English accents and their implications for spelling reform
1–10 of 14 posts
Re: English accents and their implications for spelling reform
#2Interesting article. There was an something on the BBC News website a while back with two sides of a similar argument, only one side was written in a style that was supposed to be easier to read; it certainly wasn't for me as it was written with a more southern (southern English that is) accent and I had to re-read certain words several times to work out what they were supposed to be.
I know this part was only covered briefly, but English did used to have two different letters for the "th" sounds - ð (like the) and þ (like thin), I suppose they were dropped for simplicity of the written alphabet in the end.
Re: English accents and their implications for spelling reform
#3Optimal communication, written, verbal and data transmission is an area that I don't see enough development in. I assume that much like the qwerty keyboard we are stuck with the devil we know. The Esperanto fans tried building a new one, but it has yet to gain wide acceptance.
Re: English accents and their implications for spelling reform
#4Chinese has an almost comically severe version of this problem. Not only do a number of mutually unintelligible languages share the writing system, but converting everything to pinyin would also make the bulk of Chinese literature incomprehensible.
Re: English accents and their implications for spelling reform
#5Optimal communication, written, verbal and data transmission is an area that I don't see enough development in. I assume that much like the qwerty keyboard we are stuck with the devil we know. The Esperanto fans tried building a new one, but it has yet to gain wide acceptance.
The Esperanto fans tried building a new one, but it has yet to gain wide acceptance.
There are good reasons why Esperanto never gained wide acceptance.
http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/
Esperanto doesn't deliver what it promises, which is an easy-to-learn language with broad international reach. In fact, Esperanto is about as hard to learn as any language, and its reach is confined mostly to certain parts of Europe where people speak other more widely spoken languages as interlanguages anyway.
Re: English accents and their implications for spelling reform
#6Wells has good credentials as a linguist on this subject. But perhaps if he wrote from America, the land of English as a koine language, he would be more optimistic about a mediating spelling that reflects plurality (and perhaps majority) practice in pronouncing English as a worldwide language. I don't see any world example that shows that a spelling must be "ideal" in the way he defines it to be practical for a broad speech community. Spanish, since its most recent spelling reform, continues to have dialectal variation (as one would expect given the wide territorial extent of Spanish-speaking countries, and their history of both conquest of and immigration by non-Spanish-speaking peoples). But people who speak Spanish seem to cope reasonably well with current standard spelling, and so also for speakers of German.
Re: English accents and their implications for spelling reform
#7Chinese has an almost comically severe version of this problem. Not only do a number of mutually unintelligible languages share the writing system, but converting everything to pinyin would also make the bulk of Chinese literature incomprehensible.
Amazingly, only just more than half of inhabitants of China are conversant in the standard national language, according to a recent official survey.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...
Re: English accents and their implications for spelling reform
#8Chinese has an almost comically severe version of this problem. Not only do a number of mutually unintelligible languages share the writing system, but converting everything to pinyin would also make the bulk of Chinese literature incomprehensible.
That's one reason why I disagree with the author of the article when he writes "Everyone pronounces sight, site and cite identically, so it is absurd (except for advocates of etymological spelling) that we have to learn to spell them all differently."
What he overlooks is that having three different spellings helps a reader to distinguish between the three different meanings. The sentence "Cite the sighting of the site." is much easier to understand than "Site the siting of the site."
If you only use pinyin to learn Chinese, you end up (or at least I did) getting confused by words like 在 zài (located) and 再 zài (again).
Re: English accents and their implications for spelling reform
#9Interesting article. There was an something on the BBC News website a while back with two sides of a similar argument, only one side was written in a style that was supposed to be easier to read; it certainly wasn't for me as it was written with a more southern (southern English that is) accent and I had to re-read certain words several times to work out what they were supposed to be. I know this part was only covere…
The letter thorn (þ), when hand-written, looks a lot like the letter Y [1]. So it remains, somewhat, in stuff like "Ye Olde Shoppe." Wikipedia claims that eth and thorn died out in common use (in English, anyway) between 1300 and 1500.
Notes:
1 - It gets drawn in one motion, down to the center from the upper left, then looping up to the upper right, back down to the center and down from there. So it looks like a sloppy Y.
Re: English accents and their implications for spelling reform
#10Chinese has an almost comically severe version of this problem. Not only do a number of mutually unintelligible languages share the writing system, but converting everything to pinyin would also make the bulk of Chinese literature incomprehensible.
That's one reason why I disagree with the author of the article when he writes "Everyone pronounces sight, site and cite identically, so it is absurd (except for advocates of etymological spelling) that we have to learn to spell them all differently." What he overlooks is that having three different spellings helps a reader to distinguish between the three different meanings. The sentence "Cite the sighting of the si…
Dewey (the guy we get the numbering system used in many libraries) was looking to simplify English spelling. From the movement he was part of, we get spellings like tho for though and thru for through.
George Bernard Shaw used to mock English spelling with the word GHOTI. This, he pronounced fish as it took the gh from enough (or tough), the o from women, and the ti from nation.
As for changing spelling and grammar, that is a very difficult task, as we tend to get pedantic jerks like Samuel Johnson who were so enamored of Latin, that they cobbled up rules like "splitting infinitives is forbidden" because the infinitive form of latin (you may be more familiar with Spanish) verbs is a single word that cannot be split. And some people still get bent by the opening sequence of Star Trek ...to boldly go... omg! a split infinitive!