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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
"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
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:
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.
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.
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.
... skewl
Sig: I stole this sig.
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.
... 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
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.
Because it's better to educate people than leave them in ignorance. That's why we have public education.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
Wasn't eliminating words the modus operandi of Newspeak?
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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)
From the Wikipedia article:
-mls
No Jesus, no pees. No Jesus, no pees.
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?
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.
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. ~
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.
What, you mean like 'circ-leh'?
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
Actually, those are Latin plurals, not Germanic.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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
>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.
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.
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....
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'.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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. . . .
===================
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.
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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.
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)
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
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".
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.
That article on Yahoo was neither cute nor funny.
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
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. :)
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.
I can make my way through that, but that's considered trivial. Also, if you can make your way through that, it would mean that it is easier to make the change since people can still read the "garbled" text as it changes. The original proposal by Mark Twain suggests doing it a step at a time rather than doing a complete overhaul.
As for the article itself, it's an extremely bad recommendation. There is no pattern for changing the spelling and can easily damage the English language. For example, "new gnu" gets converted to "nue nue" resulting in teachers docking you for doubling a word when they mangled the language in the first place. Language reform attempts that do not take homonyms into account are bound to fail.
And just in case someone may actually believe the scrambled text, here's a rebuttal.
Try reading the following:
1) A vheclie epxledod at a plocie cehckipont near the UN haduqertares in Bagahdd on Mnoday kilinlg the bmober and an Irqai polcie offceir
2) Big ccunoil tax ineesacrs tihs yaer hvae seezueqd the inmcoes of mnay pneosenirs
3) A dootcr has aimttded the magltheuansr of a tageene ceacnr pintaet who deid aetfr a hatospil durg blendur
These sentences fit the requirements, but become increasingly difficult to read - especially when the last word almost looks like a similar word. In addition, the scrambling blindingly kills Proper names, which risks making it difficult to find an appropriate reference (especially on other news sites.)
While there is some truth to the text in question (e.g. pattern recognition), it requires the brain to work harder and can break down on uncommon or complex words.
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.
"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.
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
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
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 ?