Let pupils abandon spelling rules, says academic

This is a false dilemma for phonetic spelling because the great variance is itself partly due to the lack of a phonetic standard and because having regional spelling to go along with the regional pronunciations isn't a problem.

So I'd choose American English as it is closest to what I use.

Well, first of all, your reference to a "lack of a phonetic standard" doesn't make much sense, unless you're advocating that everyone speak the same.

What cimplified spelling systems gain in terms of consistency they often throw away in terms of clarity. Eight may be a peculiar way of speclling the number that follows seven, but it certainly helps to distinguish it from the past tense of eat. Similarly, the syllable seed can be spelled a variety of ways in English -- seed, secede, proceed, supersede -- but if in our quest for consistency we were to fix on the single spelling of, say, seed, we wouldn't be able to distinguish between reseed and recede. Fissure would become fisher; sew and sow would be so; There would be no way to distinguish between seas and seize, flees and fleas, aloud and allowed, chance and chants, air and heir, wrest and rest, flue, flue, and flew, weather, whether, and wether, and countless others. Perplexity and ambiguity would reign (or rain or rein).

And who would decide which pronunciations would be supreme? Would we write eether or eyther? As we have already seen, pronunciations often bear even less relation to spellings than we appreciate. In spoken English, many millions of people -- perhaps the majority -- say medal for metal, hambag for handbag, frunnal for frontal, tolly for totally, forn for foreign, and nookular for nuclear. Shall our spellings reflect these? The fact is, especially when looked at globally, most of our spellings cater to a wide variation of pronunciations. If we insisted on strictly phonetic renderings, girl would be gurl in most of America (though perhaps goil in New York), gel in London and Sydney, gull in Ireland, gill in South Africa, gairull in Scotland. Written communications between nations, and even parts of nations, would become practically impossible. And that... is a problem enough already.

The worldwide standard shoud be English
as spoken by Tom Brokaw

All of these folks would, I suspect, encounter considerable difficulty if the writeen English they were familiar with was suddenly upended and they had to rely on an often limited grasp of the spoken language (and certainly of its many different accents and dialects) to suss out the new version.

Or, as is the case here, if you don't understand the advantages of a phonetic alphabet well. The primary purpose of writing is to map spoken sounds to written words, not to map meaning to letters

The phonetic standard I advocate is a mapping of the sounds used in English to specific letters or combinations. If that standard is consistent it doesn't matter if I say 'tomato' and you say 'tomahto' because we both can instinctively spell any of the sounds we use and if you want to say it that differently you should just write it differently as well. If you want to write with the same letters you should speak with the same sounds.

I would have no problem with regional spellings to accompany regional pronunciation or having pronunciation itself standardize. These problems you raise are non-issues for people already using phonetic languages.

We can do that right now. I think it should be pretty clear that any attention-seeking dunce can come up with his own phonetic spelling system.

If I say "tomahto," then I can write "tomahto." Nothing would stop me except my own good sense. You're not advocating the adoption of a different standard, then, you're advocating the adoption of no standard.

Robert Gentel wrote:

These problems you raise are non-issues for people already using phonetic languages.

Really? To which phonetic languages are you referring?

There was a time, about 30 years ago, when the rules were taken too seriously,
but we have gone far the other way since that time.

joefromchicago wrote:

We can do that right now. I think it should be pretty clear that any attention-seeking dunce can come up with his own phonetic spelling system.

Sure, but the point isn't to get any system but a standard one. It's not widely useful unless it's a standard that makes sense. English is the product of any dunce (some didn't even speak English) coming up with their own system.

Quote:

If I say "tomahto," then I can write "tomahto." Nothing would stop me except my own good sense. You're not advocating the adoption of a different standard, then, you're advocating the adoption of no standard.

Nonsense. I advocate a phonetic alphabet as a standard and have been clear about it.

Spanish. It strikes a good balance between whole language advocates and phonetic advocates. The alphabet itself is simple phonetics and once you learn all the sounds mapped to their letters you can write any word you hear.

They also have great regional differences in pronunciation and dialects but can still interchange text just as well as English countries currently do.

What you fail to realize is that the problems you pose are always going to exist as long as there are any differences between regional use, and I'm not proposing that all people follow the same standard but that the regional standards themselves be consistent.

The problem isn't that someone can say tomato and another tomahto. The problem is that even disconsidering those differences there are internal inconsistencies that preclude the ability to learn the language systemically.

It makes no sense that a case can be made to spell "fish" as "ghoti" (gh pronounced as in laugh, o as in women, and ti as in nation) regardless of what regional differences there are.

I just don't see what's so urgent about changing. Is there a horrible lack of internal consistency in spelling? Sure. Do a lot of people have trouble with spelling? Sure. Does it hinder the utility of English as a spoken or a written language?

When spelling was codified in various languages, the majority of the speakers of the language were illiterate. That's no longer the case, and to change would require that millions upon millions of people be complicit in the change. Perhaps this is why the numerous advocates of a spelling revolution in the past couple of centuries -- folks like Webster and Shaw -- have not made any headway whatsoever.

And how many generations would it be before only scholars would be able to read anything written under the current system? It's no big deal to us not to be able to read Chaucer -- there just isn't much that's survived -- but to not be able to read anything from Shakespeare to the present... what a bummer.

No, you're not advocating a standard.

You've said that anyone can write phonetically as long as what they write reflects the way they speak. As you said: "If that standard is consistent it doesn't matter if I say 'tomato' and you say 'tomahto' because we both can instinctively spell any of the sounds we use and if you want to say it that differently you should just write it differently as well. If you want to write with the same letters you should speak with the same sounds." But that only imposes a standard upon each individual, not upon spelling in general. And a standard that binds only one person is no standard at all.

Nope. You don't advocate a phonetic alphabet, you advocate many phonetic alphabets -- as many as there are literate English speakers.

Really you must be joking. Although Spanish spelling is more regular than English, it still has its exceptions. A Castilian, for instance, will pronounce a soft "c" or a "z" like a "th." Thus, "cerveza" comes out sounding like "thervetha" in Madrid but "servesa" in Mexico City. Likewise, in certain parts of Latin America, the "ll" sounds more like a "j," so "caballo" sounds more like "cabajo than the standard "cabayo." But despite regional differences, "cerveza" and "caballo" are spelled consistently.

Precisely! And that's because they don't change the spelling of words to match the regional pronunciations.

I don't pronounce words the same as my neighbors. How are we supposed to arrive at a consistent regional spelling?

Robert Gentel wrote:

The problem isn't that someone can say tomato and another tomahto. The problem is that even disconsidering those differences there are internal inconsistencies that preclude the ability to learn the language systemically.

Rubbish. English is the world's most widely used second language. Clearly people are learning it despite its idiosyncratic orthography.

Robert Gentel wrote:

It makes no sense that a case can be made to spell "fish" as "ghoti" (gh pronounced as in laugh, o as in women, and ti as in nation) regardless of what regional differences there are.

Actually, with all due apologies to George Bernard Shaw, no good case can be made to spell "fish" "ghoti." No English word that begins with "gh" pronounces that combination as an "f." Likewise, the only time "ti" is pronounced like "sh" is in combination with "on" or "ous." It's a cute example, but no one would ever make the mistake of reading "ghoti" and pronouncing it as "fish."

In truth, most English words are either phonetic or else follow some pretty easy-to-learn rules. In that respect, it is little different from French, which has an equally challenging orthography. There are a number of exceptions to the rules, but that has not proven to be an insurmountable hurdle to the millions who have learned English as a second language, not to mention the millions who have learned it as a first language. Anyway, it's probably easier to learn irregular spellings than to learn irregular verbs -- of which English has relatively few.