Well... yes. That was my point. Innate and irate are pronounced differently. Spelling them the same way hinders text to speech, since you can't tell which is which from spelling, and it hinders speech to text since it's counterintuitive to spell different sounds the same.MoonRightRomantic wrote:According to Google <innate> <irate> <blood> are pronounced /iˈnāt/ /īˈrāt/ /bləd/ in General American. There's no distinction between stressed and unstressed schwa and the vowels with macrons indicate long vowels affected by the Great Vowel Shift: <ā> <ī> are pronounced [ei] [ai].Ebon wrote:Except that inate would then look like it's pronounced like irate, which I believe it is not. I also believe that exemption and except use a different sound, so that's misleading as well. And is blood pronounced like pod?
(YMMV, obviously, but that's how I learned it., Apologies if this is addressed in the handbook, but I don't have the time to dig through hundreds of pages right now.)
Not that English orthography is great when it comes to this, but it's also not a spelling reform that's supposed to make things easier.
Which addresses a single issue I showed, and it also means I'd have to switch to an English keyboard configuration every time I want to type English, because that's not on mine. Inconvenient. I'm aware that it's impossible for a single configuration to cover every language, but it strikes me as silly to require a reconfiguration for a lingua franca that's this closely related to German.MoonRightRomantic wrote:That's why I think syllabic consonants should be indicated as such. Ideally <exlnt, govrnmnt, contnnt> should be indicated <exl̩n̩t, govr̩nmn̩t, contn̩n̩t>.It may remove spelling errors to cut out schwas, but it'd make learning pronunciation a nightmare for anyone trying to learn English. How do you know it's excellent and not, say, excelnet if all you have is exclnt and you've never encountered the word before? There's no reason why it couldn't be excelnet- it'd be a valid English word if it existed.
There's also the fact that English students don't necessarily schwa when native speakers schwa (or can distinguish schwas from other sounds, or even know what a schwa is in the first place), so then you're left with memorising spelling even more than now.
Speaking of reconfiguration, in the hypothetical situation that this spelling reform becomes a thing, who's going to pay to replace literally every single English textbook? There was a spelling reform in German before I entered school, and when I finished I was still using textbooks with the old spellings. I doubt they've replaced them since, too. Schools, at least German ones, quite simply don't have the money to throw out and replace this many textbooks at once.
What about the other issues? You seem to be under the assumption that a) English students always schwa when native speakers schwa (I don't, and I'm not exactly learning English anymore), b) they can distinguish schwas from other sounds, c) they know what a schwa is.
You can teach them what it is, yes. But if I picked a recording of, say, excellent and asked if all Es are pronounced the same, I'm very certain that most of them would say yes. Once again, it would require rote memorisation of when not to spell vowels. From a German speaker's perspective, it would also be quite difficult to get used to vowels being spelled in this way. This does not make learning English easier in the slightest.