Let pupils abandon spelling rules, says academic

jtt wrote:
But when these style manuals go beyond the artificial rules they've created for writing, they fall apart, linguistically speaking. That they can have so many different "in house" rules illustrates their artificiality.

I think this shows just why these measures don't work for language as a whole, for real language, the language of speech. And you are right, they are not anymore successful at "herding the cats".

Robert replied"
I didn't say they weren't more successful, I was noting that you thought so. But the meta discussion aside they have had more success than their non-authoritative English counterparts. The example I provide is how they prevented the forking of Spanish spelling.

jtt wrote:
It isn't a matter of a personal linguistic viewpoint. It's only a matter of whether the actual rules that govern how we use language are accurately described. Many traditional/prescriptive rules were horribly inaccurate.

Robert replied:
You are looking at it from an odd viewpoint. If they are successful it is descriptive. For example, the Royal Spanish Academy's success in maintaining a single orthography accurately describes the current state of affairs in the Spanish language but they were not reactively describing the language, they were proactively maintaining it.

Robert wrote:
Your criticisms can be validated through their history as well, in that they are often criticized for not being able to adapt quickly enough to the evolving language (for example I am aware of zoologists protesting their lethargy in introducing zoological terms to the official dictionary) and you can argue that a reactive description of the language is the ideal but you can't legitimately argue that they haven't had more success in shaping their language than has the English linguistic "authorities" because they have. You can argue whether they should have though, and in the case of maintaining a non-pluricentric orthography I think they've done well for themselves and that it is a good example of language regulation.

jtt wrote:
'quaffable' has a distinct meaning for me. "Some beers are eminently quaffable". Is there a new meaning beyond that that you hold?

Robert replied:
I had a lot of words or meanings I wanted to introduce into formal lexicons, for example my inclusion of "quaffage" in a project I was hired to work on got me in trouble.

In any case that was many years ago and I'm no longer trying to wrangle lexicographical inclusion for those, or any, words. But I note with glee that the word "quaffage" now shows up on the internet a bit (not by my doing). I'd better stop here before I start wasting time on lexicographical pranks again.

jtt wrote:
I don't think there is a middle ground when something is wrong; wrong in the sense that it doesn't accurately describe language.

Quote:

Robert replied:
If it works it's accurate. If it doesn't it's not. If I got the word into the OED I would have been right. That I only got it into "Craven de Kere's English Etymology Lexicon" means I was wrong. If I had continued to waste a lot of time on it, I would have become right.

That's false, Robert. Words don't have to get into a dictionary to be words. Many never will, but they stand as words because we use them, understand them and, often, expand them to other parts of speech.

A google for 'quaffable';

Results 1 - 10 of about 106,000 English pages for "quaffable".

includes a Dictionary.com entry

'quaffage' yields,

Results 1 - 10 of about 275 English pages for "quaffage".

with the definition that I envisaged, following the rules of English that I have contained in my internal grammar. Maybe your bosses or colleagues were a bit hasty, or you were in thinking that you had coined a new word.

Quote:

jtt wrote:
There's no need to normalize the evolution of language. All that's needed is for any particular "new language" to be accurately described as to how it fits into the existing language.

Quote:

Robert replied:
And here is where I disagree. I think the evolution of spelling in English is particularly stupid and that it could have evolved very differently if people who actually understood the language were responsible for its spelling.

Instead you had an idiot (linguistically speaking) with a poor command of the language (William Caxton) making up the standard as he went. His claim to fame was that he was the first English printer and while he admitted that his dialect was ‘broad and rude’ and that his own English was being forever corrected he was responsible for the English spelling we have today.

It was criticized then, and legitimately so, because he had no idea what he was doing. Caxton himself reported that educated people complained to him that his printings ‘coude not be vnderstande of comyn peple, and desired me to vse olde and homely termes in my translacyons’.

And this is a perfect case of a linguistic authority being helpful. Caxton just wanted to make money. He had been abroad and came back with a new technology (the printer). He had no competition and decided to serve as linguist, translator and printer in his haste to make his money.

In the process he established most of the spelling we are still stuck with and if someone who actually knew the language had had input it wouldn't have been as bad. He used technicians that did not speak the language and who added letters indiscriminately to achieve line justification in their printing.

It could have gone another way, and had Caxton first tried to make a decent standard, or tried to acquaint himself with the meager linguistic standards of the day English spelling wouldn't be so stupid.

More on this later, but as I mentioned, we have been talking about two separate things, speech versus writing.

Quote:

jtt wrote:
In other words, additions to language aren't bad/wrong because they don't fit the framework that is Formal Written English.

Quote:

Robert replied:
But would you agree that they are wrong if the standard is made by foreigners who don't even speak the language adding letters to words for the purpose of spacing?

I'm harping on this a bit much but that is a huge part of the root of this problem. Adding letters to words that used to be spelled logically was not a natural evolution of language but rather a group of technology entrepreneurs operating without regard to any standards and by virtue of their technological primacy they got modern English spelling off on a particularly retarded foot.

I agree that there are some problems with the spelling system but I don't believe they can be described as "wrong". As I've mentioned, it's an artificial system and spelling could be much different and worse than it is. We could actually spell 'apple' as '#**^@'.

There is an excellent discussion on the English spelling system in "The Language Instinct" by S Pinker. I forget the chapter. It was probably the "Words, Words, Words" chapter. Pinker too, agreed that the spelling system wasn't perfect but he described, accurately to my mind, why it wasn't so bad.

Let me just say this and then I'll leave this aspect to you and Joe to hash over. I think that too much emphasis is placed upon spelling and it makes some otherwise highly intelligent people very defensive.

Doesn't it make much more sense, especially in this day and age of spell checkers for us to develop people's minds, and not get hung up on spelling. There are myriad examples of people who could never read and write who have made remarkable advances, who have made some incredible inventions.

I'm not suggesting that we scrap spelling tests and have a free for all spelling system.

Quote:

jtt wrote
I've read with interest the postings on alphabet versus syllabary language systems and I'm still trying to digest both your and Joe's arguments. Maybe I'll jump in later.

Quote:

Robert replied:
Not to be a pendant (or maybe precisely to be because that's all that one can be in this kind of discussion) but syllabary systems haven't been discussed at all as far as I am aware.

My understanding is that a syllabary is a system wherein each symbol/letter stands for one sound and one sound only as opposed to an alphabet where, well you know this already because you are a native English speaker. I thought that was what Spanish had.

There's really no reason to respond point-by-point to your arguments, since so many of them are tangential or don't make much sense. But since you insist...

Ah yes, Robert's rules of logic. Your mighty ipse dixit has shown my claim to be false.

Well, color me unimpressed. But since you seem to think this is an important point (it isn't), I'll indulge you and amend my previous statement: "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 also has a challenging orthography."

Happy?

Quote:

Why do you think linguists consider Spanish to be a good example of an orthography that strays less from the true alphabet ideal than does English?

Probably because it does. But then I never said it didn't. As I pointed out: "Although Spanish spelling is more regular than English, it still has its exceptions." My point wasn't that Spanish spelling wasn't more regular than English, but that Spanish orthography still departs from spoken Spanish, so it is not truly a phonetic alphabet.

In that respect, your statement: "The alphabet itself is simple phonetics and once you learn all the sounds mapped to their letters you can write any word you hear." is simply false, since regional differences in pronunciation mean that Spanish is not uniformly phonetic across accent boundaries.*

Cripes, this is getting almost surreal. Of course an alphabet doesn't represent words -- I never said that it did. My point is that it is absurd to advocate alphabet reform but be totally noncommittal to spelling reform. The purpose of an alphabet isn't just to represent sounds -- it's also supposed to be used to form words.

But then you know that -- you've stated, for instance:

See, even you think this is a spelling problem, not an alphabet problem. And with good reason: it is a spelling problem. Nobody is out there (except maybe you, inconsistently) saying that the difficulty with English is that we don't have a simple way of representing the "f" sound, as if that, by itself, were a significant handicap. The only reason why it's a problem is because the spelling of the "f" sound is inconsistent. Alphabet reform is merely a way of addressing the spelling problem: it's not an end in itself.

I brought up the differences in pronunciation because that's an important consideration for someone advocating a phonetic alphabet. Like you.

They're separate? You can't be serious. You want to construct a phonetic alphabet without consideration for the way people actually speak?

Wow!

I have absolutely no idea how you arrived at that conclusion. Far from claiming it's impossible, I'm the one who wrote: "I think it should be pretty clear that any attention-seeking dunce can come up with his own phonetic spelling system." So I'm on record as not only saying that phonetic spelling systems are possible, but that anyone can come up with one. But since you are so sure that I've misquoted you and misrepresented your position, perhaps you'd like to point out precisely where I said that an orthography of the type that exists and is used by millions is impossible.

Robert Gentel wrote:

Quote:

Now, of course, if your interest is merely in duplicating something like the IPA or in studying comparative linguistics, then that's different. But since this entire thread has been about English spelling, I'm sure that's not the case here.

You still can't seem to pay me the courtesy of actually reading what I write before randomly speculating about what it is I am trying to say. In the very post you are replying to I was very clear about this:

"I would not seek to establish a phonetic notation for all languages (like the International Phonetic Alphabet purports to do)"

I'm merely covering all the bases.

Robert Gentel wrote:

Quote:

In the end, however, there is an easy solution to this problem. Since there is no recognized authority regulating either speech or spelling, language is technically in a state of anarchy.

The English language. Other languages do have recognized authorities that maintain their languages.

More or less. But then we're not talking about Spanish alphabetic reform, are we?

Robert Gentel wrote:

This analogy is stupid. You first raise the point that there is no central authority for the English language when that is my main bone to pick with the English language to then argue that no standard can be had. This ignores that other languages do have central authority and that this is something I advocate for English.

That is your gripe? That English doesn't have something like the Acadamie Française? Why didn't you say so three pages ago?

Frankly, that's a side issue. Establishing an "Acadamie Anglaise" is, I'm convinced, another serious flaw in your position, but it's not something that needs to be covered in a discussion about spelling or alphabet reform. So, unless you absolutely insist, I see no need to go into detail on this point.

Not a cop out at all. My point, all along, is that the type of reform that you advocate is not worth the costs involved, and that what you propose is, in itself, problematic.

As I stated before: "What you're suggesting, then, is merely to substitute one problem (inconsistent phonetic spelling) for another (non-phonetic spelling)."

My analogy with the marketplace shows that there is already a mechanism in place to address your proposals. The fact, however, that such proposals have rarely been successful is, I think, a pretty good indication that the benefits of the "solution" are not worth the costs.

Now, I know you think yours is the only argument being ignored, but if you'd try to address my argument squarely you might spend a little less time with these rambling tangents (although I sincerely doubt it).

So thanks, but there's no need to point out to me that English already uses a phonemic orthography. Like I said:

joefromchicago wrote:

In truth, most English words are either phonetic or else follow some pretty easy-to-learn rules.

Robert, I'll allow that the Spanish, French, Japanese and some other language authorities have had success wrt determining writing norms. My point was/is that because these are artificial aspects of language, there is no conflict with any natural rules of language, so it's understandable that people will try to follow these writing guidelines.

As regards what is real language, speech, I doubt that they have been any more successful than the Prescriptivists of English in establishing rules because rules that are foreign to the natural rules of language can't and won't be followed.

Being successful doesn't change the fact that they are prescribing a set of norms for the language. Prescription works for the norms of writing because some sort of artificial guidelines must be established for what is a completely artificial system.

All the rules in all languages that govern the mechanics of writing, as opposed to the structure of language, are artificial, hence prescriptive. The rules that describe the structure of language cannot be prescribed for as soon as someone accurately describes how language works they are being descriptive.

But again, we are discussing at cross purposes here because we can't compare writing to speech.

However, description and prescription can appear to be in conflict when stronger statements are made on either side. When an extreme prescriptivist wishes to condemn a very commonly used language phenomenon as solecism or barbarism or simply as vulgar, the evidence of description may testify to the acceptability of the form. This would be the case if someone wished to argue that ain't should not even be used in colloquial spoken English. Prescriptive statements will sometimes be heard which suggest that a word is inherently ugly; a descriptive approach will deny the meaningfulness of this judgment. In such instances of controversy, most linguists fall heavily on the descriptive side of the argument, accepting forms as correct or acceptable when they achieve general currency.

On the other hand, some adherents of a strongly descriptive approach may argue that prescription is always undesirable. Sometimes they see it as reactionary or stifling. A "pure descriptivist" would believe that no language form can ever be incorrect and that advice on language usage is always misplaced. However, this is a very rare position. Most of those who claim to oppose prescription per se are in fact only inimical to those forms of prescription not supported by current descriptive analysis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription#Prescription_and_description_in_conflict

I can understand that it got you in trouble for it is not the job of lexicographers to invent vocabulary, [and what follows may sound contradictory] though lexicographers have every right as users of the language to do so and have done so.

It sounds like you just took the wrong tact. Valley Girls, surfer dudes and many others have had remarkable success in introducing new words to English. New words are coined daily.

Had you introduced 'quaffage' and 'quaffable' in the bar with your colleagues, I'm sure there would have been much less resistance.

And what did you do but follow the real rules of language; adding 'able' to a verb form to make an adjective, and adding 'age' to a verb form to make a noun. These are common features of English.

That's false, Robert. Words don't have to get into a dictionary to be words. Many never will, but they stand as words because we use them, understand them and, often, expand them to other parts of speech.

with the definition that I envisaged, following the rules of English that I have contained in my internal grammar. Maybe your bosses or colleagues were a bit hasty, or you were in thinking that you had coined a new word.

I agree that there are some problems with the spelling system but I don't believe they can be described as "wrong". As I've mentioned, it's an artificial system and spelling could be much different and worse than it is. We could actually spell 'apple' as '#**^@'.

Doesn't it make much more sense, especially in this day and age of spell checkers for us to develop people's minds, and not get hung up on spelling. There are myriad examples of people who could never read and write who have made remarkable advances, who have made some incredible inventions.

My understanding is that a syllabary is a system wherein each symbol/letter stands for one sound and one sound only as opposed to an alphabet where, well you know this already because you are a native English speaker. I thought that was what Spanish had.

If you found them tangential you shouldn't have brought them up. I was largely responding to the meandering course you took.

I offered no less proof when correcting you than you did when making the error in the first place. So if mine was an ipse dixit then it shares that quality with your claim but differentiates itself by not being wrong, like yours was.

If you don't think it's important then you shouldn't have brought it up. You equated French orthography to English orthography when even French has a fundamentally superior orthography to English that English could take a cue or two from.

In French orthography there are multiple ways to write a sound, so if you hear a word you may not be able to spell it. But unlike English if you see the word you have a very good chance of being able to say it because French doesn't share English's tendency to have multiple sounds for the same letter combinations. Furthermore, French uses diatrics and because of this the alphabet itself can represent more sounds than can English's. One of the fundamental challenges in an alphabetic orthography is that there are more sounds in use than letters to represent them. The French diatric marks are a fundamental difference in the orthographies giving French more graphemes than English to work with.

You had claimed that there was "little difference" and that French orthography was equally challenging. So yes, I am happy you learned that the orthography is not equal in this regard and if you need to portray it as inordinate pedantry on my part to correct you and claim it's no longer important to the discussion (even though you brought it up) I am happy that you eventually got it right.

Well that's a very pointless point because I am not advocating a perfectly phonetic alphabet and if you hadn't jumped to that conclusion or had listened to me telling you repeatedly that you are off on that tangent you would have saved yourself a lot of time. There are no major languages that are purely phonetic and a rudimentary understanding of linguistics is all that is needed to understand why the proponents of English spelling reform throughout history have largely never advocated such a thing.

I agree that calling the Spanish alphabet "simple phonetics" can reasonably be interpreted as false, it's phonetic to a simple degree but is not a perfect phonetic orthography and my statement can be read to imply as much. That being said, if you know the sound mappings you can still write any word you hear. Even if you hear it in another dialect it's very recognizable. In English you can't write some words you've never seen even if you hear it in your own dialect.

I think it got surreal because of your insistence on treating my proposal as a perfect phonetic orthography. I stated repeatedly that I didn't care if there were regional variations of spelling and that your objections were not relevant to what I propose and this is all true. Your objections were predicated on insisting that I was advocating a perfect phonetic orthography and that is just not the case. I was clear that I understand the predictable relationship between an alphabet and words but that I am simply not trying to establish a uniform way to spell across all regional dialects and that I would be happy with mere consistency with phoneme and the letters representing it.

So I'm glad this is out of the way. We both get that the alphabet shares a predicable relationship with words, and hopefully you get that English spelling reform (as I and just about any other reformist advocate) is simply not about a perfect phonetic orthography.

This is a stupid logomachy.

My qualms with the spelling problem largely center around the alphabet's inadequacies. There are other spelling "problems" that I am not referring to and this is why I make the distinction. For example, I don't mind that there are some differences in regional spelling as much as I mind that the alphabet's relationship to the words doesn't make sense in any of the dialects.

That is why I am focusing on the more fundamentally flawed letters to phoneme relationship and not its consequential phoneme to words relationship in this discussion.

So we are back to square one then? Why does Spanish thrive, given that Spanish is a very good example of what I advocate and has regional differences in pronunciation. And if you get pissy about me rubbing your nose back in Spanish then do note it's because you persist in claiming that the regional variances are an impediment to what I propose and Spanish provides a working example of what you claim is so difficult to achieve.

Separate doesn't mean no consideration Joe. Linguists have long separated language into different parts. The phoneme is the smallest part of speech and the letter the smallest part of writing. The qualm I have with English orthography lies in the relationship of letters to phonemes. The relationship of the letters to words is just a consequence of that first relationship that I separate because it's just a separate moving part of the language.

What is most amazing to me is that you claim I'm being inordinately tangential while you are spending so much time stuck on how to describe what I propose instead of addressing what it actually is.

OK, let's take a walk down memory lane yet another time and I'll just hope you don't get stuck all over again.

You claimed that regional dialects render my proposal invalid and that it means I advocate "no standard". I told you that you are ignoring that many people already operate under a system like I propose without such difficulty and that they have many regional dialects. You asked what examples I had and I gave you the example of Spanish. Your retort to this was that I must be joking and you went on describing how my proposal's viability is fundamentally impeded by regional dialects.

I'm not sure if you ever used the word "impossible" but you were quite dogmatic that I was advocating "no standard" based on your claim that the regional dialects of English preclude my proposal from being a standard. So your incredulously retort that I was joking and persistence in arguing against the viability of my proposal is how I reached that conclusion.

Spanish is a good example of the degree of approximation to a true alphabet that I would like to see. It has regional dialects and has a standard. The bottom line is that what I propose is demonstrably viable.

Yet you claim I am the one being tangential while explaining away your straw men as "covering bases".

No, but once again Spanish has such authorities so it is a good example of why it is viable. The lack of the authority in English doesn't preclude such a beast.

If you don't think the lack of an authority is something that needs to be covered in a discussion about spelling reform then you shouldn't have used it as an argument for why the reform is not viable Joe. You are making a habit now of claiming that when people respond to things you bring up they are being tangential.

This is revisionism on your part. You spent most of the first half of this discussion claiming that I was proposing no standard at all. Now you are claiming that your point was that there's a switching cost all along. I acknowledged the switching cost and improbability of the reform and was arguing it's linguistic merits. You fumbled along trying to argue it on linguistic terms and now want to portray the whole thing as merely an impracticality.

Well that's a good example of how you are just fumbling along the linguistic part of this discussion, because that does not describe the reform at all. It would be a change from being the most inconsistent phonemic alphabet of all major languages to being a more consistent phonemic alphabet and along the way it doesn't have to introduce additional phonetic inconsistency.

What you fail to understand is that the existing regional inconsistency is already a phonetic inconsistency that the normalization of the orthography at the letter-phoneme level would not introduce or even need to exacerbate. If they are already saying it differently there is already phonetic inconsistency and normalizing the inconsistency that all regional dialects share in their orthography does nothing to increase this.

Like I said from the very beginning this is a false dilemma.

By that simplistic argument then Spanish is a good example of the market deeming that the benefits are worth the cost. But neither are true, and the market just tends to use whatever system they have no matter how convoluted it is. English orthography has not been shaped by the market accepting one viewpoint over the other in a cost/benefit analysis but is shaped in large part by some guy being the first to do it a certain way and setting a precedent.

I'll stop arguing on rambling tangents as soon as you stop introducing them to the debate as your arguments. When you are done pretending that I don't advocate any standard and that regional dialects are compatible with my proposal I won't have to spend as much time arguing against that nonsense.

There will be no need to point out what kind of writing system English uses when you cease to portray the proposals inaccurately. Furthermore your statement is not acceptable to me on its face. 84 of the 90 basic English spelling patterns have exceptions and the exceptions are substantial. If the rules are so easy, why don't you explain them?

Now on to the cost/benefit claim.

You believe the costs outweigh the benefits. I think that all depends on what your assessment of the value of the benefits and the detriment of the cost is, and I think a reasonable case can be made that it's more trouble than it's worth. But I don't think you've even attempted to make that case with real arguments against what I advocate (as opposed to tangents against the straw man of the perfectly phonetic orthography you prefer to argue against) so I'll outline some benefits and leave the costs to you to argue.

- Increased literacy - Tests using more phonetic alphabets to teach children have shown a greater rate of literacy and larger vocabularies. Them most comprehensive study I know of to compare literacy levels across languages that are inherent to the language itself was done by Philip Seymour, Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Dundee University when he compared 15 European languages and found that the levels of literacy that it took more than twice as much time for children to achieve the same literacy in English that their peers acheived in other languages typically What took about a year for their peers took 2 to 3 years for their peers studying English. I was unable to find the study itself published online but have found references like this one from the BBC or this one from the economist.

- Lesser rates of identifiable dyslexia. Why is dyslexia more prevalent in some countries (England and France) than others? Paulesu, et al. (2001) Science 291: 2165-2167 [1]. Studies show the same patterns in brain activity and suggest that the difference is that illogical languages bring out the symptoms.

- Faster reading - Nearly all spelling reform campaigns would reduce the amount of letters per word [ref] so this would mean that everyone reading English would be able to read more of it in the same time.

- Lower printing costs and less paper used - Given the above, the costs for printing would be lowered and less resources would be needed to produce the same literature.

The central benefit I see is that it frees up more of the mind and more time toward more useful endeavors than learning the absurdities of the English orthography. I've tossed in the lower printing costs in case you want to make a big deal about printing costs with language reform.

I think it would be fair to note that there are examples of modern spelling reform I will cite if you come back with nonsensical costs. I advocate small incremental changes toward the ideal to minimize the switching cost to any one generation. There are modern (within your lifetime) examples of national spelling reform that have done this and I think that's important to note before you get too carried away with the cost estimates.

Robert Gentel wrote:

If you found them tangential you shouldn't have brought them up. I was largely responding to the meandering course you took.

And I to you.

Ipse dixit redux.

"Diatric marks?" Is that another Cravenism that you're trying to shoehorn into the English language? Good luck with that.

And exactly how much do those diacritical marks extend French orthography to cover more sounds than are already covered by the standard alphabet?

Far from "telling me repeatedly" that you are not advocating a perfectly phonetic alphabet, that is actually a rather recent amendment to your position. But, as I have mentioned before, I can appreciate that the format of these discussions does not always lend itself to an orderly presentation of one's argument, and I'm willing to cut you some slack.

You started out by saying that you wanted "a phonetic replacement standard." Later, you said that "The phonetic standard I advocate is a mapping of the sounds used in English to specific letters or combinations." It was only in response to one of my questions that you brought up the example of Spanish as a language where the "alphabet itself is simple phonetics." But even then you didn't identify Spanish as something that was not "purely phonetic."

It was only in this post that you hinted at the possibility that you were deviating from "a phonetic replacement standard" when you said "I am proposing a phonemic alphabet and not a strict phonetic transcription alphabet."

From then on, you have successively refined your position, and now it appears you are advocating a rather more limited change than the one you advocated in your initial post.

That's fine. In fact, I probably wouldn't have taken issue with you if you had laid out that position in your first post as you have in your last one. Like I said, I don't have too big of a problem with expanding upon one's position over the course of successive posts. You must, however, understand that my responses necessarily evolved in conjunction with yours.

Sure you can. Most neologisms are pretty easy to spell. And even if they aren't, it's usually pretty easy to come up with a close approximation. For instance, if you had said that you were interested in French "diatrics," I'm sure I could have come up with the same spelling that you did, even though I had never heard the word before (and hope never to hear it again).

As I've mentioned before, I don't see how you can be interested in alphabet reform but remain agnostic about spelling reform.

Furthermore, I don't see why you'd even bother with alphabet reform if you weren't interested in spelling reform. But then your own statements show that you are interested primarily in spelling reform, so your protestations to the contrary remain unconvincing.

That's fine. If you want to spell "through" as "thru," then go for it. I wish you the best of luck.

Robert Gentel wrote:

This is a stupid logomachy.

I'm glad you're finally seeing it my way.

Robert Gentel wrote:

That is why I am focusing on the more fundamentally flawed letters to phoneme relationship and not its consequential phoneme to words relationship in this discussion.

Two sides of the same coin.

Pissy? I must have missed that.

I don't claim that adopting a consistent Spanish spelling is difficult to achieve -- for Spanish speakers. But then we're not talking about them, are we?

Nor do I argue that it would be difficult to come up with an English orthography that is perfectly, or even imperfectly, phonetic. I've gone over that a couple of times -- no need to repeat it here. The problem isn't the technical one that you're talking about, it's all the practical ones that you have brushed off as largely inconsequential.

Making sure I know what you're talking about is tangential to what you're talking about? I beg to differ.

Since it appears that you no longer advocate a "phonetic standard," I'll waive my previous objection.

Robert Gentel wrote:

Yet you claim I am the one being tangential while explaining away your straw men as "covering bases".

Give it a rest.

You can do me the courtesy of reading what I have written. I never said that the lack of an authority was an argument for why the reform is not viable." Indeed, in my market analogy, I think I made it perfectly clear that the lack of an authority is the existing mechanism for spelling reform of English. Far from making it non-viable, the lack of a central authority makes spelling reform even more viable than in countries with ultraconservative language academies.

As I pointed out, if there has been any change in my responses, it is because they reflect the changes in your positions.

I don't fail to understand that regional inconsistency is already phonetic inconsistency. I think I made that pretty clear. And if all you're advocating now is adopting an orthography that covers those areas where there is no regional inconsistency (e.g. in the pronunciation of the "f" sound), then that's fine with me. The problem comes in where there is regional inconsistency (e.g. in the pronunciation of vowel sounds).

But there are costs and benefits in overturning precedent.

I won't explain them for the same reason that you won't explain all the ways in which French orthography is more consistent than English. This is a discussion forum, not a court of law.

Well, if you're suggesting that there is some sort of causative link between the difficulty of a language's orthography and illiteracy, you'll need to do better than that.

Illiteracy is a difficult problem, and one that has many sources. I should imagine that poverty correlates much more strongly with illiteracy than orthography. Furthermore, according to the CIA, the literacy levels in the US and the UK are 99 percent. In contrast, in Turkey, which has a language where "the spelling is largely phonetic, with one letter corresponding to each phoneme," the literacy rate is 87.4%. Now, that number is greatly influenced by the fact that women have a much lower literacy rate than men, which is probably due to systemic sex discrimination, but then that just reinforces the argument that illiteracy is multi-determined.

In short, if English orthography is leading to widespread illiteracy, it's not showing up in the numbers.

That may very well be so, but then dyslexia is likely also multi-determined. Show me a study that provides a causative link between orthography and dyslexia and I might be more sympathetic to this sort of argument.

Honestly, I see little advantage in being a faster reader, but I suppose you're right: I can read "thru" much more quickly than "through."

This is just silly. If you read a typical English passage next to its French or German translation, for instance, the English passage is almost always shorter -- even with all of the aberrant spellings. I suppose simplifying the spelling would make books shorter, but they're already pretty short, all things considered.

Go for it! There's nobody to stop you.

I think one of the things that is ignored by traditionalists is new technology>>>>>>>as a pause that was just as valid.
Fighting to maintain the indefensible is stupid: I mean would like queue, thorough, biscuit etc are indefensible. Lets review and change them: tradition means nothing. There's no logic to it.

4) Future loan words and neologisms. I would want the loan words to stop being used as is and to be anglicized. English has a habit of just picking up the word as it is in the borrowed language and expecting English users to simply pick up that bit of the other language even if its orthography does not share much with English.

Note: the best argument (in my opinion) against this kind of proposal is the etymology and meaning argument against English spelling reform. For example, if the word "karaoke" were more phonetic it would not be very similar to the word in Romaji.

I have found liberals to be super ultra-conservative spellers.
Logic means nothing to them.

Super ultra-conservative: surely the case being that super and ultra both being superlative prefixes means that one is redundant.

I spell correctly because it how I was taught: however I dont knock those who dont share my predjudices

It is a magnifier and an intensifier.

Apologies. Can I point out that Spanish is a phonetic language.
It helps people spell and read.

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It is a magnifier and an intensifier.

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You're right about this one particular aspect of language,
David but you're off the mark on the spelling issue.

This is one area of language where prescription rules.

Yes; until it has been defeated by enuf rejection,
in favor of logic. We need a paradigm (paradime) shift.
MY ANALOGY:
we r driving along in a car.
I point out that one of the tires is flat.
I am then berated from many directions for my apostasy
as it is pointed out that we have been driving on 3 good tires
for a long while n I shoud not make trouble; its a tradition.

I argue that its inefficient; thay argue: "SHADDUP, damn you.
THIS is how we do it, because this is how we 've done it for a long time."

I argue that we can save gasoline, if we stop dragging the axle
along the ground and fix it, whereupon thay call me an "IDIOT".

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Consider all the idiotic "rules" [prescriptions] of language that
hung on for so long, still do among some, even though they
were/are completely unnatural to language.

Writing is an artificial aspect of language and as such, it is much
more prescriptive in nature. It is unrealistic to expect that a
phonetic system will be adopted by such highly conservative individuals.

Man will tire of the unnecessary burden,
but we must point out the better way to do it.
Already, youth text messaging have abandoned atavistic throwbacks
in spelling. I predict that the youth will grow older and will proliferate.

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You don't really think that the spelling you use represents
a logical response to spelling, do you?

It demonstrates failures of logic in paradigmatic spelling.
I point out that it is an offense against sound reasoning
to put an L into woud, coud or shoud and that there is NO
logical reason to put the letters UGH after the word tho.

There is no logical reason to write the word enuf "enough".

Will we be loyal to competent reasoning or to irrational tradition?

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And you really can't think for a moment that it would fly in a legal brief.

A wise man PICKS his battles
and organizes them optimally, as to time n place.





David

No one is telling you to shut up, David.
But do try to expend a little thought on the matter.

No, not just a knee jerk response.