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.

Comments

Re:Not again

[Compuser]

Those aren't rules. That's documentation and guidance maybe but not rules.
The mere fact that there is a category "usually [masculine, feminine, neutral]"
should tell you that there is no first principles way to determine the gender.
Notice also that the "always [masculine, feminine, neutral]" also has exceptions.
Latin-derived grammars are usually a pain in the ass because of genders, irregular
verbs, and noun cases. German suffers from all of those. English has fewer
irregularities (gerund; too many tenses, like the conditional tenses that few
people use; rather arbitrary use of "a" vs. "the", etc). That said, I am not
aware of a language with a simple consistent grammar with no exceptions to just
a few simple rules (unlambda is the only one and that's for computers only).

Stop calling the American language "English"

[ozbird]

If you think the rest of the English speaking world is going to follow this stupidity, think again. Which "intelligent designer" thought it would be a good idea to have a language that looks like it's been written in crayon?! I guess Dubya will be happy when his "nucular missles" r speld rite...

(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"?)

Directors at Daimler-Benz and Chrysler have announced an agreement to adopt English as the preferred language for communications, rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, Directors at Chrysler conceded that English spelling has some room for improvement and has accepted a 5 year phase in plan. In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c."

Also the hard "c" will be replaced with "k." Not only will this klear up konfusion, but komputers kan have 1 less letter. There will be a growing kompany enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced by "f." This will make words like "fotograf" 20 persent shorter.

In the third year, Daimler-Khrysler akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated shanges are possible.

Daimler-Khrysler will enkourage the removal of double letters, which have always been a determent to akkurate spelling. Also, all will agree that the horrible mess of silent "e's" in the language is disgrakeful, and they would go.

By the fourth year, people will be resepetive to steps such as replaking "th" with "z" and "w" by "v".

During ze fifz year, ze unekessary "o" kan be dropped from vords kontaining "ou", and similiar khanges vuld of kors be applied to all ozer kombinations of letters.

After zis fifz year, ve vill hav a really sensible vriten style. Zere vill be no more trubls or diffikultis and employee's vill find it easy to komunikat viz each ozer.

Ov kourse all suppliers vill be expekted to svitsh to zis for all business kommuniktion via Daimler-Khrysler.

Ze dream vill finally kome true.