I would love to listen to an Eminem rendition of this poem as a rap.
With suno.com this would be quick to create
The Chaos (1922)
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Re: The Chaos (1922)
#12Wait, made and bade are pronounced differently? Is this an anglicism or have I been doing it wrong?
It is /bæd/ vs /meɪd/ https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/bade
Is this gonna be like "pin" and "pen" where everyone insists they're different but they sound the same to me?
Re: The Chaos (1922)
#13Re: The Chaos (1922)
#14Complete version as originally published in 1920: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Chaos >
There’s a thorough explanation of the history of the poem and the research that went into rediscovering the author of the poem and [re?]producing the ‘final’ version presented in the article - scroll down to after the poem.
The conclusion is that “This version is essentially the author's own final text, as also published by New River Project in 1993” (so ‘1922’ in the page title and link text is arguably wrong, or at least misleading).
Re: The Chaos (1922)
#15English spelling could be significantly improved by adding a few optional accents. They could be purely additive: the ASCII spellings would remain valid for those who prefer to use them.
Native English speakers don’t seem to quite grasp how difficult the spelling is. I’ve been using this language for thirty years and I sometimes forget how some basic words are pronounced because I mostly write it.
There’s no need to change physical keyboards. In the smartphone era, most English around the world is already being typed using soft keyboards and autocomplete. A spelling reform could be agreed between Google, Apple and Microsoft. They are the de facto equivalent of Académie Française for the English language, even if they don’t use that power.
Here’s my basic suggestion for the optional accent marks:
A long vowel is marked with an acute accent. The sound is simply the one you’re familiar with from how the alphabet is pronounced. This lets us distinguish between léad (the verb) and lead (the metal), live (the verb) and líve (as in streaming), lów and how, féar and bear, bléak and break, infinite and fíníte, etc.
It also fixes the spelling of many loan words that look like the final e would be silent and today you just have to know it’s not: catastrophé, epitomé, Eurydicé, etc.
This easy rule doesn’t nearly cover all the weird vowel spellings, but it already fixes a substantial part of the worst obstacles for English learners.
Two more accent marks could be deployed:
The macron is already familiar to Japanese learners. It’s a long version of the short vowel sound, as in Ōsaka. The spelling of many English loan words could be unified by deploying the macron consistently. It would allow replacing é with ē in French loan words like fiancē.
The grave accent could be used to assign a third vowel sound, but it’s not as obvious what this should be. As an example, maybe for the letter A, it could be the sound in words like àll and hàul and àwe. Again, the point would be to give a consistent and useful hint of a sound that doesn’t follow the basic rules, not to make the spelling perfect in one stroke.
Re: The Chaos (1922)
#16A well deserved slap in the face of the English language, delivered with splendor.
Isn’t wild that if you said that sentence about why other language, particular, a non-Western one, this would be considered hate speech? It’s interesting how language works.
Re: The Chaos (1922)
#17Reading and writing are different transformations - they are not complementary or inverse - they are just different. Phonics gives you some clues to remember a word, context gives you other clues. Eventually, you may learn what kinds of words come from Latin, Greek, and French, and those are more clues. But before those clues do anything at all for you, you have to care and want to read. Four righting ewe jest halve…
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Re: The Chaos (1922)
#18Looking at extreme examples of historical spelling (e.g. Tibetan) English isn't particularly bad, even in the context of Great Britain, e.g Manx [0] is way more off.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_language#Spelling_to_so...
Re: The Chaos (1922)
#19I would love to listen to an Eminem rendition of this poem as a rap.
With suno.com this would be quick to create
Nah, it's too long. You can do it but it's going to be a pain trying to extend and add different lyrics. Would probably be a full evening of work, multiple tries per section.
Re: The Chaos (1922)
#20English spelling could be significantly improved by adding a few optional accents. They could be purely additive: the ASCII spellings would remain valid for those who prefer to use them. Native English speakers don’t seem to quite grasp how difficult the spelling is. I’ve been using this language for thirty years and I sometimes forget how some basic words are pronounced because I mostly write it. There’s no need to…
This seems like a good idea that isn't likely to catch on widely, but could maybe be deployed in places like the Simple English Wikipedia and other contexts where non-native English speakers are a major part of the target audience.