words must now become "ise". Non sensical words like "aint" will be stricken from the language and their use will gain the speaker a good public flogging, the correct word to use is "aren't" or "isn't" which is short for "are not" and "is not" and these terms will be used in the correct context. Y'all will also be added to this list, the British provincial government of the southern states are preparing for a major drop in population.
Further more anyone caught shortening the English language by leaving out the correct spelling and replacing it with the letter(s) which correspond phonetic sound will be punished by being de-fingered one at a time until they get it right. Also anyone caught speaking in "rap" words like "tha", "yo" and the like will simply be shot on sight, Lethal wounding will requirement for this crime but no more bullets then necessary are to be spent. In fact all rappers will be shot on sight, punishment for the crime of rap may be administered by citizens and agents of the provincial government alike, the Commonwealth of California will also prepare for a population decrease
Thank you for your attention. We know that the residents of the Commonwealth of America will welcome your new Monachal overloads.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Firstly, there is nothing wrong with fractions and in algebra fractions are EXTREMELY uselful, a fraction is just a different way of notating a division, which in itself is adifferent way of notating a multiplication. Should we do away with multiplication and division??
Secondly (to the parent), our language has a base ten numbering system, 0-9. These are all of our numbers and all other numbers are just combinations of these ten digits. What makes sense about a base 12 system in alanguage that only has ten numbers?? 12 is a one and a two. To top it off, the american iperial system isn't even base 12!!, you have base whatever suits the application, a mile is how many feet?? what sizes do nuts and bolts come in?? thats right, 16th's of an inch, theres nothing 12 about 16. Without changing our language to include twelve seperate numbers instead of ten there is no point in using anything other than a decimal system.
"Lurning English reqierz roet memory rather than lojic, he sed."
What on earth is "roet" supposed to be??
Know, it will knot!
What you are missing here is that you will break nearly every computer or embbedded application ever written.
There is too much code out there that believes that all characters can be displayed using 7-bit ASCII chars.
We are constantly having fun (I am working in Germany) with umlauts and other special chars that users enter into our database application and they are not even remotely aware of the crap they are typing.
And while talking to english or american programmers I found this out: they are not aware of the fact, that it might be problematic to store user input in strings that consist of signed 8-bit chars and doing integer math like greater or lesser comparisons on the chars.
As far as we IT guys are concerned 7-bit ascii is enough, maybe we could even drop the uppercase chars ?
English is not a problem compared to French or German. How about "Schrumpfschlauch" or "Zahnfleischfrisch"?
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
No, really? Whoever would have guessed it?
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
Give me doughnoughts or give me death... I mean coffee!
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
Also, just like those three words, they are independant. By this, I mean that a word like "way" has more than one meaning. For example, note the difference between "Way over there" and "I saw him on the way to work". One means something like "far", while the other means "path". Yet these meanings are not independant. They are drawing from the same concept and are clearly related.
"seikou" has TEN independant meanings. I doubt any word in English does this.
You can't speak and listen to a language and conciously decode the rules in
your head in real time. By the time you've done that on one sentence the speaker has
probably moved on a whole paragraph. You can only learn a language properly by learning
it subconciously and just copying how the native speakers speak, whatever the actual
reason behind putting word ending A on noun B in case C. This only comes through
practice. A LOT of practice. Language rules are of interest to linguists , not people
who simply want to learn the language to be able to speak it day to day.
So we reform it now...and once the pronounciation drifts, we keep changing it. Just like we have before. Why do you think Shakespeare's English varies from our own?
... as opposed to specifying the language to one set of "official" pronounciations, make it more ambigious. Take note of what seems to be the common threads in the spelling and pronounciation and what varies with the accent -- you may pronounce "tomato" different, but there are still sounds that remain common in every accent. Identify those and go from there if you want to improve English.
... I'm just throwing stuff off the top of my head ...
... we read the words, not the letters, so turn them into the ultimate visual cues ... it's too radical to be adoptable, but I'm just saying it would work individually.
Writing is an attempt to express one's verbal language in a more permanent form, something to pass on to the next generation or at least record information for the larger masses. This is all fine and well until the verbal language changes. Suddenly, the permanence of the written language becomes its own worst problem -- the spelling, originally meant to reflect sounds, suddenly leaves this and becomes more abstract.
Written English is really less about preserving our pronounciation than giving clues: we can make a general assumption of what the word is based on what is written. It has a certain amount of ambiguity to it, so that one word can have multiple pronounciations. Why not expand upon this
Maybe the introduction of an Ambigiuity marker, similar to the accent mark, to settle once and finally that it is both "tow-mah-tow" and "tow-may-tow"? Say, "tomXto", with a more appropriate symbol for X? There's a lot more you can do in generalizing the language
How about dropping the vowels altogether, like some varieties of Arabic
Shakespeare is difficult enough to read now. Old English is darn near impossible. By changing the rules of spelling, alphabets, or whatever, we will succeed in cutting of future generations from a wealth of literature, culture and knowledge. It's hard enough to get kids to read the classics, and we want to make it impossible? And lets not even think of the monumental task of transliterating all of the existing documents. Ha! The end result in 100 years is simply a new useless university degree in 21'st century English. English, for all its faults, is a beautiful language. It's malleable and fluid. It produces beautiful poetry and music because of the very depth people would erase. Insead of dumbing down the language, let's wisen up. The spot.
Take a look at Ghoti:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
To weigh in on with my personal opinion doesn't anyone else think that maybe "logic" and "magic" aren't compatible? Yes we could simplify English spelling, but why stop there? Why not eliminate redundant words, irregular conjugations, why not take a knife to everything about the language which isn't "logical"? But where would the magic and beauty be in that language? Somehow I think it might be highly efficient to learn and speak but altogether lacking in expressiveness and beauty.
I saw a vrey itrensetnig sing the ohetr day, the gsit of it was taht you can udetsdnard msot Enislgh so lnog as the frsit and lsat ltetrs are in the rhgit pacle. Makes me tihnk taht selplnig is a lot lses itonprmat tahn we've been led to bilevee.
Bah - can someone please translate the article for me? Babelfish doesn't have a Stupid->English conversion yet!
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
you have to consider that the german reform was not in the same direction. german has far fewer loan words than english and many changes concern loan words that have been used for so long that they appear "as good as german" to native speakers; some of those were assigned a 'more german' (and thus phonetic) spelling (as german spelling is largely phonetic in the first place). e.g. 'photo' -> 'foto'. this has been criticized for much the same reasons given in comments here, arguing against the proposed changes: you lose valuable information, among other things about the interrelations of words. it's just silly to change 'photo' to 'foto', but leave 'photon' as 'photon'.
however, more changes make the written language more self-consistent and logical. unnecessary rules, such as disallowing the same consonant three times in a row, have been eliminated. 'schiffahrt' has become 'schifffahrt', and it's obvious that it's simply 'schiff' + 'fahrt'. use of the sz-ligature has been vastly simplified. now, whether 'ß' or 'ss' is used gives you a strong indication as to how to pronounce the word, and doesn't depend on superfluous rules such as whether it occurs at the end of a word.
the german reform has been rejected for a multitude of reasons, with some publications even unable to make up their mind and flip-flopping back and forth between spellings. for some it went too far, for others not far enough, others yet got hung up on individual details they found stupid. but it's inevitably being adopted (pupils are learning the new spellings in every school now, proponents of the old ones will simply become extinct), and that's a good thing. consistency is what makes writing easily comprehensible, so that's the most important criterium. i don't care much whether someone uses the old or the new spellings, as long as it's consistent. and overall, the reform is a change for the better, so there's no reason not to adopt it, lest you suffer from geriatric stubbornness.
Simply "remove" rules with arbitrary exceptions:
- "i before e except after c"
- "AN historical event"
- overloaded words for instance "bear"
That sort of thing.
Don't go overboard on phonetics... but lets face it "phonetics" should be spelled "fonetics". Eliminate silent letters.
Just take baby steps. E-Prime was a pretty neat idea.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I just scored an old (1880s?) "Farmers Allminax", written entirely in phonetic English, by Josh Billings at an antique store in Maine. WAY cool.
Tom Geller
Mainland China adopted both a phonetic alphabet and a simplified ideograph system and pretty much enforced their use. However, they were a totalitarian society at that time and could do so.
Even so, the phonetic alphabet is flawed. It uses 24 letters of the roman alphabet to represent 37 sounds, so there is some doubling up of sounds per letter, and doubling of letters for sounds. For example there are four variations of the "ch" sound in Chinese represented by "ch", "q", "zh" and "j". There are enough exceptions that effectively you learn how to pronounce the 400 legatiment syllables as a whole rather than sounding out their letters. Chinese has only about about a quarter of the syllables of a European language. A pre-communist spelling reform made their own 37 symbol alphabet, but this is not used on the mainland.
The other flaw is phonetic drift in the last 80 years making a tiny percentage of phonetic spelling already wrong. Many "n" finals in the Beijing dialect have changed to an "r". Phonetic drift doesnt matter so much with ideographs. Though you can see poems that used to rhyme, or had repetive tonal patterns in the Han to Tang dynasties no longer rhyme. Much is attributed to the crude Mongols whose manglings eventually became the norm, much like French pronunciation basterized Old English.
The ideographs are slightly phonetic. About 70 are used to transliterate gringo names. An example is Coca-cola. It immediately signals transliteration to any native Chinese speaker. But the a couple of the transliteration characters can be literally translated as "mount happiness". Western news sources sometimes mistakenly take phonetics literally.
Many modern techical words combine a meaning character with a pronunciation character to make a new ideograph. Chemistry and anatomy terms are clear examples. I can guess the pronunciation fairly easily. Words centuries old are harder to guess, but there are often patterns.
Welsh, by many accounts, is the only language that can correctly and phonetically spell a sneeze.
Cute, but probably untrue (depends on what sound a sneeze makes). Most people would include the '' (International Phonetic Alphabet) sound in a sneeze (first sound in 'chips'), and Welsh doesn't have that sound. When you want to write 'chips' in Welsh, you approximate it as 'tsips'. 'ch' in Welsh is pronounced 'x' (IPA), so it couldn't correctly be spelt 'chips'.
Welsh is pretty much spelt phonetically (some regional differences in 'u' & 'y'. 'y' has two sounds), mainly thanks to orthographical reforms of the 19th century. Irish Gaelic didn't reform, hence its pretty difficult orthography.
Sumbody is smoeking to much maryjaywanna...
Some settling may occur during posting.
http://www.ajokes.com/jokes/423.html
Won't be long, and we'll all be using newsspeak too.
-- If we don't stand up for our rights, now, there will be no right to stand up for them later.
"Dunno if it's a joke, but it seems in earnest. Mark Twain must be spinning around somewhere."
The poster seems to ignore the fact that he himself is using shortened spelling in his description of the issue: "Dunno" as opposed to "Don't know".
I went to t'e skool to get an edUcas'on.
Was t' school in Yorkshire by any chance, lad?
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
We can't redesign English any more than we can change the fundamental characteristics of a civilisation overnight (apart from, with weapons of mass destructions, its survival).
By all means, do what others have done with languages such as Esperanto, and start from scratch (or set up an island utopia somewhere). However, you'll find that quite soon, the language (and the islanders) develop their own illogical quirks.
Consistent English spelling was only invented relatively recently. Phonetically inconsistent spellings are a byproduct of this.
I know that last question was rhetorical, but I'm 30 years old - UK has officially used Metric since before I was born. Milk and beer are still sold in pints (though milk is getting close to being metricised), height and weight of people is still done in Imperial measure (I blame the schools!) and street signs are still all in miles.
;0)
... snowball ... hell ... need I say more?
It's only this year that the supermarket I frequent has relented (with the law!) and started showing the £/kg price instead of £/lb (= imperial pound, must be Latin????). Of course noone buys fruit anymore, now it's more expensive
What chance does dictionary reform have
"People asked how I kept them separate and I pointed out throughout all of the time I took the languages, Japanese was MW, and Chinese was TR."
They are not that similar really. The phonetics is certainly very different.
In contrast, Vietnamese sounds fairly similar to Chinese (at least some dialects).
The writing is the only part that overlaps. Confusion can arise when Kanji phrases
mean something different in Japanese relative to Chinese.
It's helpful to remember that Japan adopted the Chinese writing system after the
development of their speech system. Hiragana and katakana are relatively recent
additional to the writing systems. Japaneses of 2-3 generations ago could
write without using kanas' at all.
So, when you write you don't have to use grammar? Huh. I guess I've been doing it wrong this whole time then...
If you can't spell the words constructing sentences becomes more difficult regardless of the grammar.
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
> a push for simpler spelling. Instead of 'weigh' it would be 'way.'
> 'Dictionary' would be 'dikshunery' and so forth.
"Weigh", I can see (although I imagine a slightly different vestigal muscle movement in my tongue with "weigh" vs. "way".
However, I refuse to misspell "dictionary" because of the way some uneducated buffoons mispronounce it.
It's not pronounced "diksunhery", it's pronounced "dictshunery". And wouldn't "dikshunery" be pronounced "dikshunery", as in farm-er? dik shun er ee?
The proper rewrite would be to have what, 40-something new letters, each corresponding to the basic sounds of the language? A letter for sh, for oo as in book, for oo as in boot, for hard and soft a, etc.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
That only works if you already know how to spell the words. Otherwise, it's as good as Ancient Greek.
Which may not sound like much of an addition to the complexity, but it is nonetheless added complexity. The effort is simply shifted from the rules to the alphabet. To go completely phonetic in English, however, would require 44 letters in the alphabet.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It seems pretty obvious that the problem is not the spelling, but the fact that nobody is bothering to pronounce their words properly!
If the Americans do decide to create their own bastardized version of English, then it will just prove to the rest of the world that they really are stupid arrogant fools, with no comprehension of history or the world outside their borders.
I cannot believe that things are so fucked up over there that this hasn been taken as a viable solution to the problems.
Teach your children properly!
----- I refuse to have an argument with an unarmed person
TheStonepedo: While wikipedia decides to throw homonyms and homophones on the same page, it still defines them as different. Homonyms are words with the same spelling and different meanings such as "yore" and "you're." Homophones have the same sound despite different spellings such as "tide" and "tied." Somewhere past the root word "homo" for same, there's a distinction between "nym" for name and "phone" for sound. Some people will be spelling-tarded forever, and it is more important that people know the meanings of big words they use when trying to pose logical points than it is for them to spell every little thing properly.
[zoom camera out as "The More You Know" infomercial sound plays]
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
My 6 year old in 1st grade come home from school one day and ask "Why do you have the Letter C, should it either be a K or a S?" and I just stood there dumpfounded. I was never good and understand this language and I've spoke it all my life. I just doesn't make sence. Geometry, Algebra and Calc all make perfect sence, but why the heck does READY have an A in it... No idea hear. If we actually did this, think by the time our kids where out of 1st grade they would know how to spell ever word there was just by sounding it out. No more HOURS AND HOURS of studying spelling. In stead we would teach them to really write or teach them more math and sciences. It would boost our educational system farther than any thing we've done. IMHO Bill Nortman
Since a) actual pronunciation drifted and b) the extra letters were (something unintelligible)dde I propose a third solution: Leave spelling as it is and pronounce the words as you see fit. When someone tries to correct your pronounciation simply retort that they are stuck in the old world and yours is the new pronunciation. Over time we can converge on a new pronunciation standard.
90% of the wealth is in 2% of the pockets. Bummer to be in the majority.
As a Canadian, I can use Center and Centre interchangeably, but I tend towards using Centre for the noun and Center for the verb. Perhaps it's because the noun tends to lack emphasis being more passive, and the verb has a slight vocal gap between "Cent" and "er" requiring an "er" instead of an "re".
And maybe its also because buildings and locations tend to have the Centre spelling prominantly displayed, whereas the action falls more into the day-to-day nondescript usage, subconciously affected by American influences.
Heh, I'm even worse and I suspect I'm not alone-- :)
If it's a road, it's a rOOt (Route 66 == Root 66). If it's my path from A to B (often involving many roads) it's a rOUTe. However when dealing with networks, OSPF is a rOUTing protocol that Cisco rOUTers can use to discover rOUTes.
Slashdot - where to disagree, is to be a troll
I think for the most part spelling things with strict phonics(fonics for or simplified spellers) simply won't work. There is going to be to be a great deal of in fighting with various dictionary authorities and different groups over what things sound like and how they should therefore be spelled.
,native speaker any way, make some pretty good guesses at the meaning of a word I have never seen before even with no sentence contense because I know some history of my langauge, where stuff comes from and a good collection of root meanings. The article cited dougnut as and example if you did not know what that was donut tells you nothing. You might know something about cooking and recongnize the dough and at least be able to undertand that this is something one might eat and obtain at a bakery, if you do things the way we do now. The trade off here is lessing the initial learning curve at the cost vauleble functionality for more accomplished users. It would be like swithing form BASH to command.com. It makes no sense.
Spelling does not have to be perfect to be read easily we have seen that most readers slide right by even if you botch a few letters in the middle of the word. We should all try to do a reasonable job though so we have something which can be universally read and easily. Its not hard to figure out what the word was supposed to be when there are one or two mistakes in a sentence what is hard is when stuff is all spelled by sound and I don't don't speak like you. The article was almost impossible for me to read. What is even more painful is when stuff is not spelled consistantly the same way. Right now we have a fairly strong agreement on how things should be spelled. As soon as we start changing stuff its going to be hard to determine, again because of the likely in fighting, what is right.
It won't be long before you and the guy sitting next to you are forced to use your jugement more often since the dictionary is in flux and we will have years of documents where stuff is spelt all sorts of interesting ways. That is really hard to read. Have you ever tried to read stuff from before Johnson's 1755 Dictionary was published? It hurts, Geoffery Chaucer would spell words several different was in one manuscript. It makes it damn hard to read.
Also the article points out the information encoded in our prefixes and suffex characters, as well as root words, phonetic spelling would deprive us of this. I can in many cases as a
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Are you joking? Is there some whooshing going on here?
There are billions of people who don't know English well. Ignoring all of them and sticking to ASCII is immensely retarded. And in any case, I don't see anything about introducing new characters, just using those same characters differently.
All Chinese-speaking individuals are female?
Certainly not. English is a gender-neutral language compared to most languages in Europe, but there are still gender rules. Like the one you allude to where, when in doubt, you should use masculine. But the real question is, since you obviously understood what he meant, why were you an ass in making fun of him? Does it make you feel better to belittle someone, or do you think you are doing your part to preserve the language? Is that the same reason you object to trying to converge the written and spoken language?
If you had listened to what he was telling you, rather than how he was telling it to you, you could have come back with great counter-examples. Pinyin, which is why he brough up Chinese, if designed to phonetically sound written characters, is a failure. The pronunciations have changed since Pinyin was created, but the spellings have not. There are cases where the letter "i" is used, but the sound should be represented by an "a" or "e" or some combination of vowels. Any attempt to do the same with English, even if perfect when complete, will soon diverge.
There is a problem. The written language changes more slowly than the spoken language. So what would you do (or not do) about it?
Learn to love Alaska
But the real question is, since you obviously understood what he meant, why were you an ass in making fun of him? Does it make you feel better to belittle someone, or do you think you are doing your part to preserve the language?
You missed my motivation, which is understandable. For thousands of years, two different neutral pronouns have been used: "he" and "they". Recently, feminists and their supporters have objected to using "he" on the grounds that it is exclusionary. I have no particular objection to that objection. However, many people have decided to replace it with "she". I do object to that, because it is at least as exclusionary as "he" is. As you can see, I'm not trying to preserve the language, but I'm merely trying to help avoid exclusionary language.
In any case, as I am unfamiliar with the details of Pinyin or Mandarin Chinese, I would not have "come back with great counter-examples", regardless of how I read the OP. In any case, I do not think the particular problem you have described is insurmountable; if a phonetic orthography is our goal, it should be simple enough to alter the spelling along with the pronunciation.
Is that the same reason you object to trying to converge the written and spoken language?
I'm afraid if you actually read what I said instead of what you wanted to read, you would have seen I never particular advocated not altering the spelling of our language. But you probably think it's fun to make an arse of yourself by belittling people, or something. In fact, I spent the entire first two paragraphs of my post refuting an objection to reforming spelling i.e. that by respelling our language we would lose the record of etymology it provides. (Perhaps also you should have read how I wrote those paragraphs, in addition to what I wrote in them. There were plenty of lines to read between.)
There is a problem. The written language changes more slowly than the spoken language. So what would you do (or not do) about it?
Did you read my final paragraph? I will quote it and expand upon it here. It provides my solution to the problem of having an orthography that corresponds to the pronunciation quite closely.
Using the IPA as the basis for an orthography could have some value; but given the variability in pronunciation between different groups of people, and over time, it would not be much use. The IPA provides definitions of the different characters and in particular it is completely inappropriate to re-order the vowel symbols with respect to height, as you would have to for some dialects of English and/or to consider time. For instance, the letter "e" would probably be used for the vowel in "game", which is reasonable enough for American English, but completely inappropriate for Australian English. So Australians would not be using the IPA to write their language, even though they spelt it the same way as Americans did (which brings us to another point: different sounds are differently merged in different dialects, so many Americans pronounce "cot" and "caught" the same, whereas I pronounce "father" and "farther" the same). The best one could do would be to use symbols from the IPA, but why? So few fonts contain a nice Latin letter open e/epsilon (trust me, I've looked) that you're better off using the regular set of Latin letters, diacritics and digraphs.
Their particular proposal looks really bad, but a nifty regularisation of the orthography could be achieved that gets rid of the worst aspects while still largely being the same in different regions; some variation will need to have different spellings based on different pronuncation. Rather than having a one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes, I would aim for a many-to-one correspondence: Any sound can be spelt in more than one way, but any particular spelling will correspond only to one sound. So for me "ar" and "aa" would be pronounced the same, whereas for most Americans they would be pronounced differently. The orthography would be n
Look out!
For thousands of years
That should've read "For a thousand years" or "For hundreds of years". I apologise for the exaggeration.
Look out!
Interestingly (if a bit off-topic) I think there are current American English terms that haven't been seen in British English since 1776 -- the British form evolved away, while the American retained the older forms ("c" vs. "s" usage in many spellings).
None of this however is as difficult to parse as the language shift from Fortran 66 to Fortran IV, however. I had a lovely proof of this, but there's not enough space in the margin to write the Fermat statement.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I get this funny feeling I've never seen so many (unintentional!) spelling mistakes as I could see in your posts to this article.
... or it may simply mean it is one of the few articles that got slashdotted only by americans.
This could either mean the most valiant defenders of orthodox spelling are frustrated pretenders, which have always had problems with spelling (and want to perpetuate them to the next generations, so they could too suffer as they did)
My opinion: WE DO NEED SOME (GRADUAL) ENGLISH SPELLING REFORMS. You know, just like any other language, as English is not infallible, immutable, or eternal. Nor is it a holy language (forget about the KJV bullshit they're teaching you in Sunday school).
This already happens, just give it some isolation, and a mix of two languages, and things start to get phonetic quickly.
For example, the Pitkern and Norfuk languages are Pidgins of English and Tahitian. Notice how the language name itself is phonetic rather than Pitcairn and Norfolk.
The same is true elsewhere, for example Computer is "Komputa" in Kiswahili because of the way the word is pronounced.
Now, in English speaking countries, this will not happen, since there is no pidgin influence, and no isolation.
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From the Finnish perspective this discussion sounds silly. Finnish is written as it is spoken - but of course, there are dialects, and if you want you can write out the dialect also. In Finland the written language is more or less standard, but there are several spoken variant depending on your region, social backgroundetc.