Then I apologize for my ignorance. In this case I suppose a comparison to written Chinese or Arabic would be more apt: if I understand correctly these English dialects are completely different languages that sound nothing alike, which communicate through a written form which is effectively a separate language? What factors exactly would make a morphemic script (i.e. non-phonetic pan-language, like Chinese or Arabic) equivalent or inferior to the current orthography? Would a reform like Cut Spelling negatively impact cross-dialectal communication?OTʜᴇB wrote:It would to all the northern English ones though. You really can't group all the UK accents together, but then distinguish UK and US accents, as the US accent is closer to mine than mine is to say Geordie or Cockney.
Regardless, the fundamental point I'm making is that you are assuming all the English accents or dialects are a lot more similar than they actually are. Not even some UK ones are completely mutually intelligible, let alone sharing all their phonemes closely enough to make a morpheme-based reform valid, let alone an improvement on what we have now.
What precisely are you arguing? That English orthography should not be simplified because it has rules? Those "rules" are bizarre and irregular. Zompist was arguing that English orthography has logic behind it, not that it isn't broken. Zompist still argues in favor of reform, going so far as to suggest adopting a hanzi-like script.Xonen wrote:This is an interesting viewpoint, actually; phrased somewhat more diplomatically, I suppose this could have led to some fairly good discussion. However, I fail to see how using multigraph phonograms makes the system resemble Hanzi more than alphabets. Most alphabetic writing systems use those to some degree, while Hanzi... doesn't. It has some phonetic elements, yes, but those only give the reader a vague clue to the pronunciation of a word at best; there's no way to write a set of rules that would even allow a human to predict the pronunciation from writing with any degree of accuracy. The contrast to Zomp's relatively short set of rules that allows 85% accuracy for a (fairly stupid, as he points out) computer program is simply enormous.
I never argued that English was identical to hanzi, only that it is closer (but inferior) to logographic systems than to phonemic systems. English orthography has phonetic hints, semantic hints, unnecessary silent letters and doesn't distinguish between them. It is demonstrably worse than hanzi because hanzi isn't littered with the same pitfalls.
As I have been led to understand, none of this orthographic "logic" applies to UK dialects other than BBC English. The spoken and written forms have diverged to the point of constituting different languages. Arguing that the orthography isn't effectively hieroglyphic a la written Arabic is intellectually dishonest.