English Orthography Reform

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MoonRightRomantic
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Re: English Orthography Reform

Post by MoonRightRomantic »

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.
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?
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.
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.

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.
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Re: English Orthography Reform

Post by mira »

MoonRightRomantic wrote:
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.
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?
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.
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.

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.
While Cut Spelling doesn't seem like a bad idea on the face of it, the differing pronunciations between dialects would likely mean far fewer letters would be removed than it is worth. There would be a noticeable difference, but you'd still have 99+% of the letters still there - so why bother?.

English Orthography has these phonetic hints (1 up over Hanzi), semantic hints (2 up over Hanzi), and letters which are silent in most dialects. For example: I pronounce "military" with a silent "a" - Americans don't. I know people that don't pronounce the "tt" in "little", but I do. These types of things occur everywhere, so these silent letters may well be very audible in the speech of others. This is why cut spelling—while it can have benefits—will have a pointlessly minuscule impact. English orthography is definitely better than Hanzi, especially considering it does all these things Hanzi doesn't whilst still working well for very different dialects - not to the extent of Chinese dialects, but very different none-the-less.
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Re: English Orthography Reform

Post by Sumelic »

MoonRightRomantic wrote:
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.
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.
...What? Did you interpret the introductory sentence of "Yingzi", "The English spelling system is such a pain, we'd might as well switch to hanzi-- Chinese characters," as a serious proposal? It's pretty clearly a thought experiment (futher down on the page, he says " I've attempted in this sketch to lay out, by analogy, the nature and structure of the Chinese writing system"). I've seen no indication that Zompist is the type of spelling-reform crank that would "suggest adopting a hanzi-like script."
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.
Written Arabic is not hieroglyphic. What do you even mean by "hieroglyphic," and why are you using the word in such an unconventional way? It makes it harder to understand if you actually have any valid arguments.

I'll start by giving my understanding of the term. I would call a writing system "hieroglyphic" if it meets the following criteria:
  • It has a large inventory of indivisible symbols or graphemes (usually more than a thousand). Digraphs are not distinct graphemes.
  • It has a number of graphemes that have a special association with particular content-word morphemes. I say "special association" rather than "unique association" because due to the rebus principle, often "pictographic" hieroglyphs are not in fact uniquely associated with a morpheme, but are also associated with some phonemic content. But hieroglyphic scripts often mark rebus usages differently from pictographic usages; e.g. in Egyptian hieroglyphs there is the vertical line used to mark logograms, and in hanzi phonetic components are often combined with a semantic component to form a new glyph.
  • It has a number of graphical elements (not necessarily independent graphemes, I guess) that indicate meaning in a manner unrelated to the phonology of a word. E.g. Egyptian "determinative" glyphs, hanzi semantic components.
I was trying to think of more, but I guess these are sufficient actually. English and Arabic have nothing like hanzi semantic components. The closest I can even imagine is how word-inital "gh" is used in some "ghostly" words, like "ghastly," "ghoul," but it also occurs in a number of semantically unrelated words like "ghetto," "gherkin."
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Re: English Orthography Reform

Post by MoonRightRomantic »

Sumelic wrote:Written Arabic is not hieroglyphic. What do you even mean by "hieroglyphic," and why are you using the word in such an unconventional way? It makes it harder to understand if you actually have any valid arguments.
You are right. I am being needlessly belligerent due to a misunderstanding and I apologize.

I believe that English orthography is needlessly opaque. There may be a logic behind it, but this logic is needlessly convoluted. English orthography exists somewhere between (or perpendicular to?) phonemic and logographic writing systems, but is inferior to both.

English orthography attempts to perform two separate tasks: preserve etymology and indicate contemporary pronunciation. It does so inadequately, therefore I suggest writing English in two parallel scripts: one set of morphograms that indicates semantics and etymology, and one set of phonograms that indicates a mostly accurate pronunciation.

The broadcast dialects of English are mutually intelligible and would probably benefit from Cut Spelling. Some dialects of English are not mutually intelligible with broadcast dialects and would not benefit from any kind of reform. We will simply have to accept that, like Arabic or Chinese, the written form remains a separate language.

Writing inter-dialectal English as parallel neoglyphi and cut spelling would be more efficient than the current orthography, assuming one is familiar with broadcast dialect.
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Re: English Orthography Reform

Post by mira »

I think reform for a subset of dialects will just mean the left out ones will stick with what they've got, and you'll just have even more people getting cheesed off that "you're spelling everything wrong." I can't be the only one that at least twitches when I see a "z" in "romanise" or a missing "l" from "traveller", let alone the worse ones like "armor" or "color" - that I don't get. Surely if those painful spellings were due to reform, they would be spelled "armer" and "culer", as I'm yet to hear anyone anywhere say /kɒlɔ˞/ or something similar, unless when mocking the spelling.

I'd rather have everyone struggle with a few weird rules and exceptions than have 12 groups of people all complaining about each other's horrible spelling - but that's just an opinion.
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Re: English Orthography Reform

Post by MoonRightRomantic »

OTʜᴇB wrote:I think reform for a subset of dialects will just mean the left out ones will stick with what they've got, and you'll just have even more people getting cheesed off that "you're spelling everything wrong." I can't be the only one that at least twitches when I see a "z" in "romanise" or a missing "l" from "traveller", let alone the worse ones like "armor" or "color" - that I don't get. Surely if those painful spellings were due to reform, they would be spelled "armer" and "culer", as I'm yet to hear anyone anywhere say /kɒlɔ˞/ or something similar, unless when mocking the spelling.

I'd rather have everyone struggle with a few weird rules and exceptions than have 12 groups of people all complaining about each other's horrible spelling - but that's just an opinion.
It's not a few weird rules and exceptions, it's a huge amount that makes reading unpleasant to learn for children and speakers of other languages. Everybody nowadays uses the spellcheck programmed into their devices. I doubt many bother to remember how to spell beyond primary school.
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Re: English Orthography Reform

Post by mira »

MoonRightRomantic wrote:
OTʜᴇB wrote:I think reform for a subset of dialects will just mean the left out ones will stick with what they've got, and you'll just have even more people getting cheesed off that "you're spelling everything wrong." I can't be the only one that at least twitches when I see a "z" in "romanise" or a missing "l" from "traveller", let alone the worse ones like "armor" or "color" - that I don't get. Surely if those painful spellings were due to reform, they would be spelled "armer" and "culer", as I'm yet to hear anyone anywhere say /kɒlɔ˞/ or something similar, unless when mocking the spelling.

I'd rather have everyone struggle with a few weird rules and exceptions than have 12 groups of people all complaining about each other's horrible spelling - but that's just an opinion.
It's not a few weird rules and exceptions, it's a huge amount that makes reading unpleasant to learn for children and speakers of other languages. Everybody nowadays uses the spellcheck programmed into their devices. I doubt many bother to remember how to spell beyond primary school.
Personally, I don't know anyone that blindly relies on spellcheck. Everyone around me can spell without a checker reasonably well, and a fair amount including me have very good spelling. Therefore I'm naturally sceptical about that point. As for the same spellings making different sounds, I'm not surprised one bit. We have more sounds than spellings, and while reform on the consonants could work a bit, reform on vowels is simply impossible without cheesing off half the dialects - and if there must be reform, it cannot split up dialects anymore than they are already, what with English being such a global language.
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Re: English Orthography Reform

Post by GrandPiano »

OTʜᴇB wrote:English Orthography has these phonetic hints (1 up over Hanzi), semantic hints (2 up over Hanzi), and letters which are silent in most dialects.
Hanzi actually does have phonetic and semantic hints, though. In fact, the most common method of character formation is to use two pre-existing characters as components, one hinting at the meanung and one hinting at the pronunciation. For example, the character 指 zhǐ "finger; to point" is made up of 手 shǒu "hand" (reduced to 扌), and 旨 zhǐ "purpose; decree; excellent". 扌 hints at the meaning, while 旨 hints at the pronunciation. Sometimes these hints are somewhat obscured by sound change and semantic shift, but phonetic and semantic hints are still definitely very prevalent in hanzi.
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Re: English Orthography Reform

Post by mira »

GrandPiano wrote:
OTʜᴇB wrote:English Orthography has these phonetic hints (1 up over Hanzi), semantic hints (2 up over Hanzi), and letters which are silent in most dialects.
Hanzi actually does have phonetic and semantic hints, though. In fact, the most common method of character formation is to use two pre-existing characters as components, one hinting at the meanung and one hinting at the pronunciation. For example, the character 指 zhǐ "finger; to point" is made up of 手 shǒu "hand" (reduced to 扌), and 旨 zhǐ "purpose; decree; excellent". 扌 hints at the meaning, while 旨 hints at the pronunciation. Sometimes these hints are somewhat obscured by sound change and semantic shift, but phonetic and semantic hints are still definitely very prevalent in hanzi.
Interesting, but only 26 symbols are needed for the hints in English, where there are far more in Hanzi, meaning that—while the hint may be better—you only get the hint once you're good enough to have less use with the hint.
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Re: English Orthography Reform

Post by GrandPiano »

OTʜᴇB wrote:
GrandPiano wrote:
OTʜᴇB wrote:English Orthography has these phonetic hints (1 up over Hanzi), semantic hints (2 up over Hanzi), and letters which are silent in most dialects.
Hanzi actually does have phonetic and semantic hints, though. In fact, the most common method of character formation is to use two pre-existing characters as components, one hinting at the meanung and one hinting at the pronunciation. For example, the character 指 zhǐ "finger; to point" is made up of 手 shǒu "hand" (reduced to 扌), and 旨 zhǐ "purpose; decree; excellent". 扌 hints at the meaning, while 旨 hints at the pronunciation. Sometimes these hints are somewhat obscured by sound change and semantic shift, but phonetic and semantic hints are still definitely very prevalent in hanzi.
Interesting, but only 26 symbols are needed for the hints in English, where there are far more in Hanzi, meaning that—while the hint may be better—you only get the hint once you're good enough to have less use with the hint.
I'm not saying that hanzi's phonetic and semantic clues are superior (or inferior) to those of the English orthography, just that it's not at all true that hanzi has no phonetic or semantic clues.

Unless I'm mistaken, your argument actually only applies to phonetic hints. Hanzi's semantic hints are arguably easier to make use of in that respect that English's, because, unlike English, hanzi has several extremely common semantic components that each occur in a very large number of characters.
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Re: English Orthography Reform

Post by Sumelic »

OTʜᴇB wrote:while reform on the consonants could work a bit, reform on vowels is simply impossible without cheesing off half the dialects - and if there must be reform, it cannot split up dialects anymore than they are already, what with English being such a global language.
It's not possible to have perfect representation of the vowels in all accents, but it is possible to reform current spelling of vowels some in a dialect-neutral fashion. I wrote an essay a while back on the "Anglish moot" site (kind of a random place for it) that discusses this: http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Clearest_ ... h_Spelling Basically, "oa" in place of "long o," "ew" in place of "long u", and "ie" as in "thief" in place of "ee" as in "feet" are all unnecessary variant spellings of vowels and don't have any siginficance as far as I can tell in any dialect. (Some dialects with variable yod-dropping may accidentally distinguish some words that have "u" vs. "ew," like "flue" vs. "flew," but I think that's never a consistent pattern.) Probably someone who actually studies this a lot could come up with more examples.
GrandPiano wrote:
OTʜᴇB wrote:
GrandPiano wrote:
OTʜᴇB wrote:English Orthography has these phonetic hints (1 up over Hanzi), semantic hints (2 up over Hanzi), and letters which are silent in most dialects.
Hanzi actually does have phonetic and semantic hints, though. In fact, the most common method of character formation is to use two pre-existing characters as components, one hinting at the meanung and one hinting at the pronunciation. For example, the character 指 zhǐ "finger; to point" is made up of 手 shǒu "hand" (reduced to 扌), and 旨 zhǐ "purpose; decree; excellent". 扌 hints at the meaning, while 旨 hints at the pronunciation. Sometimes these hints are somewhat obscured by sound change and semantic shift, but phonetic and semantic hints are still definitely very prevalent in hanzi.
Interesting, but only 26 symbols are needed for the hints in English, where there are far more in Hanzi, meaning that—while the hint may be better—you only get the hint once you're good enough to have less use with the hint.
I'm not saying that hanzi's phonetic and semantic clues are superior (or inferior) to those of the English orthography, just that it's not at all true that hanzi has no phonetic or semantic clues.

Unless I'm mistaken, your argument actually only applies to phonetic hints. Hanzi's semantic hints are arguably easier to make use of in that respect that English's, because, unlike English, hanzi has several extremely common semantic components that each occur in a very large number of characters.
Exactly. As I said earlier, I don't think it makes sense to say that English has any semantic hints at all, if we're using "semantic hints" to mean the same type of thing that hanzi semantic components and Egyptian determinatives are. Those things are graphemes whose only function is to convey semantic information--they are completely unrelated to the phonology of the word. English spelling is almost always related to some kind of phonology (often historical rather than current, and often related in an overly-complicated way) or morphology, or in some cases the lexical stratum of the word (e.g. Greek, French, Latin origin). The semantic associations of graphemes are either due to parallel semantic associations in the phonology, or they are morphological, or for some minor patterns they are due to false etymologies or analogy. Stuff like "sc" for cutting words (like "scythe" and "scissors") is barely useful as a semantic hint, and it's only possible anyway for these words because they start with the sound /s/ (we don't have any words with spellings like "sctrimmers" /trɪmərz/, where the semantics-related part of the spelling is completely unrelated to the phonology-related part).
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Re: English Orthography Reform

Post by GamerGeek »

I know there has been a lot of discussion, but I'm not reading 37 pages. I kinda skimmed over the last two pages.
The best way to reform english is to minimize irregularity, not to change how it looks. We wont be "cacεŋ" balls anytime soon.
How do we do this? Simplify our digrafs like this, and it's pretty eesy to reed, even if it looks a litle derpy. I think this is the most likely speling reform, wat do yoo think?
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Re: English Orthography Reform

Post by Sumelic »

GamerGeek wrote:I know there has been a lot of discussion, but I'm not reading 37 pages. I kinda skimmed over the last two pages.
The best way to reform english is to minimize irregularity, not to change how it looks. We wont be "cacεŋ" balls anytime soon.
How do we do this? Simplify our digrafs like this, and it's pretty eesy to reed, even if it looks a litle derpy. I think this is the most likely speling reform, wat do yoo think?
Certainly that is the easiest course of action, and if you're interested in using or promoting practical spelling reforms it makes sense to do that (Jack Windsor Lewis uses some simplified spellings on his blog). But it seems that very few people are motivated to do this. I know that I just think of English spelling reform as an interesting puzzle, and something that I am broadly sympathetic to, not something that I actually care about. Furthermore, even if I did care, the way I write will have essentially no effect on society. It's like the paradox of voting. I'd join an organization or something like that if I wanted to effectively accomplish societal change.

On my level of engagement (as I said, interested in the "puzzle" elements of spelling reform) the issue with changes like "digraf" is that they're too obvious to be very interesting to discuss. Everyone on this board already knows that English uses "ph" to represent the sound /f/, and that this is pretty much unnecessary. Making things less complicated by using "f" instead works fine, with no particular complications that I know of that might need to be circumvented in interesting, unexpected ways. Furthermore, it isn't particularly important either: I haven't checked but I'd imagine that a very small percentage of spelling errors involve writing "f" for "ph" or vice versa, and a very small amount of the difficultly of learning English spelling is tied up with this convention. So besides being obvious (and therefore, kind of boring to me) it's not one of the areas where a "fix" is obviously needed. And last, like you said, it looks a bit derpy. All else equal, I'm biased toward spelling reforms that appeal to my sense of aesthetics.

(There are some differences between the examples in your post, of course. I talked about "ph" > "f" in the preceding paragraph; "ea" > "ee" is similarly "obvious" but seems much more useful, so I like it more, even though it does look a bit weird; "ll" > "l" in "spelling" is actually a problematic decision because it implies re-working the whole system of doubling consonants and replacing it with something else that works better as a system, which is a bit tricky if we're sticking with the idea of not making drastic changes. So "ll" > "l" is potentially interesting, but what I really want to see is a description of the general principles/system for changing spelling like this, and arguments for why it would be better than the current system.)
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Re: English Orthography Reform

Post by Hominid »

I don't really like these moderate hero spelling reforms that take away the interesting parts of English without actually making it easier to spell or pronounce.

Ajd ræðë rid sämpþíŋ lajk ðís than sumthing liek this.
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Re: English Orthography Reform

Post by alynnidalar »

Hominid wrote:Ajd ræðë rid sämpþíŋ lajk ðís
Certainly "interesting"; not sure I'd characterize it as "easier to spell or pronounce", though.
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Re: English Orthography Reform

Post by mira »

alynnidalar wrote:
Hominid wrote:Ajd ræðë rid sämpþíŋ lajk ðís
Certainly "interesting"; not sure I'd characterize it as "easier to spell or pronounce", though.
I don't think that's the point. I think Hominid is more interested in the artistic potential of orthography reform, rather than the practical.
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Re: English Orthography Reform

Post by Hominid »

alynnidalar wrote:
Hominid wrote:Ajd ræðë rid sämpþíŋ lajk ðís
Certainly "interesting"; not sure I'd characterize it as "easier to spell or pronounce", though.
The point is that it would be easier to learn, for non-native speakers. These spelling reforms that only get rid of some obvious problems while keeping others seem counterproductive to me.

That said, I am indeed not really interested in any kind of orthography reforms for English.
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How deranged is the English spelling system?

Post by Ahtaitay »

I am a second learner of English, a pretty good one at that, and the English spelling system is the kinda thing that make me wanna rip my eyes out. It seems not only foreign learners are frustrated with this spelling system, but also native speakers. In the couple of past weeks, I researched this topic, with quite some depth, and I wrote an article about it. It seems that the English spelling system has far-reaching (negative) implications that go beyond the individual learner. Find the original article [http://ahtaitay.blogspot.com/2017/11/th ... -deep.html]. Please, suggest any additions that might be added to this article, and point out any corrections. I would love this to turn into a profitable multinational debate.

Have a good read [:D] [:D]
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Re: How deranged is the English spelling system?

Post by Axiem »

The English spelling system is perfectly fine. Strange, yes, but perfectly fine.

I really like the property that English has where a person whose dialect I wouldn't be able to understand in speech can still write a letter that I can understand, and vice-versa. Any reform to English spelling that at all tried to make it closer to modern pronunciations would invariably break this property.
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Re: How deranged is the English spelling system?

Post by Xonen »

Merged the new thread with the existing one.

Axiem wrote: 18 Nov 2017 01:06 The English spelling system is perfectly fine. Strange, yes, but perfectly fine.
Well, I'd say "perfectly fine" is stretching it. It's not as bad as its detractors tend to make it out to be, but it is quite objectively harder to learn than it would strictly need to be, and largely for fairly stupid reasons.
I really like the property that English has where a person whose dialect I wouldn't be able to understand in speech can still write a letter that I can understand, and vice-versa. Any reform to English spelling that at all tried to make it closer to modern pronunciations would invariably break this property.
/aɪm fɛərli ʃɜːr juː kæn ʌndərstænd ðɪs dʒʌst faɪn/, and so could anyone whose native language is English, if that's what they were taught in schools and whatnot. After all, teaching a system closer to modern pronunciation could hardly be harder than the current one! But obviously, the real problem is that the hundreds of millions of speakers already used to the current system would effectively have to learn to read all over again, and that's just never gonna fly.

In any case, the main problem with English spelling isn't that it's too far from modern pronunciation - it's not - but that it's irregular. Even a fairly minor spelling reform could fix a lot of the irregularity - but as we've seen with fairly recent examples from, say, German and French, even fairly minor spelling reforms can be really difficult to implement.
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