![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Nothing new goes on, I just rehash the same thoughts, but it's always there in the back of my mind. It is never gonna happen, but if it's okay for people to seriously discuss the characters on their favorite series, it's gotta be okay for me to spend some time seriously thinking about reforming our writing system.
The nieces were, as I said, home sick today, and they spent some time playing on the computer, doing a PBS game called, I thought, "Ecohouse". Do not let your kids find this site. It is boring and patronizing. "You are going to bed. Should you leave every single light in the house on, or turn them all off? Which is better for the earth?" "You are waiting for your friend. Should your mom and dad leave the car running for ten minutes, or turn it off while you wait?" To make it even more insulting, it is always the second answer. So even if you're completely ignorant and also devoid of all common sense, you can still get it right if you have a basic ability to make patterns.
At any rate, it turns out the site is named "Eeko" house. Or so Ana told me, I didn't check personally. So I had to explain to her that sometimes you can - if and only if you know what you're doing! - make the stylistic choice to deliberately misspell a word for some sort of effect. What sort of effect "eeko" makes rather than "eco" I don't know, but maybe it has to do with copyright or something.
Obviously, with any reasonable orthography this would be limited, at best... at least, if you wanted to keep the same pronunciation. And that would be a loss, actually. Not one that justifies the mess that is English (I mean, why exactly is it that the w in one is nonexistent and the w in two is silent? No, don't tell me why, I do know the reason, but it's beyond silly to pretend that those spellings make sense nowadays), but a loss nonetheless. (And one that, for whatever reason, the "Never Reform!" people never mention.)
Well, it's fine for me to talk like this. We'll see the end of "spring forward, fall back" long before there's any momentum to fix writing - and even if there were, it'd take ages for them to start doing it!
The nieces were, as I said, home sick today, and they spent some time playing on the computer, doing a PBS game called, I thought, "Ecohouse". Do not let your kids find this site. It is boring and patronizing. "You are going to bed. Should you leave every single light in the house on, or turn them all off? Which is better for the earth?" "You are waiting for your friend. Should your mom and dad leave the car running for ten minutes, or turn it off while you wait?" To make it even more insulting, it is always the second answer. So even if you're completely ignorant and also devoid of all common sense, you can still get it right if you have a basic ability to make patterns.
At any rate, it turns out the site is named "Eeko" house. Or so Ana told me, I didn't check personally. So I had to explain to her that sometimes you can - if and only if you know what you're doing! - make the stylistic choice to deliberately misspell a word for some sort of effect. What sort of effect "eeko" makes rather than "eco" I don't know, but maybe it has to do with copyright or something.
Obviously, with any reasonable orthography this would be limited, at best... at least, if you wanted to keep the same pronunciation. And that would be a loss, actually. Not one that justifies the mess that is English (I mean, why exactly is it that the w in one is nonexistent and the w in two is silent? No, don't tell me why, I do know the reason, but it's beyond silly to pretend that those spellings make sense nowadays), but a loss nonetheless. (And one that, for whatever reason, the "Never Reform!" people never mention.)
Well, it's fine for me to talk like this. We'll see the end of "spring forward, fall back" long before there's any momentum to fix writing - and even if there were, it'd take ages for them to start doing it!
no subject
Date: 2011-03-23 06:20 pm (UTC)1. Most of what people mention when they talk about The Vowel Problem is things like "In Texas, people say Ah when they mean I" and the like. This isn't really a problem - so long as we agree that the same symbol or symbols always means that vowel sound, it doesn't matter if we disagree on how to say it.
2. There are of course things like splits and mergers, which make things more complicated. In this case, I suggest a general poll and you go with the most common set-up. If most of the English speakers distinguish between the vowel in Dawn and the one in Don (no matter how they SAY those sounds), they get separate symbols. If most of them don't distinguish between the one in "Mary" and the one in "marry", they don't.
3. There will still be situations like "orange" and the pin-pen merger, in which case we just suck it up, pick one pronunciation as standard, and run with it. This isn't ideal, but it's what everybody else does and it's significantly MORE ideal than the current mess. Plus, in my view of things, we call this pronunciation "standard" or "school" or "business" English instead of calling it "correct". We consider it a deliberately homogenized version of the language and call it a day, allowing people to speak their own dialects with limited stigma.