I must annoy the nieces no end.

[conuly]

They can't ask me the definition of any word and just get it, I have to take them through the etymology of it as well. (Plus I make them guess from context FIRST, and usually do charades as well. I'm easily entertained.)

My ultimate goal is to convince them to stop asking me, but I'll accept "educate them" as a (distant!) second answer. So when Evangeline asked me why I called "that thing" a "structure" I took her through CONstruction and DEstruction and INstruction as well. (One of the few concrete benefits of taking Latin, however poorly I may have done at that, is that I can rattle this stuff off without blinking.)

I also am prone to doing things like this if they ask me to spell stuff for them and telling them "sheesh, sound it out already" (my default answer - we're not supposed to tell them how to spell things according to the schools) isn't likely to work, I run through WHY it has the weird spelling it has (if, indeed, it has a weird spelling).

I'd rather have a sensible orthography, but that's not likely.

And what really bugs me beyond belief is the argument that if we had a sensible, reasonable, rational orthography we'd somehow lose all knowledge of etymology! It's a silly argument to begin with, but it's made even sillier when nobody (well, almost nobody) teaches this to kids to begin with! (Few people really grasp it even as adults, apparently, which is just sad, but that's beside the point.)

I browsed a list of tips for teaching unintuitive spellings the other day, and one of them was about using mnemonics. Well, I can go with that - but the example given was of a teacher who told her students that "grammar comes from Mars".

And that just bugged me. Why not tell them that it's related to the word grammatical (which it is, and also glamor and grimoire, the root concept for all of these being "learning", but neither of those words really is helpful in this instance, and I have the feeling it's a different sort of related anyway), which is equally mnemonic and also teaches them something useful? (That this has to be taught strikes me as strange, but if it were obvious people wouldn't get it wrong so often, would they?)

Interestingly, the case of grammar indicates another issue with spelling reform that opponents never ever mention, the question of whether we'd do everything totally phonemically (for whatever dialect we'd just have to pick or invent to do it all in) or whether we'd do it morpheme by morpheme. The first has the advantage of being really easy to spell and read, the second has the advantage of keeping similar spellings for words that vary only according to suffix (so grammar/grammatical would start off the same way, just like they do now, even though they sound like they have a different vowel.)

Opponents of spelling reform, though, hardly ever seem to have any good arguments. I've noticed that. I don't know why that should be, but I've noticed it. It's not fair that I should have to argue their side as well! (It's probably because it's never gonna happen, so they don't have to bother. But it's still laziness.)

Comments

[pne.livejournal.com]

One thing I really liked about Greece from the point of view of a foreigner is that it marks the stress on all words of more than one syllable.

But it depends on what the optimisation goals of the spelling reform are: make it easier for foreigners, or for native speakers.

Native speakers nearly always know where the stress goes anyway, except where the placement of stress makes a difference. So the question would be whether to mark those exceptions, or whether not marking it is enough.

For what it's worth, the Shaw alphabet does mark reductions to shwa, and in doing so, implicitly marks stress in many cases. Thus, doublets such as perfect/perfect and present/present would be unambiguous. (It could be argued that the STRUT sound is not a separate phoneme but merely the stressed allophone of the COMMA souns. Shavian treats them separately; similarly with the rhotacised versions NURSE and LETTER, respectively.)

[conuly]

Yeah, but firstly then you have the debate of "mark schwas only, or also schwis", which apparently some people don't have, and secondly you have the fringe groups declaring that it's all a plot by mad linguists to encourage lazy speaking.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Hopefully any such debates would be held in a circle of competent experts (probably mostly linguists, but presumably also some teachers or other pedagogues for input on what's easily teachable and what's tough) that's as small as possible, and the result presented to the public as "this is it". Then whatever that group comes up with, we use, whether that means shwis or not.

I think the value of *a* decent (even if not 100% "perfect", whatever that means) standardised phonemic orthography are greater than continually tinkering with it in order to achieve perfection *or* simply doing nothing.

[conuly]

(I mostly made that comment as an excuse to use the word schwi. It's really just fun to say, and funner to type!)

Also, apparently "funner" counts as a word for Spellcheck. Ashkenazi doesn't, but funner does. Go figure.