A problem with all English spelling reform is that it is often intended to be phonetic and usually favours the pronunciation of the person proposing the change another is that it makes homophones also homonyms.
Where I come from in the South West of England bath has a long a and so does castle but in the North East they both have short a. Which one should the orthography reflect? What about house? Pronounced almost to rhyme with mice in some quarters and moose in others.
What do you do about Shrewsbury when even the locals don't all agree on how it is pronounced? Will Scots get to spell the name of a large aquatic mammal as hwale to more closely match the pronunciation? One positive change might be that in England the word wales would be reserved for the animals and we would all start referring to the country as Cymru.
If spelling reformers want to spell words differently then they should just do it the way that English has done for centuries, just do it. If you prefer to write labor rather than labour then do so. If you would rather write jeeny than genie go ahead. After all as mentioned in the article there is no English Academy to tell you not to. If others agree then the written language will adjust.
My Norwegian teacher was adamant that Norwegian is pronounced as written despite knowing perfectly well that almost every valley here has a different accent or even dialect. Norway gets away with it only by declaring that the two official forms are merely standardised written Norwegian; no one actually speaks bokmål or nynorsk.
The article’s example of “mis(c)e(l)lany” is one example that stood out to me like this - perhaps in some dialects it’s pronounced with a single S sound, but it’s definitely two for me. (And on the flip side, I wouldn’t retain the second I in “suficient”.)
It's pretty normal to have a somewhat deficient but still mostly phonetic script. So you _can_ read it purely phonetically, but you would sound robotic and/or unnatural. It also might miss some information that is obvious to native speakers.
Most Slavic languages belong to that category. E.g. Russian and Ukrainian texts usually don't mark the stressed syllables. Russian tends to reduce vowels so they are pronounced ambiguously. Czech had some vowel shifts so that some letters are now pronounced identically, etc.
It's still much better than English, where you often need to _know_ how a word is pronounced (e.g. "put" but "putty").
This is a problem that other languages have already dealt with. Spelling doesn't have to represent the exact pronunciation of every word; it can represent phonemes, leaving some variation in pronunciation to dialect.
For example Vietnamese has considerable regional variation, some of which is reflected in the spelling system. The letter d represents /z/ in standard Northern Vietnamese but /j/ in standard Southern Vietnamese.
English already does something similar, as you've pointed out. In dialects that distinguish wh from w, the former can represent /hw/, whereas in most of England the distinction has disappeared and both are pronounced /w/. We don't need to respell whale because it already accommodates either pronunciation (although let's please get rid of "magic e" and spell it `wheil` to at least match the vowel).
Any linguist knows that a perfectly phonetic spelling system is not desirable. As well as what I've already discussed, pronunciation changes over time too. But I don't think that rules out spelling reform because currently English has many ways of spelling the same phoneme.
I just want "a" to make the same sound it makes in literally every other spelling system, including Cyrillic and Greek, not "ey" or "eh". Seriously, that's one of the most stable phonemes, how did it turn into "ey" in English?
The vowel probably shifted in English and the spelling wasn't adjusted. "Wal" in German is pronounced... almost like you'd expect, except it's a long 'a' without any of the usual markers for that (aa or ah). German spelling is more phonetic than English but less than Spanish.
Long story short you could say they rotated their vowel "wheel" a couple centuries ago - high vowels dropped lower, like a towards e, e towards i, and the lower ones got some upward movement towards a, like u and i.
This is a non-argument. There are no spelling system in the world that takes into account every variation in the spoken language. Heck, even the current English spelling is based on the specific pronunciation of some part of England a few hundred years ago.
What all spelling system do, is just pick one dialect as the reference dialect, and build the spelling based on that. Is it perfect? No. Does it work? Yes, if the dialect that you pick is the most widely spoken and the most prestigious.
Ah concur, so long as the Scoattish pronunciation's brought in line wi' a proper Manc twang:
«Ah pit the roobbish oot in the mornin’, then catch the booss wi’ a goon tucked doon ma kecks» («I take the rubbish out in the morning before taking the bus with a gun in my pants»).
The most successful push on spelling was when the Chicago Tribune switched to simplified spelling in the 1940s through the 1960s.[1]
They started with about 40 words, and gradually expanded. But after McCormick died, the company gave up, retaining only "tho" for "though". That ended in 1975.[2]
Colonel McCormick actually got together with a bunch of other large newspaper owners to push the simplified spelling. Not for any kind of altruistic reason, but to save on ink and paper.
All these people who have pushed for simplified spelling since don't realize they're carrying water for another era's long-dead barons.
/Former Tribune employee who heard it from the old-timers.
> In support of its adoption of "drouth" in place of "drought" THE TRIBUNE cites the fact that most persons use the pronunciation indicated by the first — and simpler — spelling.
This one seems very strange. Do people really pronounce the final sound as /θ/?
Yes, I've heard that commonly pronounced by Americans. Not to mention that most will also try to correct you if you dare pronounce it differently than they do!
I'm an American and don't remember ever hearing this pronunciation. Wiktionary lists /draʊt/ for both the US and UK pronunciation. America has a lot of regional accents though, it's not unbelievable to me that this exists somewhere.
"Literate people have spent years learning the spelling of leaden and its likes and will be reluctant to admit that if the adjective acquires the form leden, their troubles were not worth the effort. In my opinion, our only hope to make progress is to adopt a minimalist program, trying to reach the desired goal by alienating no one and taking one small step after another over possibly several decades."
-------------
This is an odd example to lead with. Leaden's root is lead, and one of its meanings is "made of lead". If we change its spelling to leden, then what do we do with "lead"? If we change lead to led, then we replace one confusing homonym with another homonym that's a homophone to boot. If we don't, we make it harder for readers unfamiliar with the meaning of leden to deduce its meaning from the root. This is not an unambiguously good change.
The reality of English is that there is no central authority on spelling, pronunciation, grammar, or even vocabulary. Dictionaries merely catalogue what is in common use. This may make the language anarchic to some, but it also welcomes foreign loan-words, idioms, etc. in a way that serves international users and enriches native speakers. The accepted spelling of some words has changed over time because of common usage. This society, instead of looking for some way to enact sweeping reforms, should just pick a couple or even just one word that could be simplified without causing side-effects and promote that change. If that change catches on, people may generalize it to similar words on their own.
This is a good start, albeit I don't share the author's enthusiasm for eliminating letters that are used in sounding out the word. I would rather we focus on popular words and remove any ambiguity in how someone would speak them if they read it for the first time. I think it is essential for the future of English that people communicating online (using text) can avoid the ambiguity in how the receiver would read and speak their message. For that reason, truncating smaller words to use fewer letters while retaining how they sound is far more valuable.
As an example, bothering with miscellany is a waste of time. Almost no one uses it when writing a tweet or a text message. It's a bigger bang for buck to change words like through to thru or knife to nyfe and so on.
I would argue that if we’re going to simplify English we should use one letter for i as in the sound used in knife, and one letter for i as in the sound used in niff, rather than having some other letter in a completely different part of the word (and later in the word no less!) modify the sound. How ridiculous our language is!
If they really want to reform English spelling, they should write a spell-checking library in every major programming language that builds on every major platform and can be easily integrated into chat, message, and mobile keyboard applications which defaults to “English 20xx”, but still supports default English.
All it would need to do is not highlight “improved spellings” as incorrect in “English 20xx” mode at the start. Then it could slowly turn the knob as they see increasing usage.
If you want to do even more then you can implement speech-to-text and transcript generators that default to “English 20xx”.
But which English 20xx to use? The one that spells the phenomenon of our eyes rendering electromagnetic radiation as "colour" or the one that renders the same as "color"?
Grey or gray?
Is the building adjacent to the one across from you "kitty-corner", "katty-corner", "kitty-korner" or "katty-korner"?
Is the small freshwater crustacean a crayfish, crawfish, or crawdad?
Says who, mind you? Why would facebook adopt some FOSS English 20xx when it could implement it's own for advertising alignment purposes? What are the odds that google and facebook both land on identical implementations?
Most of those are alternate words, not alternate spellings.
It would be helpful to start with some of the worst of the offending spellings such as the “ough” mess. And maybe remove some of the silent b’s with which we were debted by 18th century philologists.
The one the people implementing the spell-checker want. I am describing a mechanism for change, not the policy.
It is a mechanism that is far more practical and likely to succeed at broad reform than their plan of convincing magazine editors and instagram models.
What do "regular" writing systems do when different dialects use different sounds for the same word? Do different people write the same word differently? Or are people forced to confirm to a standard dialect? Both seem bad.
People learn a deterministic way to sound a word at school, same for everyone. The very fact of having that as part of education tends to stabilise the language to a degree: I can read 16 century poems and stuff sounds the same and rhymes perfectly.
Most local variations and accents will deviate in semi standard ways: For example, southern spaniards will usually use the same sound for S and C (which in Spain's Spanish is the famous 'lispy s' sound). So in general people are aware of what is part of the standard and what is a local characteristic.
Our educative system makes a point of those variations explicitly not being 'wrong', but sometimes in practice there are ideological debates about this stuff: For example, people might self police in media by adapting to the standard, which in turn draws criticism for "reneging of their identity").
They sound quite different, and all are accepted and understood, but it's very unusual to use the "wrong" one. Only if you are a tourist or immigrant or something.
---
For the GP: the idea is that a few variants/dialects are accepted. When the pronunciation changes, it slowly is introduced in the written text as a literally recourse, and then it the new spelling may get popular in some area, and then accepted as a regional variant. If the new variant gets everywhere it becomes the official one. So the spelling slowly changes to accommodate the changes in the local or global variants and the old spelling get's deprecated.
So the spelling is keep somewhat in sync with the oral version.
Ah yes, fair addition there: The language is not assumed to be set in stone forever, but "guided" by certain academic authorities, that try to strike a balance between the system representing the reality of the spoken language and rules being kept standard. We get dictionary patch notes, so to speak.
The Real Academia Española does this job in the case of Spain, and there's an equivalent in each Spanish speaking country, with all belonging to a larger entity.
>Spain: "autillo" but last time I posted it, anthk said it's more complicated
Yup, diminutives are very regional here, one of the easier ways to pinpoint someone's origin: iño is common in the northwest due to influence of Portuguese, -ete in the northeast as an influence of French and Catalan, etc.
Both happen, my guess is that it is more common to have a written standard that just doesn't match some dialects. Sometimes you will have multiple standards, which is usually due to politics/history.
An example where the same words are written differently is Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin. One dimension among several that dialects there vary along is the development of a vowel from a common ancestor Slavic language into /e/, /i/, or /(i)je/. This leads to a variety of spellings for some words such as "vreme/vrime/vrijme" (time). It's made even more complicated by the variation crossing borders and even not being consistent within one people. For example standard Serbian has /e/ and the /(i)je/ since Bosnian Serbs mostly use the latter, Bosnian and Croatian use /(i)je/, and /i/ is technically not in any written standard but still exists and can be found in colloquial writing.
Personally if I were to design a writing system from scratch I don't think going "full regular" is all that it's sometimes made out to be. You can lose clues about common roots between words. That said keeping historical spellings forever can also be confusing. Russian Cyrillic has had a number of reforms to trim things that had become redundant/not pronounced anymore. English could use some of that as well, but the extreme variety and lack of a central writing system authority makes that hard.
There is usually a standard language people learn at school. It's mostly used as a written language or when you want to sound formal. In more casual situations, people tend to use their favorite dialects. Or maybe an intermediate form between the standard language and the dialect, if that feels more appropriate.
Typically, in informal writing, you write it as you say it in your dialect, and in formal writing, you use the standardized form of the language if there is one.
As a non native speaker, I would highly value a spelling reform to enforce sound encoding.
Pronouncing never heard before words is practically impossible today. Sure it's irrelevant for native speakers, but it's excluding non native speakers the same way kanjis are excluding non native readers who didn't spent decades of their youth learning Japanese.
As a non-native speaker, I’d be happy if we all could just adopt an easy neutral language for international communication and leave hurdles of the various national languages to their native speakers. Probably not happening, but one can dream.
It has already been adopted for international communication. Quite an easy and forgiving language, probably because of the above. English it's historically a mix of different language families.
Have you talked to Gen Z about this? In so many countries now, young people are growing up with hours a day spent on English-language social media, and they absorb it by osmosis. These young people don't have the same perception of English being "hard" or not "neutral" as older generations.
A lot of 1990s or early-millennium advocacy for language diversity and non-English interlinguistics doesn't resonate with many young people today. In fact, avoiding English (like antiglobalization ideas more generally) has become associated with the far-right in some countries.
Well, any language becomes relatively easy when you learn by immersion. That’s how I finally managed to learn English with little effort, after struggling with it for years. Doesn’t mean the language in and of itself is easy. And it most certainly isn’t neutral; just the fact that it’s the native language of several countries and an inherent vehicle of cultural influence disqualifies it as such.
I’m not in any way doubting the success of English as a widespread second language, I just find it unfortunate we haven’t gone with an easy, neutral language instead.
It’s also the most successful attempt of its kind, by far. Which might be a little depressing, but hey, at least the language is still alive and well and not totally unknown! That’s something. :-)
For many years now, any non-native speaker of English can use a site like Forvo to hear the pronunciation of a word just as this English speaker uses it for other languages with such uncertainties.
> Pronouncing never heard before words is practically impossible today.
Pronunciation rules do exist. They're not perfect but if you know them you'll get the right pronunciation most of the time. The problem seems to be that they're rarely taught and usually just absorbed through exposure. Most people aren't even aware of them and just do it automatically because of that.
For example, a common gotcha word is "'ghoti is pronounced 'fish'" - except it's not. Ask a native speaker and it's nearly guaranteed they'll say something like "go-tee" or "go-tie", because to get the "fish" pronunciation you have to break multiple English pronunciation rules: The "f" sound for "gh" never occurs at the start of a word, and the "sh" sound for "ti" requires a vowel after it. The "h" also prevents the "g" from being pronounced like a "j" when it starts the word. I can't remember if there was a rule violation for the "o".
The article doesn't go into it but G B Shaw went so far as inventing an alternate orthography for English called Shavian -- publishing a book printed in it -- and then commissioned another alphabet by Kingley Read called Quikscript. Both alphabets are phonetic.
Reforming English spelling would make it easier for people to learn English, but it could also theoretically have some negative effects as well. For example, it's possible that the bizarreness and irregularity of English spelling have a stimulating effect on the mind that has grasped them and lead to enhanced creativity in a similar way to how the minor variations between musical instruments of the same general type, or between paintbrushes, can lead to interesting creative results. Also, part of the aesthetic effect of written text comes from the exact sequence of characters.
I like spelling reform a little bit, but I like etymology more. Knight tells us about Middle English knyght, from a time when they had actual knights riding around, and they pronounced every letter in the word, same as with its Germanic ancestor knecht. Sophistry has a ph because it's Greek and that represents the letter phi, which really was pronounced that way, an "aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive" like spitting. So you get historical context, Germanic knights, Greek Sophists (originally teachers of excellence and virtue). Then there's a bunch of words that break the customary i-before-e rule: deceive, conceive, perceive, receive. By putting the e before the i, those are all telling us the same thing about Norman French grammar, but I forget what,* and whatever it was it's a grammatical rule that we never even used in English. So I'd be happy for that one to be reformed. I guess I support slight change.
* I think it's distinguishing the present tense from the imperfect, in the subjunctive mood. Maybe.
> I like spelling reform a little bit, but I like etymology more.
I love the spirit but wouldn't a new change in spelling fit right in with all the past, etymological changes? Isn't it antietymological to try to freeze words as they are? :)
A very interesting study might be made of the etymological history lost with past changes.
How about backwards compatibility, support the new spellings as well as the old? We're sort of already in that situation with English vs. American English. Over 100s of years, the "natural" spelling will win out.
The very first three "egregious examples" are already leaving me with a low expectation for the rest of this article.
"aquire" over "acquire" I will readily agree with, that makes a lot of sense. "suficient" and "comunal" however? absolutely not. those doubled consonants are putting in legitimate work in indicating an alternative stress pattern. its suf-FI-cient and com-MU-nal. but without the doubled letters, my intuitive reading becomes su-fi-CI-ent and CO-mu-nal.
There's plenty of words that could stand a respelling in english, but those are terrible examples to call "egregious". doubled consonates have a clear function in the words they appear in.
This doesn't seem clear cut to me. Sufficient and deficient have the same stress pattern, but deficient doesn't have a double letter. Neither does proficient.
The ff in sufficient indicates a short vowel sound for the "u". The single f in deficient indicates a long vowel sound for the "e". Hence, suff-icient and dee-ficient. At least, that's how we pronounce it where I'm from.
OED, Merriam-Webster, and Collins all show a short "e", as in "delete" or "different", i.e. /dɪ/. I've never heard it pronounced as /diː/. Do you have some kind of southern drawl where you put the stress on the first syllable, like some people do with "defense"?
The article makes some oblique references to the stenography-like alphabet that Shaw had ordered to be designed after his death. You can practice it with an app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.blackenvel...) which accurately transcribes from English to phonetic representation, which is nifty and could be transposed to other languages. But ultimately: one can understand why it hasn't caught on. Is it really such a problem that our writing isn't very phonemic…? Every person/dialect would have their own person orthography.
But the large majority of texts is now typed, not handwritten. I'd optimize a writing system for fast, easy, error-resistant reading. The Latin script reads easier than this, despite its known problems, maybe because Quickscript lacks the 27 centuries of refinement.
If I were to pick an existing script, that would be either Hangul or Tengwar (with vowels). Tengwar already has an English mode, and Hangul would likely need a few adjustments, following its general principles.
How did you come to this conclusion? Is there a way to measure that?
(Maybe reading speed comprehension tests? On that note I wonder if an emoji-based script would win there. Color is one of the fastest things to be processed visually. Probably the same reason we like syntax highlighting so much!)
I'm assuming of course that you haven't spent the same amount of time practicing both scripts. (I assume this is also true for everyone on the Quikscript mailing list! Though it might be cool to write browser extension that translates everything into Quikscript...)
But obviously there's a compelling argument for "the one everyone can already read." (Historical counterpoint: Hebrew.)
That reminds me of something I heard about software. To be worth the pain of switching, an alternative application cannot be 10% better. It must be 10x better.
+1 for Tengwar though, it wins on aesthetics, no contest!
I'm a native speaker and I agree. English spelling carries a lot of history and context along with it, which would be lost in any spelling standardization. That richness is a good thing. A little complexity or inconsistency is good. It reflects that spelling is a fundementally imperfect encoding of a living language whose true form is the spoken word. And if you truly grapple with the tremendous diversity of spoken English, it is obvious that any One True Phonetic Orthography is impossible.
I suspect I may soon start seeing "u" for "you" everywhere. Maybe "r" for "are". Because why the hell not. Even at places that don't do it right now (and even frown) and I won't be able to avoid it anymore by just avoding text-speakers. It will result in perpetual dehydration for me due to excessive vomiting.
A fun idea but I think someone that learns the language and invests enough time into it would find no reason to have the "f" removed from sufficient, they just accept it as it is and never think twice about it
"Queue" is not pronounced as the sound that the 'q' in "quick" or "quack" makes.
My favorite is "ghoti"[1] which is pronounced as "fish" because of:
gh, pronounced /f/ as in enough /ɪˈnʌf/ or tough /tʌf/;
o, pronounced /ɪ/ as in women /ˈwɪmɪn/;
ti, pronounced /ʃ/ as in nation /ˈneɪʃən/ or motion /ˈmoʊʃən/.
You only get that pronunciation by breaking at least two English pronunciation rules: Leading "g" is always pronounced like a "g" (and in this position the "h" prevents it from being pronounced like a "j"), and "ti" is only pronounced like "sh" when followed by a vowel. Can't remember if there was a rule it broke about the "o".
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
Some (un?)reliable sources on the Internet claim that it was actually written by a man named M.J. Shields and published as a letter to The Economist in the 1940s
A problem with all English spelling reform is that it is often intended to be phonetic and usually favours the pronunciation of the person proposing the change another is that it makes homophones also homonyms.
Where I come from in the South West of England bath has a long a and so does castle but in the North East they both have short a. Which one should the orthography reflect? What about house? Pronounced almost to rhyme with mice in some quarters and moose in others.
What do you do about Shrewsbury when even the locals don't all agree on how it is pronounced? Will Scots get to spell the name of a large aquatic mammal as hwale to more closely match the pronunciation? One positive change might be that in England the word wales would be reserved for the animals and we would all start referring to the country as Cymru.
If spelling reformers want to spell words differently then they should just do it the way that English has done for centuries, just do it. If you prefer to write labor rather than labour then do so. If you would rather write jeeny than genie go ahead. After all as mentioned in the article there is no English Academy to tell you not to. If others agree then the written language will adjust.
My Norwegian teacher was adamant that Norwegian is pronounced as written despite knowing perfectly well that almost every valley here has a different accent or even dialect. Norway gets away with it only by declaring that the two official forms are merely standardised written Norwegian; no one actually speaks bokmål or nynorsk.
Shouldn't it be laybuh, anyway?
The article’s example of “mis(c)e(l)lany” is one example that stood out to me like this - perhaps in some dialects it’s pronounced with a single S sound, but it’s definitely two for me. (And on the flip side, I wouldn’t retain the second I in “suficient”.)
It's pretty normal to have a somewhat deficient but still mostly phonetic script. So you _can_ read it purely phonetically, but you would sound robotic and/or unnatural. It also might miss some information that is obvious to native speakers.
Most Slavic languages belong to that category. E.g. Russian and Ukrainian texts usually don't mark the stressed syllables. Russian tends to reduce vowels so they are pronounced ambiguously. Czech had some vowel shifts so that some letters are now pronounced identically, etc.
It's still much better than English, where you often need to _know_ how a word is pronounced (e.g. "put" but "putty").
This is a problem that other languages have already dealt with. Spelling doesn't have to represent the exact pronunciation of every word; it can represent phonemes, leaving some variation in pronunciation to dialect.
For example Vietnamese has considerable regional variation, some of which is reflected in the spelling system. The letter d represents /z/ in standard Northern Vietnamese but /j/ in standard Southern Vietnamese.
English already does something similar, as you've pointed out. In dialects that distinguish wh from w, the former can represent /hw/, whereas in most of England the distinction has disappeared and both are pronounced /w/. We don't need to respell whale because it already accommodates either pronunciation (although let's please get rid of "magic e" and spell it `wheil` to at least match the vowel).
Any linguist knows that a perfectly phonetic spelling system is not desirable. As well as what I've already discussed, pronunciation changes over time too. But I don't think that rules out spelling reform because currently English has many ways of spelling the same phoneme.
I just want "a" to make the same sound it makes in literally every other spelling system, including Cyrillic and Greek, not "ey" or "eh". Seriously, that's one of the most stable phonemes, how did it turn into "ey" in English?
The vowel probably shifted in English and the spelling wasn't adjusted. "Wal" in German is pronounced... almost like you'd expect, except it's a long 'a' without any of the usual markers for that (aa or ah). German spelling is more phonetic than English but less than Spanish.
The Great Vowel Shift. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
Long story short you could say they rotated their vowel "wheel" a couple centuries ago - high vowels dropped lower, like a towards e, e towards i, and the lower ones got some upward movement towards a, like u and i.
This is a non-argument. There are no spelling system in the world that takes into account every variation in the spoken language. Heck, even the current English spelling is based on the specific pronunciation of some part of England a few hundred years ago.
What all spelling system do, is just pick one dialect as the reference dialect, and build the spelling based on that. Is it perfect? No. Does it work? Yes, if the dialect that you pick is the most widely spoken and the most prestigious.
> Will Scots get to spell the name of a large aquatic mammal as hwale to more closely match the pronunciation?
I vote we spell everything with Scottish pronunciation. Puts native and non-native speakers on level terms.
Ah concur, so long as the Scoattish pronunciation's brought in line wi' a proper Manc twang:
«Ah pit the roobbish oot in the mornin’, then catch the booss wi’ a goon tucked doon ma kecks» («I take the rubbish out in the morning before taking the bus with a gun in my pants»).
Controversial hot take:
Simplify the orthography to make it phonic, and then people spell words however they are pronounced in their local dialect.
The most successful push on spelling was when the Chicago Tribune switched to simplified spelling in the 1940s through the 1960s.[1] They started with about 40 words, and gradually expanded. But after McCormick died, the company gave up, retaining only "tho" for "though". That ended in 1975.[2]
[1] https://www.spellingsociety.org/uploaded_media/tribune-media...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/30/archives/thru-is-through-...
Colonel McCormick actually got together with a bunch of other large newspaper owners to push the simplified spelling. Not for any kind of altruistic reason, but to save on ink and paper.
All these people who have pushed for simplified spelling since don't realize they're carrying water for another era's long-dead barons.
/Former Tribune employee who heard it from the old-timers.
> In support of its adoption of "drouth" in place of "drought" THE TRIBUNE cites the fact that most persons use the pronunciation indicated by the first — and simpler — spelling.
This one seems very strange. Do people really pronounce the final sound as /θ/?
Yes, I've heard that commonly pronounced by Americans. Not to mention that most will also try to correct you if you dare pronounce it differently than they do!
I'm an American and don't remember ever hearing this pronunciation. Wiktionary lists /draʊt/ for both the US and UK pronunciation. America has a lot of regional accents though, it's not unbelievable to me that this exists somewhere.
I’ve also heard it as drouth. It is, in fact, an archaic alternate spelling
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/drought-or-drouth
I've never heard anyone ever pronounce it that way.
"Literate people have spent years learning the spelling of leaden and its likes and will be reluctant to admit that if the adjective acquires the form leden, their troubles were not worth the effort. In my opinion, our only hope to make progress is to adopt a minimalist program, trying to reach the desired goal by alienating no one and taking one small step after another over possibly several decades."
-------------
This is an odd example to lead with. Leaden's root is lead, and one of its meanings is "made of lead". If we change its spelling to leden, then what do we do with "lead"? If we change lead to led, then we replace one confusing homonym with another homonym that's a homophone to boot. If we don't, we make it harder for readers unfamiliar with the meaning of leden to deduce its meaning from the root. This is not an unambiguously good change.
The reality of English is that there is no central authority on spelling, pronunciation, grammar, or even vocabulary. Dictionaries merely catalogue what is in common use. This may make the language anarchic to some, but it also welcomes foreign loan-words, idioms, etc. in a way that serves international users and enriches native speakers. The accepted spelling of some words has changed over time because of common usage. This society, instead of looking for some way to enact sweeping reforms, should just pick a couple or even just one word that could be simplified without causing side-effects and promote that change. If that change catches on, people may generalize it to similar words on their own.
The other problem is that when I see "leden" my brain immediately switches to German.
This is a good start, albeit I don't share the author's enthusiasm for eliminating letters that are used in sounding out the word. I would rather we focus on popular words and remove any ambiguity in how someone would speak them if they read it for the first time. I think it is essential for the future of English that people communicating online (using text) can avoid the ambiguity in how the receiver would read and speak their message. For that reason, truncating smaller words to use fewer letters while retaining how they sound is far more valuable.
As an example, bothering with miscellany is a waste of time. Almost no one uses it when writing a tweet or a text message. It's a bigger bang for buck to change words like through to thru or knife to nyfe and so on.
I wonder why the e is needed on the end of knife or nyfe. Seems to me the way you pronounce it would be the same with or without
niff without the e. (see: life, wife, fife, strife) The k is arguable (but you can find eloquent people who enunciate it)
I would argue that if we’re going to simplify English we should use one letter for i as in the sound used in knife, and one letter for i as in the sound used in niff, rather than having some other letter in a completely different part of the word (and later in the word no less!) modify the sound. How ridiculous our language is!
Mhm mhm, a lot of fixes ahead.. what's your plan on sow, sew and so? You, ewe and yew (bonus: eww)?
Or live and live/lead and lead (context dependence means you can never be sure)
but that's the magic e.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SI9hHo9_QB8
If they really want to reform English spelling, they should write a spell-checking library in every major programming language that builds on every major platform and can be easily integrated into chat, message, and mobile keyboard applications which defaults to “English 20xx”, but still supports default English.
All it would need to do is not highlight “improved spellings” as incorrect in “English 20xx” mode at the start. Then it could slowly turn the knob as they see increasing usage.
If you want to do even more then you can implement speech-to-text and transcript generators that default to “English 20xx”.
But which English 20xx to use? The one that spells the phenomenon of our eyes rendering electromagnetic radiation as "colour" or the one that renders the same as "color"?
Grey or gray?
Is the building adjacent to the one across from you "kitty-corner", "katty-corner", "kitty-korner" or "katty-korner"?
Is the small freshwater crustacean a crayfish, crawfish, or crawdad?
Says who, mind you? Why would facebook adopt some FOSS English 20xx when it could implement it's own for advertising alignment purposes? What are the odds that google and facebook both land on identical implementations?
Most of those are alternate words, not alternate spellings.
It would be helpful to start with some of the worst of the offending spellings such as the “ough” mess. And maybe remove some of the silent b’s with which we were debted by 18th century philologists.
The one the people implementing the spell-checker want. I am describing a mechanism for change, not the policy.
It is a mechanism that is far more practical and likely to succeed at broad reform than their plan of convincing magazine editors and instagram models.
What do "regular" writing systems do when different dialects use different sounds for the same word? Do different people write the same word differently? Or are people forced to confirm to a standard dialect? Both seem bad.
The usual answer is that they pretend these differences dont exist and use one blessed (maybe artificial) dialect.
Using Spanish as an example:
People learn a deterministic way to sound a word at school, same for everyone. The very fact of having that as part of education tends to stabilise the language to a degree: I can read 16 century poems and stuff sounds the same and rhymes perfectly.
Most local variations and accents will deviate in semi standard ways: For example, southern spaniards will usually use the same sound for S and C (which in Spain's Spanish is the famous 'lispy s' sound). So in general people are aware of what is part of the standard and what is a local characteristic.
Our educative system makes a point of those variations explicitly not being 'wrong', but sometimes in practice there are ideological debates about this stuff: For example, people might self police in media by adapting to the standard, which in turn draws criticism for "reneging of their identity").
There are also variants accepted for local dialects, for example "small car" can be
Argentina: "autito"
Colombia: "autico"
Spain: "autillo" but last time I posted it, anthk said it's more complicated https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44490096
They sound quite different, and all are accepted and understood, but it's very unusual to use the "wrong" one. Only if you are a tourist or immigrant or something.
---
For the GP: the idea is that a few variants/dialects are accepted. When the pronunciation changes, it slowly is introduced in the written text as a literally recourse, and then it the new spelling may get popular in some area, and then accepted as a regional variant. If the new variant gets everywhere it becomes the official one. So the spelling slowly changes to accommodate the changes in the local or global variants and the old spelling get's deprecated.
So the spelling is keep somewhat in sync with the oral version.
Ah yes, fair addition there: The language is not assumed to be set in stone forever, but "guided" by certain academic authorities, that try to strike a balance between the system representing the reality of the spoken language and rules being kept standard. We get dictionary patch notes, so to speak.
The Real Academia Española does this job in the case of Spain, and there's an equivalent in each Spanish speaking country, with all belonging to a larger entity.
>Spain: "autillo" but last time I posted it, anthk said it's more complicated
Yup, diminutives are very regional here, one of the easier ways to pinpoint someone's origin: iño is common in the northwest due to influence of Portuguese, -ete in the northeast as an influence of French and Catalan, etc.
>: iño is common in the northwest due to influence of Portuguese,
And the Galician influence into Spanish, OFC. For the HN'er, once Galician and Portuguese where the same language.
>(which in Spain's Spanish is the famous 'lispy s' sound)
No. In Spanish Spain it's
za, ce, ci, zo, zu with /th/ as in think.
German picked a random Central German dialect as Standard German and went with that.
"Random" as in they have more drones/tanks/knights?
Random as in that's where Martin Luther came from.
Both happen, my guess is that it is more common to have a written standard that just doesn't match some dialects. Sometimes you will have multiple standards, which is usually due to politics/history.
An example where the same words are written differently is Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin. One dimension among several that dialects there vary along is the development of a vowel from a common ancestor Slavic language into /e/, /i/, or /(i)je/. This leads to a variety of spellings for some words such as "vreme/vrime/vrijme" (time). It's made even more complicated by the variation crossing borders and even not being consistent within one people. For example standard Serbian has /e/ and the /(i)je/ since Bosnian Serbs mostly use the latter, Bosnian and Croatian use /(i)je/, and /i/ is technically not in any written standard but still exists and can be found in colloquial writing.
Personally if I were to design a writing system from scratch I don't think going "full regular" is all that it's sometimes made out to be. You can lose clues about common roots between words. That said keeping historical spellings forever can also be confusing. Russian Cyrillic has had a number of reforms to trim things that had become redundant/not pronounced anymore. English could use some of that as well, but the extreme variety and lack of a central writing system authority makes that hard.
There is usually a standard language people learn at school. It's mostly used as a written language or when you want to sound formal. In more casual situations, people tend to use their favorite dialects. Or maybe an intermediate form between the standard language and the dialect, if that feels more appropriate.
Typically, in informal writing, you write it as you say it in your dialect, and in formal writing, you use the standardized form of the language if there is one.
As a non native speaker, I would highly value a spelling reform to enforce sound encoding.
Pronouncing never heard before words is practically impossible today. Sure it's irrelevant for native speakers, but it's excluding non native speakers the same way kanjis are excluding non native readers who didn't spent decades of their youth learning Japanese.
As a non-native speaker, I’d be happy if we all could just adopt an easy neutral language for international communication and leave hurdles of the various national languages to their native speakers. Probably not happening, but one can dream.
It's called English.
> easy
> neutral
> leave hurdles of the various national languages to their native speakers
> (context)
Of all the possible languages in the world, how did my comment make you think of English?
It has already been adopted for international communication. Quite an easy and forgiving language, probably because of the above. English it's historically a mix of different language families.
I wouldn’t call English especially easy and forgiving. Why would you?
Have you talked to Gen Z about this? In so many countries now, young people are growing up with hours a day spent on English-language social media, and they absorb it by osmosis. These young people don't have the same perception of English being "hard" or not "neutral" as older generations.
A lot of 1990s or early-millennium advocacy for language diversity and non-English interlinguistics doesn't resonate with many young people today. In fact, avoiding English (like antiglobalization ideas more generally) has become associated with the far-right in some countries.
Well, any language becomes relatively easy when you learn by immersion. That’s how I finally managed to learn English with little effort, after struggling with it for years. Doesn’t mean the language in and of itself is easy. And it most certainly isn’t neutral; just the fact that it’s the native language of several countries and an inherent vehicle of cultural influence disqualifies it as such.
I’m not in any way doubting the success of English as a widespread second language, I just find it unfortunate we haven’t gone with an easy, neutral language instead.
Esperanto was an attempt. Its obscurity is a reflection of its success.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
It’s also the most successful attempt of its kind, by far. Which might be a little depressing, but hey, at least the language is still alive and well and not totally unknown! That’s something. :-)
For many years now, any non-native speaker of English can use a site like Forvo to hear the pronunciation of a word just as this English speaker uses it for other languages with such uncertainties.
> Pronouncing never heard before words is practically impossible today.
Pronunciation rules do exist. They're not perfect but if you know them you'll get the right pronunciation most of the time. The problem seems to be that they're rarely taught and usually just absorbed through exposure. Most people aren't even aware of them and just do it automatically because of that.
For example, a common gotcha word is "'ghoti is pronounced 'fish'" - except it's not. Ask a native speaker and it's nearly guaranteed they'll say something like "go-tee" or "go-tie", because to get the "fish" pronunciation you have to break multiple English pronunciation rules: The "f" sound for "gh" never occurs at the start of a word, and the "sh" sound for "ti" requires a vowel after it. The "h" also prevents the "g" from being pronounced like a "j" when it starts the word. I can't remember if there was a rule violation for the "o".
Here's someone's attempt at organizing and formalizing them: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html
The article doesn't go into it but G B Shaw went so far as inventing an alternate orthography for English called Shavian -- publishing a book printed in it -- and then commissioned another alphabet by Kingley Read called Quikscript. Both alphabets are phonetic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript
Reforming English spelling would make it easier for people to learn English, but it could also theoretically have some negative effects as well. For example, it's possible that the bizarreness and irregularity of English spelling have a stimulating effect on the mind that has grasped them and lead to enhanced creativity in a similar way to how the minor variations between musical instruments of the same general type, or between paintbrushes, can lead to interesting creative results. Also, part of the aesthetic effect of written text comes from the exact sequence of characters.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
Based on your comment and username, you might like or even already have read this:
https://www.lovelybooks.de/autor/Z%C3%A9-do-Rock/Fom-Winde-f...
I found it quite enjoyable.
I like spelling reform a little bit, but I like etymology more. Knight tells us about Middle English knyght, from a time when they had actual knights riding around, and they pronounced every letter in the word, same as with its Germanic ancestor knecht. Sophistry has a ph because it's Greek and that represents the letter phi, which really was pronounced that way, an "aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive" like spitting. So you get historical context, Germanic knights, Greek Sophists (originally teachers of excellence and virtue). Then there's a bunch of words that break the customary i-before-e rule: deceive, conceive, perceive, receive. By putting the e before the i, those are all telling us the same thing about Norman French grammar, but I forget what,* and whatever it was it's a grammatical rule that we never even used in English. So I'd be happy for that one to be reformed. I guess I support slight change.
* I think it's distinguishing the present tense from the imperfect, in the subjunctive mood. Maybe.
> I like spelling reform a little bit, but I like etymology more.
I love the spirit but wouldn't a new change in spelling fit right in with all the past, etymological changes? Isn't it antietymological to try to freeze words as they are? :)
A very interesting study might be made of the etymological history lost with past changes.
Of course, but these are opposing forces that both deserve respect. How much do we want to live in the past? I say a non-zero amount.
How about backwards compatibility, support the new spellings as well as the old? We're sort of already in that situation with English vs. American English. Over 100s of years, the "natural" spelling will win out.
The very first three "egregious examples" are already leaving me with a low expectation for the rest of this article.
"aquire" over "acquire" I will readily agree with, that makes a lot of sense. "suficient" and "comunal" however? absolutely not. those doubled consonants are putting in legitimate work in indicating an alternative stress pattern. its suf-FI-cient and com-MU-nal. but without the doubled letters, my intuitive reading becomes su-fi-CI-ent and CO-mu-nal.
There's plenty of words that could stand a respelling in english, but those are terrible examples to call "egregious". doubled consonates have a clear function in the words they appear in.
This doesn't seem clear cut to me. Sufficient and deficient have the same stress pattern, but deficient doesn't have a double letter. Neither does proficient.
The ff in sufficient indicates a short vowel sound for the "u". The single f in deficient indicates a long vowel sound for the "e". Hence, suff-icient and dee-ficient. At least, that's how we pronounce it where I'm from.
OED, Merriam-Webster, and Collins all show a short "e", as in "delete" or "different", i.e. /dɪ/. I've never heard it pronounced as /diː/. Do you have some kind of southern drawl where you put the stress on the first syllable, like some people do with "defense"?
The article makes some oblique references to the stenography-like alphabet that Shaw had ordered to be designed after his death. You can practice it with an app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.blackenvel...) which accurately transcribes from English to phonetic representation, which is nifty and could be transposed to other languages. But ultimately: one can understand why it hasn't caught on. Is it really such a problem that our writing isn't very phonemic…? Every person/dialect would have their own person orthography.
See also: Quikscript, optimized for handwriting (but suitable for printing also).
https://www.omniglot.com/writing/quikscript.htm
And the excellent official Quikscript manual:
https://www.omniglot.com/pdfs/quikscriptmanual.pdf
The guy who invented it is called Read. Nomen est omen!
---
See also, re: Reforming the English lexicon: Uncleftish Beholding
https://msburkeenglish.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010...
Interesting. It makes me think of J.R.R. Tolkien's Tengwar script:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengwar
But the large majority of texts is now typed, not handwritten. I'd optimize a writing system for fast, easy, error-resistant reading. The Latin script reads easier than this, despite its known problems, maybe because Quickscript lacks the 27 centuries of refinement.
If I were to pick an existing script, that would be either Hangul or Tengwar (with vowels). Tengwar already has an English mode, and Hangul would likely need a few adjustments, following its general principles.
> The Latin script reads easier than this
How did you come to this conclusion? Is there a way to measure that?
(Maybe reading speed comprehension tests? On that note I wonder if an emoji-based script would win there. Color is one of the fastest things to be processed visually. Probably the same reason we like syntax highlighting so much!)
I'm assuming of course that you haven't spent the same amount of time practicing both scripts. (I assume this is also true for everyone on the Quikscript mailing list! Though it might be cool to write browser extension that translates everything into Quikscript...)
But obviously there's a compelling argument for "the one everyone can already read." (Historical counterpoint: Hebrew.)
That reminds me of something I heard about software. To be worth the pain of switching, an alternative application cannot be 10% better. It must be 10x better.
+1 for Tengwar though, it wins on aesthetics, no contest!
English spelling is a treasure, and I'm not even a native speaker, or writer.
I'm a native speaker and I agree. English spelling carries a lot of history and context along with it, which would be lost in any spelling standardization. That richness is a good thing. A little complexity or inconsistency is good. It reflects that spelling is a fundementally imperfect encoding of a living language whose true form is the spoken word. And if you truly grapple with the tremendous diversity of spoken English, it is obvious that any One True Phonetic Orthography is impossible.
Some years ago, I made a list of books at the Internet Archive on English spelling reform from the early 20th century. Here are a few:
Child’s First Reader (1904?)
https://archive.org/details/childsfirstreade00pitm/page/72/m...
A Plea for Alphabetic Reform (c1905)
https://archive.org/details/pleaforalphabeti00pitm/page/n3/m...
Simplified Spelling for the Use of Government Departments (1906)
https://archive.org/details/simplifiedspelli00simprich/page/...
The Problem of Spelling Reform (1906)
https://archive.org/details/problemofspellin00skearich/page/...
The Fonetic Primer Offering the Universal Alfabet and the Science of Spelling (c1907)
https://archive.org/details/foneticprimeroff00storrich/mode/...
English Spelling and Spelling Reform (1909)
https://archive.org/details/englishspellings00loun/page/n5/m...
Simplified Spelling (1911)
https://archive.org/details/cu31924027251341/page/n5/mode/2u...
Handbook of Simplified Spelling (1920)
https://archive.org/details/handbookofsimpli00simprich/page/...
I suspect I may soon start seeing "u" for "you" everywhere. Maybe "r" for "are". Because why the hell not. Even at places that don't do it right now (and even frown) and I won't be able to avoid it anymore by just avoding text-speakers. It will result in perpetual dehydration for me due to excessive vomiting.
I read this as satire, it was so ridiculous
Any reforms you could suggest sound like "1984" to me. English is fine, stop ruining it.
A fun idea but I think someone that learns the language and invests enough time into it would find no reason to have the "f" removed from sufficient, they just accept it as it is and never think twice about it
Exhibit A: queue. Five letters to make the sound of the first.
But that's not always the sound it makes.
"Queue" is not pronounced as the sound that the 'q' in "quick" or "quack" makes.
My favorite is "ghoti"[1] which is pronounced as "fish" because of:
gh, pronounced /f/ as in enough /ɪˈnʌf/ or tough /tʌf/; o, pronounced /ɪ/ as in women /ˈwɪmɪn/; ti, pronounced /ʃ/ as in nation /ˈneɪʃən/ or motion /ˈmoʊʃən/.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
Huh? How do you pronounce the name of the first letter of the word queue, and how does that differ from when you pronounce the word queue?
The most obvious difference is that queue uses unaspirated /k/ sound while quick and quack both use the aspirated /kʰ/ sound.
You only get that pronunciation by breaking at least two English pronunciation rules: Leading "g" is always pronounced like a "g" (and in this position the "h" prevents it from being pronounced like a "j"), and "ti" is only pronounced like "sh" when followed by a vowel. Can't remember if there was a rule it broke about the "o".
> Here are a few more stray examples of the losses no one should rue: dumb, numb, thumb, succumb.
What? "Dum" and "Dumb" sound completely different. All of those words end with a quiet "b" sound.
That was where the article lost credibility with me.
Rough, tough, though. One single letter change each time and you get a completely different sound. It's atrocious.
> Rough, tough, though. One single letter change each time and you get a completely different sound.
Rough and tough do rhyme...
Cough and bough would be good additions.
Hiccough is the best one.
Do rough and tough not rhyme in your dialect?
y did u take all nite to drive thru the rain?
Yep.
http://www.i18nguy.com/twain.html
Not Mark Twain, but (believe it or not) Dolton Edwards in Astounding Science Fiction, Sept 1946.
"Dolton" was an amusing pseudonym. See this thread from a few years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23587507
Some (un?)reliable sources on the Internet claim that it was actually written by a man named M.J. Shields and published as a letter to The Economist in the 1940s
Yes, that's covered in the thread I linked to. The Economist letter was in 1971, and contributed wording that made it into the meme later on.
> Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
It actually looks pretty good. It's written for comical effect, but it highlights nicely how _bad_ English orthography is.
It's basically how Spaniards and Italians would spell English :D
As a native Spanish speaker, I agree
A bit of a tangent, this was written by an Italian singer to sound like English without being English: https://vimeo.com/1071644859
Unfortunately the Youtube upload of that performance seems to have been copyright struck in the past couple of months after being up for 13 years...
kinda reminds of dutch