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conuly
They want a rational orthography for English. They're not going to get it, but it's a very nice thought.
The comments at Yahoo, of course, are... well, they're comments at Yahoo. There's a few main threads:
1. We shouldn't "dumb down" things because that's just helping illiterates, and they're just being lazy.
2. We shouldn't "dumb down" things because that's just helping illiterates, and they're just stupid anyway.
3. We shouldn't "dumb down" things because we can't do that with math... or can we? Also, nobody uses algebra or geometry in real life.
4. These people are just lazy teachers and bad spellers and should be shot at dawn.
5. If we did this, nobody would be able to distinguish homophones in writing and the sky would fall!
6. If we did this, English wouldn't have all these connections to other languages and the sky would fall!
7. If we did this, you wouldn't be able to tell the etymology of a word by looking at it, and you'd never know what an unfamiliar word meant! (This is, of course, the previous argument, but it has the benefit of being somewhat coherent.)
8. But what about dialects????
Now, I've actually given some thought in the past to how I'd reform English orthography if anybody ever gave me that job. I know I've complained in the past about people saying various words "can't be sounded out" when, in fact, they can so long as you have a grasp of how phonics works (last time I made this point it was with the word "lightning", which makes perfect sense once you remember that "igh" is one unit), but be that as it may, English orthography is still an unholy mess. In all the ridiculous amount of time we spend teaching kids to read and write, they could ACTUALLY be reading and writing! Or learning anything else, which is bound to be more useful than mastering a skill people with more sensible set-ups figure out in less than half the time.
So let's take these points in turn.
1. My, aren't you kind!
2. My, aren't you kind! Seriously, why is it some people think that nothing is virtuous unless it's difficult?
3. Other languages have reformed their spellings without the sky falling in AND without failing math (indeed, if you can spend less time spelling you can spend more time for math....)
Also, we do SO use geometry and algebra every day! What sort of mathless life do YOU lead?
4. Really? This? This is your argument?
5. Stupid argument. Stupid, stupid, STUPID argument. There are some good arguments for keeping our current system (inertia is a pretty powerful one all on its own), but this isn't one of them and never has been. Obviously, if you can tell the difference between "but" and "butt" in speech you don't actually need that extra t to distinguish them in writing. No, really. And every time you make a weak argument, you weaken your entire position. Strong arguments aren't bolstered by adding a few weak ones to the pile, they're really not.
6. Of course we'd still have those connections to other languages! Why, it wouldn't be English if we didn't have a bajillion words from other languages floating about! They'd just be spelled differently! (And if that's seriously their argument, can we at LEAST get rid of that stupid floating "s" in "island"? It's only there because of false etymology to begin with!)
7. This is the argument those people meant to make. To this I say:
a. It's not like we teach etymology in schools. It'd be great if we did - heck, we could use some of that time freed up from not learning spelling to do so! - but we don't.
b. I agree, the moment when you realize that "two" is of course related to "twin" and "twice", or that "one" has to do with "alone" is a pretty nifty and inspiring moment... but I'm not sure it's worth ten words a week in penance.
8. This is a good argument! This is their only good argument, as far as I'm concerned. I have three thoughts about this.
a. Not all spelling reforms have to be massive, sweeping, and radical. We can start by doing something as simple as removing letters which are universally (or very nearly) considered both silent and meaningless.
Now, every time I say this some smartass goes "what about silent e!?!", which just goes to show that being able to spell doesn't improve your reading comprehension one bit. I said meaningless. Since these people invariably mean not the silent e in "come" but the one in "home", that letter has a purpose. That purpose is to "make the vowel say its name". It's an awkward and unwieldy way of distinguishing between long and short vowels, but it works very well indeed. And just getting rid of, say, the b in "thumb" (this IS phonetic - "mb" at the end of the word ALWAYS says "m" - but it's really just as easy to put "m" there instead) or the p in "pneumonia" will save a lot of stress for young students, lazy or otherwise.
This is a spelling change which would have very few problems with dialects. In fact, in my little proto-plan I've divided reforming spelling into different stages, and have tentatively identified "vowels" as the biggest problem. My suggestion would be to ignore all vowels for a start and concentrate only on clearing up the problems with consonants.
b. Not all problems with dialects are big ones. The ones people always mention are of the vowel shift variety, though they don't know that.
Here's the thing. You and I may not agree about exactly how to say the "i" in "time", but we probably do agree that it's the same vowel that's in "tie" or "my" or "bite". We can have a distinct symbol for that, and it won't really *matter* that we say it differently, so long as we're all consistent.
c. The problem they *don't* mention is with things like the "Don-dawn merger" and likewise, where two different people put two different phonemes into the same word. Bad enough with Don and dawn (where one group of people is stuck with two symbols for the same sound, but they can get over it), but it gets downright tragic with or-ange and ah-range! OMG, HOW DO WE PICK WHICH ONE???
I don't know. I mean, I do know, but I don't like the answer more than you do. We do what everybody else does and arbitrarily pick one dialect (or make one up out of whole cloth) to be the standard. And then we teach that.
Truthfully, we already *do* that, when it comes right down to it, but in my ideal world we wouldn't say that the standard is more or less correct than the other dialects, simply that it's convenient for everybody to have one way of writing, and that in order to do that we NEED one way of speaking when we're not talking within our own group. It's no different from learning Latin or Esperanto for the same purpose.
And yes, that would just suck, but I'm not convinced it sucks more than our current mess. And let's face it - it IS a mess. And we just keep on making it messier. Jalapeno? WTF? There is NO GOOD REASON for us to keep that "j" just because that's how they do it in Spanish.
There is one other problem that ought to come up in these discussions, but that I rarely see, and that's the fact that English has far more sounds than letters. I keep seeing the number "44" put up there, but that probably varies depending on dialect, of course.
Now, this isn't a totally insurmountable problem. Using my own speech as my personal guide, and allowing as many digraphs as I can reasonably squeeze in, I can get the number of necessary letters down to 32, with the possible inclusion of a hyphen or diaresis to distinguish between diphthongs and non-diphthong strings of vowels. But it's a very tight squeeze, and for it to work some letters have to lose their existing meanings altogether and take on bizarre new ones, which... let's face it, is REALLY never going to happen. A spelling reform may have an impossibly slim chance of occurring, but nobody is going to really let me get away with saying "Well, q is unnecessary when kw can do the job, so let's make it take on both sounds of th instead".
So all told, we have a whole bunch of bad and silly reasons against spelling reform, and three good ones - the dialect problem (we can work around it, but it'd be a real pain in the butt for everybody concerned), the limited letters problem (ditto), and the inertia problem (I can understand that nobody wants to reprint the OED just because of a few upstarts).
The comments at Yahoo, of course, are... well, they're comments at Yahoo. There's a few main threads:
1. We shouldn't "dumb down" things because that's just helping illiterates, and they're just being lazy.
2. We shouldn't "dumb down" things because that's just helping illiterates, and they're just stupid anyway.
3. We shouldn't "dumb down" things because we can't do that with math... or can we? Also, nobody uses algebra or geometry in real life.
4. These people are just lazy teachers and bad spellers and should be shot at dawn.
5. If we did this, nobody would be able to distinguish homophones in writing and the sky would fall!
6. If we did this, English wouldn't have all these connections to other languages and the sky would fall!
7. If we did this, you wouldn't be able to tell the etymology of a word by looking at it, and you'd never know what an unfamiliar word meant! (This is, of course, the previous argument, but it has the benefit of being somewhat coherent.)
8. But what about dialects????
Now, I've actually given some thought in the past to how I'd reform English orthography if anybody ever gave me that job. I know I've complained in the past about people saying various words "can't be sounded out" when, in fact, they can so long as you have a grasp of how phonics works (last time I made this point it was with the word "lightning", which makes perfect sense once you remember that "igh" is one unit), but be that as it may, English orthography is still an unholy mess. In all the ridiculous amount of time we spend teaching kids to read and write, they could ACTUALLY be reading and writing! Or learning anything else, which is bound to be more useful than mastering a skill people with more sensible set-ups figure out in less than half the time.
So let's take these points in turn.
1. My, aren't you kind!
2. My, aren't you kind! Seriously, why is it some people think that nothing is virtuous unless it's difficult?
3. Other languages have reformed their spellings without the sky falling in AND without failing math (indeed, if you can spend less time spelling you can spend more time for math....)
Also, we do SO use geometry and algebra every day! What sort of mathless life do YOU lead?
4. Really? This? This is your argument?
5. Stupid argument. Stupid, stupid, STUPID argument. There are some good arguments for keeping our current system (inertia is a pretty powerful one all on its own), but this isn't one of them and never has been. Obviously, if you can tell the difference between "but" and "butt" in speech you don't actually need that extra t to distinguish them in writing. No, really. And every time you make a weak argument, you weaken your entire position. Strong arguments aren't bolstered by adding a few weak ones to the pile, they're really not.
6. Of course we'd still have those connections to other languages! Why, it wouldn't be English if we didn't have a bajillion words from other languages floating about! They'd just be spelled differently! (And if that's seriously their argument, can we at LEAST get rid of that stupid floating "s" in "island"? It's only there because of false etymology to begin with!)
7. This is the argument those people meant to make. To this I say:
a. It's not like we teach etymology in schools. It'd be great if we did - heck, we could use some of that time freed up from not learning spelling to do so! - but we don't.
b. I agree, the moment when you realize that "two" is of course related to "twin" and "twice", or that "one" has to do with "alone" is a pretty nifty and inspiring moment... but I'm not sure it's worth ten words a week in penance.
8. This is a good argument! This is their only good argument, as far as I'm concerned. I have three thoughts about this.
a. Not all spelling reforms have to be massive, sweeping, and radical. We can start by doing something as simple as removing letters which are universally (or very nearly) considered both silent and meaningless.
Now, every time I say this some smartass goes "what about silent e!?!", which just goes to show that being able to spell doesn't improve your reading comprehension one bit. I said meaningless. Since these people invariably mean not the silent e in "come" but the one in "home", that letter has a purpose. That purpose is to "make the vowel say its name". It's an awkward and unwieldy way of distinguishing between long and short vowels, but it works very well indeed. And just getting rid of, say, the b in "thumb" (this IS phonetic - "mb" at the end of the word ALWAYS says "m" - but it's really just as easy to put "m" there instead) or the p in "pneumonia" will save a lot of stress for young students, lazy or otherwise.
This is a spelling change which would have very few problems with dialects. In fact, in my little proto-plan I've divided reforming spelling into different stages, and have tentatively identified "vowels" as the biggest problem. My suggestion would be to ignore all vowels for a start and concentrate only on clearing up the problems with consonants.
b. Not all problems with dialects are big ones. The ones people always mention are of the vowel shift variety, though they don't know that.
Here's the thing. You and I may not agree about exactly how to say the "i" in "time", but we probably do agree that it's the same vowel that's in "tie" or "my" or "bite". We can have a distinct symbol for that, and it won't really *matter* that we say it differently, so long as we're all consistent.
c. The problem they *don't* mention is with things like the "Don-dawn merger" and likewise, where two different people put two different phonemes into the same word. Bad enough with Don and dawn (where one group of people is stuck with two symbols for the same sound, but they can get over it), but it gets downright tragic with or-ange and ah-range! OMG, HOW DO WE PICK WHICH ONE???
I don't know. I mean, I do know, but I don't like the answer more than you do. We do what everybody else does and arbitrarily pick one dialect (or make one up out of whole cloth) to be the standard. And then we teach that.
Truthfully, we already *do* that, when it comes right down to it, but in my ideal world we wouldn't say that the standard is more or less correct than the other dialects, simply that it's convenient for everybody to have one way of writing, and that in order to do that we NEED one way of speaking when we're not talking within our own group. It's no different from learning Latin or Esperanto for the same purpose.
And yes, that would just suck, but I'm not convinced it sucks more than our current mess. And let's face it - it IS a mess. And we just keep on making it messier. Jalapeno? WTF? There is NO GOOD REASON for us to keep that "j" just because that's how they do it in Spanish.
There is one other problem that ought to come up in these discussions, but that I rarely see, and that's the fact that English has far more sounds than letters. I keep seeing the number "44" put up there, but that probably varies depending on dialect, of course.
Now, this isn't a totally insurmountable problem. Using my own speech as my personal guide, and allowing as many digraphs as I can reasonably squeeze in, I can get the number of necessary letters down to 32, with the possible inclusion of a hyphen or diaresis to distinguish between diphthongs and non-diphthong strings of vowels. But it's a very tight squeeze, and for it to work some letters have to lose their existing meanings altogether and take on bizarre new ones, which... let's face it, is REALLY never going to happen. A spelling reform may have an impossibly slim chance of occurring, but nobody is going to really let me get away with saying "Well, q is unnecessary when kw can do the job, so let's make it take on both sounds of th instead".
So all told, we have a whole bunch of bad and silly reasons against spelling reform, and three good ones - the dialect problem (we can work around it, but it'd be a real pain in the butt for everybody concerned), the limited letters problem (ditto), and the inertia problem (I can understand that nobody wants to reprint the OED just because of a few upstarts).
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 04:24 am (UTC)This is the inertia argument, but it's also the backward compatibility argument. If we radically change spelling, then I worry that generations of people will have difficulty reading all of the current stuff that is out there. Sure, some of it could be converted, but it'd be difficult and not all of it would be, so it's cut people off from the past more.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 04:39 am (UTC)It's probably the biggest and most convincing argument, actually, which is why the few times I bring up the subject I start in with the concept of starting small. Little things at a time.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 04:44 am (UTC)And sure, people will do it for cash, but I want it easily and cheaply available. We already have too man rich/poor divides as it is. If we make most reading material hard to access then there's too much of an ability to limit what people can easily read. And that is what worries me. With gradual shifts, it's harder to do that and people have less motivation, as the results won't take effect in their lifetimes.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 02:25 pm (UTC)Translation software. It'd be pretty simple, actually.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 04:58 am (UTC)My husband is very smart, but his spelling is atrocious.
I've been tempted on occasion to write things in the spellings i would use if i had my way.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-15 12:48 am (UTC)THIS, oh this. I so relate. I think it's due in large part because he was never made to memorize all the "rules" I take for granted.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 05:06 am (UTC)I have seen etymology taught in schools-- I read a Latin/Greek bits test to a trio of students once, doing prefixes and roots and such. I did my best not to wordnerd them to death.
Change mostly happens bit by bit, I think, as we make plough into plow and catalogue into catalog. I'm okay with that. Any big reforms run the risk of hitting something either ridiculous or that I just don't agree with. I'm more comfortable with spelling weirdness when it just sort of happened than when someone did it on purpose.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 05:08 pm (UTC)Yup, that's the inertia argument, writ small and personal.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 05:09 am (UTC)It's not as though there's no precedent for variant spellings. Today, we can write "flyer" or "flier," "gray" or "grey", "buses" or "busses", or (although it's a bit archaic) "gaol" or "jail."
It wouldn't be changing the language, just formally recognizing some phonic spellings as acceptable for a few words every couple of years. Very gradually, the English language could evolve to a somewhat more rational spelling.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-14 12:42 pm (UTC)Noooooooo!
That's just as bad as writing "male parent" as "fother".
Sincerely,
someone without the cot/caught merger.
(Now, if you had proposed "bawt" or the like, I would have been on your side. Not "baht" or "bot", though; those are both separate for me. On the other hand, "bort" would have been acceptable to me, but probably not to you....)
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 06:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 04:54 pm (UTC)I agree that the spelling of "bot" looks like it means something else, but the only version of "bought" I'm familiar with in the US sounds like that.
Anyway, I'm not married to any particular spelling. Just suggesting options.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 05:06 pm (UTC)Maybe most people wouldn't read it that way. I don't know why I do. I'm sure I have some unconscious rules or associations, but being unconscious, I can't say whether or not they are reasonable. I just know it'd never occur to me to read "coff" as "cough" and if I saw it in print, I wouldn't know what word it was. I'd have to be explicitly taught to read it like that, and it'd be difficult.
And I am from the US and do not have the cot/caught merger. They sound completely different to me. Just as bot and bought do. Or hotty and haughty or tot and taught. But that's just part of the general issue of mergers already brought up. I've dealt with other people making distinctions I can't hear. I'd be in favor of writing the distinctions though, and letting those who can't hear them just have to memorize what seems like inconsistent spelling. It would still be less funky spelling memorization than we currently have.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 05:27 pm (UTC)I say cough like off and coffee as well, but they all have the same caught vowel.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 08:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 05:06 pm (UTC)Do you pronounce "Don" and "Dawn" the same way?
Cough and bought have the same vowel as Dawn.
Bot has the same vowel as Don.
Of course, if to you those have the same vowel, you'll see whence the confusion.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 05:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 05:26 pm (UTC)For me, "cough" definitely goes with "Don" (and with "bot"), not with "Dawn".
(So I'd spell "cough" as "coff", since it has "short-o" for me, not "aw".)
"Cawf" (or, for that matter, "cawfee") would make me think of a stereotypical New Yorker.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 05:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 08:54 pm (UTC)I'll check with some others though. This is not one of the things anyone has told me I am weird in my pronunciation of. And they do call me on "mirror" and "drawer", so my friends are not beyond picking on my dialect.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 09:54 am (UTC)... and didn't depict all dialects faithfully back then, either. People deal.
A problem with English, of course, might be that every English-speaking country (as opposed to region) might want its own "standard" orthography.
The number of letters business is nonsense, too. One could simply use the relevant IPA symbols - which already exist anyway - the "work around" has already been done. The "pain in the butt" problem, of course, remains - if everyone suddenly has to learn that "x" doesn't represent "ks" anymore but rather the "j" in "jalapeno" ["xรขlรขpenyรด"?], that'll no doubt be annoying at first ;)
Or it would be easier to keep some conventions intact (even if that means one sound represented by two symbols, or two sounds represented by one). As long as there's consistency...
If you do start on a spelling reform, however, please get people to do it that actually know about the workings of the language. That's my biggest issue with the German spelling reforms of the past two decades - some of the decisions do make sense, but many are kind of arbitrary or actually the wrong way round (such as that what was once aufwenden ("to expend") is now aufwรคnden because the corresponding noun is Aufwand ("expenses"). Welll... yes... but both aufwe/รคnden and Aufwand are originally derived from wenden ("to turn"), which is still (even now) spelled with an "e"......?).
Oh, and yes - all our dictionaries have naturally been edited and reprinted. And because there have actually been three (or thereabouts) "waves" to the reforms, they have been edited and reprinted with slight changes three (or thereabouts) times.
But that certainly shows that it can be done.
Then again, German spelling was never near as messy as English spelling is.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 02:22 pm (UTC)As for using IPA, it's kinda ugly.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 02:46 pm (UTC)While voiced and unvoiced th "rarely" form minimal pairs (the only one that comes to my mind would be "thigh"/"thy", and I suppose it's arguable whether "thy" still counts as an English word), different "letters" to represent them could nicely mark content words (thigh, throw, thing, whatever) against function words (this, there, they, whatever), so personally I'd prefer different letters. That is, of course, just personal taste. ;) But English could just revive the good old thorn and eth for that purpose...
Though I suppose the easiest way out of the mess that is English orthography would be a pronunciation reform rather than a spelling reform. Just tell people to pronounce stuff like 16th century Londoners would've done and suddenly most of it makes sense again...
As for "kinda ugly", I suspect that's mostly a matter of habit. Many IPA symbols occur in "normal" English writing without looking particularly "ugly" or "pretty" there, after all.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 03:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 05:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 05:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-14 12:55 pm (UTC)I don't know. I mean, I do know, but I don't like the answer more than you do. We do what everybody else does and arbitrarily pick one dialect (or make one up out of whole cloth) to be the standard. And then we teach that.
I suspect part of the decision involves whether to make it easy to read the new standard dialect or to write it.
If you want to make it easy to write, then merge what can be merged: "o" will stand for the vowel in "bot", "bought", and "(Thai) baht". If you want to make it easy to read, then split what can be split: "witch" and "which" will start with different consonants, and "mass" and "pass" will be spelled with different vowels. (And "can"-made-out-of-metal and "can"-be-able-to would probably also have separate vowels.)
In the first case, you don't have to know how someone else's dialect splits up the vowels that you merge in order to write; in the second case, you don't have to "endure" someone else's mergers in order to figure out which of two (or more...) words that are perfect homophones for them but which sound entirely distinct to you are meant.
Personally, I'd be for a standard that uses as few mergers as possible (only those that are very widespread) and probably includes some splits as well.
(The difference between a "split" and a "merger" is really only valid when talking diachronically anyway, i.e. looking at the development; synchronically speaking, i.e. looking at a snapshot in time, the difference is the same: some people make a distinction between sounds X and Y and others don't, and whether this is because X and Y were originally distinct or whether they were originally the same sound but split into two distinct sounds for some people isn't really relevant to ease of use of a writing system. I think.)
Then, based on the argument that you read more material than you write, splitters and non-mergers will have their larger phoneme set catered for, while mergers and non-splitters will simply learn that, say, "o, aw, ah" are three symbols for the same sound, just like most of Anglophonia lives with "er, ir, ur" for the same sound (Bert, dirt, hurt).
And when writing - well, you'll have to learn the spelling of words if your own pronunciation merges or doesn't split the appopriate vowels. Or use a dictionary. Which is the situation you have now with, say, "rite right write wright", though admittedly worse since it'll be much more widespread.
And spelling checkers can only get you so far, since while "dawg" and "dahg" are both "obviously" misspelled forms of "dog", a computer can't tell whether "cot" or "cawt" is correct since both are (well, would be) correctly-spelled words. (Like "their" and "there" nowadays.) And "caht" is obviously a misspelling, but it doesn't know of which of the two.
Still, I'm for a splitty blanket orthography.
(Admittedly, I'm biassed, since my 'lect is about as splitty as it gets; the er-ir-ur and horse-hoarse ones are pretty much the only major ones it's missing. And minor ones like meet-meat or weight-wait are, I'm guessing, not widespread enough to warrant inclusion in the orthography.)
no subject
Date: 2010-06-14 01:03 pm (UTC): )
But that *is* a good comment, thank you.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-14 01:13 pm (UTC)That's probably not hard to "enforce" - I'd be a bit surprised if you make distinctions I don't. (Except for rhoticity, e.g. spa/spar.)
The questions is: will (or: may) the writing make distinctions that you don't!
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 05:29 pm (UTC)Since I doubt this is ever going to happen, I can be magnanimous: Sure, why not!
Actually, I guess logically the rule should be: If the distinction is made by at least some percentage of the people (one third? One quarter? Five twelfths?) it should be in writing. If not, those who make it are outta luck.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 05:32 pm (UTC)Sounds reasonable to me.
I'd probably put the bar fairly low, especially given how many UK speakers there are compared to how many US speakers - I think I could even go with 10% or something like that (that's worldwide, though, so regional accents of the UK would still mis out).