Let pupils abandon spelling rules, says academic

@aidan,

aidan wrote:

Quote:
It can be a mini-version of the concept of paragrafing
on the basis of topic, and a subtle way of slightly emfasizing
the word at the end of the line, which may be a little more conspicuous.

Its not necessarily something that I 'd do in the real world,
certainly not when I was on-the-job, but here I have unlimited freedom

sort of like writing poetry then...

Maybe; I 'm not much of a poet.

During the fullness of my life,
I 've made up only one poem.

David

0 Replies

to be honest i think if i can learn to spell then it can't be that hard. just read some books! although i do see the academics point, but if it's so hard why is it the most popular language for people to learn?

3 Replies

@TNTABC123,

TNTABC123 wrote:

... if it's so hard why is it the most popular language for people to learn?

It's the best return on investment. If you learn English as a second language you will probably have more financial opportunities opened to you than if you learned another language.

1 Reply

@TNTABC123,

TNTABC123 wrote:

to be honest i think if i can learn to spell then it can't be that hard. just read some books! although i do see the academics point, but if it's so hard why is it the most popular language for people to learn?

I expect English, as pronounced by Tom Brokaw,
to dominate the world. Spelling is effortless if it is fully fonetic, as logic dictates that it shoud be.

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

exactly, and why is that?

1 Reply

@OmSigDAVID,

yeah i agree that spelling would be easy if it was phonetic, but remember we have the most words of any language in the world, so it would be quite difficult to change them all to phonetics, also for example, if you go phonetic, you have to think, when used in the alphabet the letter Y sounds like "why" but at the end of a word it almost always sounds like "ee". See, the problem with english is that we pronounce letters differently in different places in words, no language is actually purely phonetic, not even spanish, italian, or finnish. and also the last time to create a language anyone could learn failed miserably, with about 100 people learning it, see the problem is people just can't be bothered to change their language now, even if it's easier in the future.

1 Reply

@TNTABC123,

TNTABC123 wrote:

yeah i agree that spelling would be easy if it was phonetic, but remember we have the most words of any language in the world, so it would be quite difficult to change them all to phonetics, also for example, if you go phonetic, you have to think, when used in the alphabet the letter Y sounds like "why" but at the end of a word it almost always sounds like "ee". See, the problem with english is that we pronounce letters differently in different places in words, no language is actually purely phonetic, not even spanish, italian, or finnish. and also the last time to create a language anyone could learn failed miserably, with about 100 people learning it, see the problem is people just can't be bothered to change their language now, even if it's easier in the future.

What u wrote implies that we shoud do nothing
unless it is ez; from that, I dissent.

Future generations need us to address the problems
and to resolve the difficulties by carefully writing new dictionaries
n teaching spelling correctly, foneticly, in schools from the beginning.

0 Replies

@TNTABC123,

Because the world's latest empire is an English speaking one.

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

yeeees, and why is that, because america adopted english, but why would they do this when the majority of their country spoke german?

either way, it doesn't matter, i'm just saying.
anyway, english would just be a boring unemotional featureless binary language,
it's its quirks that interest me, that's why i think that we should keep our interesting English and not adopt a phonetic spelling.

1 Reply

@TNTABC123,

TNTABC123 wrote:

it's its quirks that interest me,
that's why i think that we should keep
our interesting English and not adopt a phonetic spelling.

It is not OK
to torture and intimidate the children
into spelling the rong way.

Thay shoud spell the effortless, natural way.

David

1 Reply

@OmSigDAVID,

so who is going to devise this new phonetic alphabet? for example how would spell 'example' in a natural way? what would the alphabet sound like?

and how is it torturing and intimidationg children? it really isn't incredibly difficult, once you have learnt the rules and with a few exceptions, to spell something just from hearing it.

2 Replies

@TNTABC123,

David's plan hasn't gone past changing a few words in his own postings. The great logician is stumped by things that require thinking.

1 Reply

@TNTABC123,

TNTABC123 wrote:

Quote:

so who is going to devise this new phonetic alphabet?

Maybe fonetic lexicografers, writing nu dictionaries.

TNTABC123 wrote:

Quote:

for example how would spell 'example' in a natural way?
what would the alphabet sound like?

That wud not be among the changes, in my opinion.
I 'd leave it alone, or delete the first e:
xample.

TNTABC123 wrote:

Quote:

and how is it torturing and intimidationg children?

like the history of Edgar Cayce, who was terrified of his father
who scared him into trying to memorize his spelling book,
learning unnatural, non-fonetic spelling.
That our fathers n grandfathers have been stupid and erred
is not a good cause to continue the error.

TNTABC123 wrote:

Quote:

it really isn't incredibly difficult,
once you have learnt the rules and with a few exceptions,
to spell something just from hearing it.

My objections r confined mostly to those exceptions,
like adding the letters UGH to the word tho
or spelling the word enuf as enough. Senseless.
MOST of English is ALREADY fonetic.

David

0 Replies

Once upon a time, all children many children . . . or, at least children in Catholic schools, were taught to diagram sentences. This was a way of analyzing a sentence by plugging the individual words into a structure of lines. Children attending Montessori elementary schools use a different system of sentence analysis involving symbols.

Last semester, my students, freshmen at a community college, often could not find the noun in a sentence. Surprisingly, the often chose the object of a prepositional phrase as the subject.

Diagramming was largely abandoned as educators sought simpler ways of teaching.

I expounded on diagramming because it offers a concrete parallel to why we should not abandon spelling rules.

The see-it, say-it or whole word method of teaching reading was thought to be an answer to why Johnny can't read but proved to be a dead end and so was largely abandoned.

Experiments are fine but methods that fail should not be pursued.

Besides, the abandonment of spelling rules is old news. Poets working in schools during the late 60s shoved spelling aside in favor of self-expression.

0 Replies

@OmSigDAVID,

This poster promotes what he considers phonetic spelling for several reasons, the two primary being that he simply likes to have his way and he believes in oligarchies.

One of the problems with changing the spelling to match the sound of the language is that in a country as large as the US, there are many sounds for the same letters. Anyone who has ever seen an explication of the use of the sounds represented by this sequence of letters - - tire - - knows how comic the results of applying this sequence to its various aural representations are.

All languages are dynamic. The sounds change over time. Ask a linguist about the vowel shift. Consider that some of the rhymes found in Milton and Shakespeare no longer work because English speakers pronounce the same words differently.

This is a factor that David never considered. His system matches his idiolect.

0 Replies

@joefromchicago,

Joe's question which pronunciation would you chose (page 1) gets to the heart of the matter.

0 Replies

@Robert Gentel,

It is not true that choosing one variant is a false dilemma (page 1) because the variance is NOT due to lack of a phonetic standard. It is partly due to distance and partly due to the fact that, historically, there were many languages spoken on the British Isles . . . some Celtic, some Romance and some Germanic. Immigrants to what are now the various English speaking nations brought many pronunciations with them. The variants of American English can be traced to the tiny regions in England that these people came from.

0 Replies

@Robert Gentel,

I think that you misuse your example of Caxton (page 3) and his alleged impact on the language. Considering that he was the first, or is at least thought to be the first, to print in English, there was no authority to which he could have appealed.

0 Replies

@TNTABC123,

English is so widely used because the sun never sat on the British Empire. All those colonies were established for trade. Then, the US, another English speaking nation, took over the role of the British.

0 Replies

@JTT,

David is basically a control freak. H's 'plan' to phoneticize English is simply a means of getting attention here among people who use fake names.

1 Reply

Let pupils abandon spelling rules, says academic

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know