Earlier quoted context omitted.
People always seem to forget that English isn't one language, it is composed of vocabularies from multiple languages all used together. Quite a few words that people think of as English are taken from languages far away, such as shampoo, pyjamas, bungalow. If people want English to have a stronger connection between spelling and pronunciation they can simply go for it, there is no authority that tells you how you mus…
But then no language is one language in that sense. For example Hungarian is a mix of Uralic, Turkic, Slavic, Germanic etc. vocabulary. This doesn't make English unique. The somewhat unique aspect is then reluctancy to respell loanwords according to their pronunciation.
English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
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Re: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really understand what you're proposing. It is indeed traditional terminology to identify 5 "long" and 5 "short" vowels in English. They are the sounds that are regularly spelled _VC and _VCE, where V represents the particular vowel you're talking about, C is any consonant, and E is the letter E. (For example, you have a "short E" in "bet", which ends in _eC, and a "long E" in "mete", which ends in _eCE.) The…
Phonetic spelling reform in English seems intractable due to regional accents and resistance to change. There’s no point in trying. But it would be possible to add minimally invasive context to the ambiguous spellings which are a big road block to the billion+ people learning English as an additional language from mostly text-based sources. This could be done by adding a single accent and not modifying any existing s…
It sounds like your reform is specifically targeted at people who already know English and are therefore aware that "lives" has only two candidate pronunciations, neither of which is more than one syllable long.
But people like that don't need help. The reason there are only two pronunciations of "lives" is that one is the regular plural of the noun "life" and one is the regular pres-3sg form of the irregularly-spelled verb "live". Anyone who's aware of the two words should have absolutely no trouble determining whether a word in an English sentence is a noun or a verb!
But your scheme will do nothing for people who aren't already very familiar with English, because it does nothing to indicate the pronunciation of the word being spelled. It limits itself to reminding the reader which of two options was desired. The spelling isn't what was restricting you to two options. (Also, you added an accent to the word "she", where there was only one option to begin with.)
Note also that an accent is already used in formal written English to disambiguate between written vowels that might or might not be pronounced at all: thus you have learned and blessed (one syllable, verbs or participles) and learnd and blessd (two, adjectives).
> So “put” is still put. There’s nothing that could be disambiguated with an accent for this word.
Of course there is. "Put" does not use any of the ten vowels traditionally described as "short" or "long". It still has a vowel in it. It still theoretically needs to be disambiguated from the vowels of "hut" and (according to you, though English spelling rules don't really allow for ambiguity here) "hoot". Accents can do whatever you want.