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.
"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."
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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 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.
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.
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]
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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").
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.
"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/.
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
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.
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.
"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 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.
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.
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-...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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").
The usual answer is that they pretend these differences dont exist and use one blessed (maybe artificial) dialect.
German picked a random Central German dialect as Standard German and went with that.
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...
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.
Interesting. It makes me think of J.R.R. Tolkien's Tengwar script:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengwar
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?
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
y did u take all nite to drive thru the rain?
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...
Do rough and tough not rhyme in your dialect?
Yep.
http://www.i18nguy.com/twain.htmlNot 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
> 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
kinda reminds of dutch