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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.
Nuthing fore u tu see here. Pleez mov alon.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
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:
Agreed, especially considering it was originally proposed in 1789 by our most famous dictionary's namesake, so if he can't get it going, well then, I ask you, who really can?
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
yeah. You'll never see people abbreviating things like 'you' and 'your' to 'u' and 'ur' or spelling 'through' or 'night' to 'thru' and 'nite'.
:(
Sadly, I've seen 5th grade papers where the kid spelled through 'thru' and the teacher didn't let out a peep.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
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.
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
Wasn't eliminating words the modus operandi of Newspeak?
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Part of the problem is context. In English, since there are so many words which are homonyms, information is actually transmitted by the spelling of the word. It's bad enough one word can have dozens of meanings, but then you have cases like: Weigh, way, and whey. If we compressed that to simply 'way', which way would you way the way? (In which manner would you determine the effect of gravity upon watery milk byproducts?) See the problem?
Simplified spelling destroys context and meaning in English. We would basically have to rewrite the language from scratch to avoid problems like the one outlined above. In not so simple terms: that will never happen.
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
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.
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.
brilliant idea. Lets take a fairly easy to grasp language and turn in into japanese for people who can't spell.
did you forget to take your meds?
"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)
I done speak that proper english! N ain't nothin' wrong wit my speelin'!
- Kal`Goblez
Pronunciation differences would have a huge impact on this change in spelling. Should you spell car as "cah" like a Northeasterner? Should door be spelled "doeor" like a Southerner says it? Since there isn't a truly standard pronunciation used by everyone, how can there be pronunciation-based spelling without causing major communcation problems?
"It's too bad stupidity isn't painful." - A. S. LaVey
Well, we could always overload words the way a C programmer would:
way -> way
weigh -> way1
whey -> way2
Although introducing namespaces would be more clear to the reader:
way -> Directions::way
weigh -> Measurements::way
whey -> Foodstuffs::way
But since we're talking about text documents in general, maybe we should base a new simplified spelling scheme on XML:
way -> <spelling:overloaded_word category="directions"> way </spelling:overloaded_word>
weigh -> <spelling:overloaded_word category="measurements"> way </spelling:overloaded_word>
whey -> <spelling:overloaded_word category="foodstuffs"> way </spelling:overloaded_word>
I had a conversation with a native Chinese speaker and a native Slovenian speaker. Both agreed that English was *incredibly* easy to learn, mostly because it has comparatively rules. The Slovenian speaker had learned German, Slovakian, and Italian. I'm not sure what other languages the Chinese speaker learned.
We don't have noun genders like other European languages, and we don't have too many verb conjugations. It's also easy to transform words into other parts of speech, e.g. verbing nouns, or making verbs nounish or noun-y, so it's pretty easy to re-use words you already know.
So just learn a few rules, learn the vocab, and the few exceptions, and you're set.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Well... There are examples to that.
Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, a few others.
They have all undergone a reform around the turn of the last century which simplified spelling and grammar. As a result Russian grammar can be expressed in under 8 pages and the language has in total around 40 exemptions to these rules. Everything else is built out through some fairly simple grammar rules. Bulgarian and Serbian are quite similar to Russian to this extent, though their language reform did not go that far.
The results are quite interesting though most people prefer to "oversee" them, because expressing them is considered to be very politically incorrect.
First of all as a result of the reform, most English speaking humanity students find Russian staggeringly hard. Engineering students (the few that are interested in languages) cruise through it with ease. I am speaking from the experience of trying to teach students at an American University Russian and it was not fun. The humanity majors could not gear their brain into "rule operating mode" and that was it. Some of them knew 3-4 languages by that time, but Russian was beyond them.
Second, Russians and attention to detail do not mix. I am half Russian and I have lived there for 10+ years so I am speaking this out of experience. Their brain functions from the perspective that things are built according to rules and most of them are not good at memorising exemptions and minute details. At the same time they will swipe the ground with you on math, ability to draw general conclusions and cold cynical logic. Sometimes you think that their entire bloody nation got a Turette syndrome.
Third, they even learn to read in a completely different manner. They learn to assemble things in blocks to get a meaning. That is simply impossible with English. An average toddler will outright get lost trying to get through all the intricacies of bought vs buy and caught vs catch and so on, so they learn to recognise words a whole, not to try to assemble them. This once again changes the way people think.
So on so forth. And by the way we can continue along these lines looking at Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and especially Chinese. Each of these shapes the brain in a specific pattern and some thoughts which are OK for them will be immensely foreign to an English speaker. And vice versa of course.
Overall, "the language shapes the thought". There are some very good observations by David Brin in the Uplift series to that regard that a language by design may prohibit certain type of thinking. So someone with a different language may come to a thought which will never otherwise occur.
A language reform will change the way English think. It is not just a problem of word meaning and context. It will fundamentally change education, culture, way of thinking, etc.
You are right, I do not believe it will happen.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
The only person who has the right to change English is The Queen. The Queen's English belongs to the Queen and we should all be thankful that she lets us use it.
God bless The Queen and the British Empire!
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
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....
Sadly, I've seen 5th grade papers where the kid spelled through 'thru' and the teacher didn't let out a peep. :(
Through->thru was one of Webster's proposed spelling reforms. Don't knock it too badly. You may be more familiar with some of Webster's other proposed spelling reforms that did succeed, such as colour->color, programme->program, etc. Through->thru didn't have quite the same level of success but it's still used ubiquitously on road signs for space-saving concerns.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
First is OK each time, second is only OK in the first example. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to explain why this is (or just why).
The second one ends in a preposition. A preposition must always have an object. We often incorrectly place the object of a preposition earlier in our sentences--"What did you place it on?" should be "On what did you place it?". This is considered OK in informal (and often formal) speech, as the meaning is still clear. The object is there, it's just in the wrong place. The second example in your second pair, however, has no object for its preposition. This makes it incorrect by any standard.
In your first pair of examples, there is no preposition. In the second pair, there is one. It's the same as if you'd stuck an article with no noun on the end of the second example in the first pair.
"Which book did you file without reading the first page?"
"Which book did you file without reading the"
See? An article must have a noun. A preposition must have a noun or pronoun. If you say "on" you have to answer the question "on what (or whom)?" It's a usage rule for prepositions. The reason that the second pair is wrong has nothing to do with why the first pair is right.
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.
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
"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.