English Orthography Reform

[toogletoggle]

Ok, so I don't want to have to type out the alphabet with IPA and stuff, so I'll just show a link to where I do that:
http://languageisawesome.weebly.com (Go to the "Learn to Speak Fluent Linguist" page.)

(A few notes note: this reform is set only for my dialect of American English. The spellings do not change even if they're pronounced differently. The spellings are set to be formal, like pronouncing "the" and "do" as [ði] and [duː] instead of [ðə]/[də] and [də].)

So, here, instead I'll write some stuff in the reform (you may also suggest other things to write):

1. To be or not to be, that is the question.:

Tō bē or nât tō bē, ðat iz ðē kwesxên.

2. My favorite quote from VSauce:

Az ðē sāēń goz, stiks and stonz mā brāk mī bonz, but wêrdz âr mērlē the smâlêst elêment uv lāńgwêj kāpêbêl uv kêntānēń mēnēń and īsêlāšên, and az sux kûd nevêr prêdōs ðē 4,000 nōtênz uv fors pêr skwer sentêmēťêr rêkwīêrd tō brāk bon.

[cntrational]

There's a thread for alternative English orthographies. Spelling reform threads are kind of a bad idea, since they lead to arguments.

[Xonen]

There's a thread for alternative English orthographies. Spelling reform threads are kind of a bad idea, since they lead to arguments.

...while bluntly shooting down someone's thread like that is your idea of reasonable discussion? If we were going to ban all topics that might lead to arguments, then we could pretty much just shut down the whole board. People disagreeing and discussing their disagreements is fine, as long as it stays civil and on point.

But yes, we do already have a thread for this. Merged now.

[cntrational]

sorry, came off blunter than I meant it

[Salmoneus]

In SSBE, it's usually /b@'kQz/. I have heard the stressed-schwa form before, though.

I thought it's /b1'kVz/, just that the V is replaced by @.

No, it's not, it's /b@'kQz/. For one thing, that /1/ of yours is American. [We may pronounce /I/ that way sometimes, but it's not phonemic]. And to me, overuse of /V/ is also American, although there may be some English people with it in that word.

[Ælfwine]

Personally i am a fan of Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet. Well maybe with some slight altercations, like limiting h, to S and tS instead of everything else.

Otherwise most proposals of orthography reform tend to make me want to gouge our my eyeballs. @_@

[Darvince]

Wut duj yu mijn baj tdat?

[qwed117]

English, French and Danish have extremely irregular spellings that make it nearly impossible to determine the pronunciation of a word from the spelling alone without memorizing several pages of rules. While most other alphabetic languages are largely phonemic because of past spelling reforms, they are not always highly regular. This plays a role in the many manifestations of dyslexia, the most pertinent to this discussion being difficulty internalizing spelling irregularities. Even in mildly and moderately irregular orthographies, however, this type of dyslexia is far less of a problem than in English, French or Danish.


From Benno Stein and Daniel Curatolo (2006)


From Seymour et al (2003)

If you were tasked with reforming spelling of a mildly or moderately deep orthography to further reduce the costs of dyslexia and illiteracy (e.g. Portuguese, Dutch, and shallower), how would you do so? For example, I hypothesized regularizing German spelling by adopting the Esperanto alphabet (identical aside from a half-dozen new or modified consonants) and distinguishing long vowels with the acute accents and double acute accents (for umlauts).

The problem with reducing English's orthography to "complex" is that it ignores multiple things about English, which is, statistically speaking, the easiest language to learn.

[mira]

One could do it the easy way and simply romanise it's phonology and use that as its alphabet, but that would likely increase the size of its alphabet to absurd proportions in some cases. Though I'd be more inclined to romanise it but with a short list of rules based on combinations of letters rather than position. This would keep the alphabet from being 50 letters long, or having 20 diacritics to learn, but would also keep the amount of confusion from irregular spelling to a low.

[qwed117]

The problem with reducing English's orthography to "complex" is that it ignores multiple things about English, which is, statistically speaking, the easiest language to learn.

Easiest language to learn to speak. It is the hardest language to learn to read other than Mandarin and Japanese.

Again, you are ignoring the lack of morphological complexity in English, where it exists, our orthography, allows for ease in communicating. For example, look at "divine" and "divinity". Syntactic complexity appears to be the hardest part of English. That's where most non-native English have trouble.
There are plenty of reasons why our orthography is the best for our language: it allows transdialect communication. A man from India will understand what a man in Australia is saying (provided he is armed with an Australian-English dictionary of course)
All the hate towards our orthography is fueled by elitist and chauvinist sentiment. I've seen people degrade AAVE as "people who weren't taught English". English is not a clear cut language with clear cut rules. There are hardly any of those in the world

[MoonRightRomantic]

All the hate towards our orthography is fueled by elitist and chauvinist sentiment.

Spelling reform is fueled by the numerous spelling irregularities that have nothing to do with facilitating trans-dialect communication. Those irregularities exist because they were deliberately introduced during the Norman Conquest, accidentally added by Dutch typesetters who didn't understand English, or deliberately added due to the limitations of ink pens and printing presses at the time. Removing those irregularities and restoring the original correct spellings would have no impact on trans-dialect communication.

Hindi (260 mil) is the most commonly spoken language after English (335 mil) and its orthography is largely regular aside from trivialities like schwa deletion. Would you argue that Hindi needs to deliberately misspell most of its vocabulary with countless silent, redundant and wrong letters that don't convey any dialectical differences in order to facilitate trans-dialect communication?

[qwed117]

All the hate towards our orthography is fueled by elitist and chauvinist sentiment.

Spelling reform is fueled by the numerous spelling irregularities that have nothing to do with facilitating trans-dialect communication. Those irregularities exist because they were deliberately introduced during the Norman Conquest, accidentally added by Dutch typesetters who didn't understand English, or deliberately added due to the limitations of ink pens and printing presses at the time. Removing those irregularities and restoring the original correct spellings would have no impact on trans-dialect communication.

Hindi (260 mil) is the most commonly spoken language after English (335 mil) and its orthography is largely regular aside from trivialities like schwa deletion. Would you argue that Hindi needs to deliberately misspell most of its vocabulary with countless silent, redundant and wrong letters that don't convey any dialectical differences in order to facilitate trans-dialect communication?

You clearly don't understand that Hindi is an enormous dialect continuum. It extends over several unrelated languages (polyphyletically): Rajasthani, Bihari, Western Hindi, and Eastern Hindi, Romani, and Parya.
Here's one dialect of Hindi: Tohaar naav kaav ahai
Another dialect of Hindi: Aapkaa naam kyaa hai?
Those two sentences are not mutually intellegible. The same written sentence will never be able to completely satisfy both dialects. English's spelling irregularities are easily internalized. Ask the 2 billion speakers that speak it (1.6 billion of whom are not natively English speaking). Again, english spelling and orthography is extremely consistent. There are various dialect based differences. Ones that have nju and dju aren't representing every dialect, one with traep and baeth won't work in England.

[MoonRightRomantic]

All the hate towards our orthography is fueled by elitist and chauvinist sentiment.

Spelling reform is fueled by the numerous spelling irregularities that have nothing to do with facilitating trans-dialect communication. Those irregularities exist because they were deliberately introduced during the Norman Conquest, accidentally added by Dutch typesetters who didn't understand English, or deliberately added due to the limitations of ink pens and printing presses at the time. Removing those irregularities and restoring the original correct spellings would have no impact on trans-dialect communication.

Hindi (260 mil) is the most commonly spoken language after English (335 mil) and its orthography is largely regular aside from trivialities like schwa deletion. Would you argue that Hindi needs to deliberately misspell most of its vocabulary with countless silent, redundant and wrong letters that don't convey any dialectical differences in order to facilitate trans-dialect communication?

You clearly don't understand that Hindi is an enormous dialect continuum. It extends over several unrelated languages (polyphyletically): Rajasthani, Bihari, Western Hindi, and Eastern Hindi, Romani, and Parya.
Here's one dialect of Hindi: Tohaar naav kaav ahai
Another dialect of Hindi: Aapkaa naam kyaa hai?
Those two sentences are not mutually intellegible. The same written sentence will never be able to completely satisfy both dialects. English's spelling irregularities are easily internalized. Ask the 2 billion speakers that speak it (1.6 billion of whom are not natively English speaking). Again, english spelling and orthography is extremely consistent. There are various dialect based differences. Ones that have nju and dju aren't representing every dialect, one with traep and baeth won't work in England.

You don't understand what I mean. The Hindi example you gave has no equivalent in English dialects because all English dialects are mutually intelligible. The chaos of English spelling is not due to dialect differences but due to mistakes and deliberate misspellings that had nothing to do with dialect: http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot ... lling.html .

Undoing those misspellings would result in a dialect neutral English as it is already, but without all the detritus that has nothing to do with dialect. No dialect pronounces "some" to rhyme with "comb" nor "tongue" with "two". No dialect pronounces silent letters like "gh" or the Latin "b". Those are accidental or deliberately misspellings propagated by arbitrary dictionaries centuries ago. I am not advocating reforming English to follow any dialect except for the dead dialect spoken a thousand years ago.

[qwed117]

I hope you realize the many problems of citing that source. You are citing uncited information, some of which is easily disproven from a cursory wiktionary search

But lack of regard for alphabetic consistency bedevilled English spelling almost from the start. As early as the 9th century, when the letter 'v' was still used for both /v/ and /u/ (vnder, heven) some scribes began to substitute 'o' for 'u' when short /u/ occurred next to 'v', 'vv' (double u), 'm' and 'n', as in 'love, vvonder, mother, month' (instead of 'lvv, vvvnder, mvther, mvnth')

Here's the thing, that's partially wrong. Let's look at the old English and Middle English cognates

love < love/lufe < lufu
wonder < wonder/wunder < wundor
mother <moder < mōdor
month < month/moneth < monaþ
other < other < ōþer
brother < brother < brōþor
So, out of 6 examples, he's wrong 4 times.

Some readers may wonder why I have made no mention of the great vowel shift which is often given as another, or even main reason for the irregularity of English spelling by some academics.
1) Most words in the many texts with original spellings from 1350 - 1755 which I studied had more than one spelling, without rhyme or logic. They make it very difficult to be sure how they were pronounced. I therefore fail to understand how the 'vowel shift' theory explains anything.
2) Many reputable scholars no longer give the vowel shift much credence. Even David Crystal in his Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language says "what was so long an uncontroversial issue has become an open question". My main reason for not giving much credence to the vowel shift theory was my discovery of the many undoubted interferences with English spelling which I have described above.

Secondly, you don't realize how sound changes work. Rarely does a sound change affect every single word in its reach. And rarely is language sensible. The verb "read" shifted from a strong class 7 verb to a weak class 1 verb, in Old English. The use of read for both /rɛd/ and /rid/ is likely due to haplo(lo)gy from rǣded and not in rǣde. Would you prefer the morphological barrier to be worse, and us writing rede, and red?

Does that make Ye olde English need respelling? If it is understood, then it is fine. No change can be made without fundamentally making dialectal differences more apparent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set
There's over 85 different sets (I counted 87, but I'm probably off by 3 or 4) 85 different vowels would be hell raising to deal with.

[Creyeditor]

For example, I hypothesized regularizing German spelling by adopting the Esperanto alphabet (identical aside from a half-dozen new or modified consonants) and distinguishing long vowels with the acute accents and double acute accents (for umlauts).

Marking vowel quality on vowels would be nice.
I think there is at least three positive criteria to orthography: contiguity, morphemicity and phoneticity. Contiguity means that older people and younger people can both read texts. Morphemicity that alle morphemes can be written (almost) the same in all contexts. And phoneticity means that you know how to pronounce a word just by looking at it.
Contiguity spekas against your idea.

[MoonRightRomantic]

I hope you realize the many problems of citing that source. You are citing uncited information, some of which is easily disproven from a cursory wiktionary search

And easily proven with a google search. It's called "minim" and it's a real thing (Source: http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~hharley/P ... pter8b.pdf ). I can provide citations for everything in the article with a few minutes on google.

In any case, you have still failed to address my actual argument. There are numerous silent words and vowel substitutions in English that have nothing to do with pronunciation in any dialect and changing those spellings would not negative effect speakers of any dialect. If the word "have" was changed to "hav" it would make no difference to speakers of any dialect and it would make English more consistent with its 30 or so rules that only apply 80% of the time.

[qwed117]

I hope you realize the many problems of citing that source. You are citing uncited information, some of which is easily disproven from a cursory wiktionary search

And easily proven with a google search. It's called "minim" and it's a real thing (Source: http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~hharley/P ... pter8b.pdf ). I can provide citations for everything in the article with a few minutes on google.

In any case, you have still failed to address my actual argument. There are numerous silent words and vowel substitutions in English that have nothing to do with pronunciation in any dialect and changing those spellings would not negative effect speakers of any dialect. If the word "have" was changed to "hav" it would make no difference to speakers of any dialect and it would make English more consistent with its 30 or so rules that only apply 80% of the time.

Well then, prove what I've disproven. Second of all, this is a minim

Thirdly, your own source shows why "have" is spelled "have" and not "hav". In fact, it's rule 3. I have addressed your argument, so please stop. Go learn Finnish, we'll see how long that takes.

[Xonen]

We already have several threads on this subject, so I'm merging these.

The attempt to initiate a discussion on languages other than English is here.

[Xonen]

Anyway:

I hope you realize the many problems of citing that source. You are citing uncited information, some of which is easily disproven from a cursory wiktionary search

But lack of regard for alphabetic consistency bedevilled English spelling almost from the start. As early as the 9th century, when the letter 'v' was still used for both /v/ and /u/ (vnder, heven) some scribes began to substitute 'o' for 'u' when short /u/ occurred next to 'v', 'vv' (double u), 'm' and 'n', as in 'love, vvonder, mother, month' (instead of 'lvv, vvvnder, mvther, mvnth')

Here's the thing, that's partially wrong. Let's look at the old English and Middle English cognates

love < love/lufe < lufu
wonder < wonder/wunder < wundor
mother <moder < mōdor
month < month/moneth < monaþ
other < other < ōþer
brother < brother < brōþor
So, out of 6 examples, he's wrong 4 times.

Not necessarily. I'd have to check, but it seems possible that the sound was already short /u/ in Middle English and was spelled <o> due to the neighboring letters - with the fact that it happens to come from Old English /o:/ here being just a coincidence. And in any case, from the POV of modern orthography it hardly matters what the historical reason for the inconsistency in spelling is, when it's clearly an inconsistency in spelling.

Thirdly, your own source shows why "have" is spelled "have" and not "hav". In fact, it's rule 3.

I believe the point is that such rules are needless and could be removed in a reform.

I have addressed your argument, so please stop.

As far as I can tell, you haven't; you've just addressed fairly trivial side issues and told the other person to shut up (almost as if you weren't actually interested in having this discussion at all... ). There are irregularities in English spelling that correspond to no dialectal differences, and a minor reform targeting such irregularities would not in any way make the spelling less usable for speakers of different dialects.

[Sumelic]

Anyway:

I hope you realize the many problems of citing that source. You are citing uncited information, some of which is easily disproven from a cursory wiktionary search

But lack of regard for alphabetic consistency bedevilled English spelling almost from the start. As early as the 9th century, when the letter 'v' was still used for both /v/ and /u/ (vnder, heven) some scribes began to substitute 'o' for 'u' when short /u/ occurred next to 'v', 'vv' (double u), 'm' and 'n', as in 'love, vvonder, mother, month' (instead of 'lvv, vvvnder, mvther, mvnth')

Here's the thing, that's partially wrong. Let's look at the old English and Middle English cognates

love < love/lufe < lufu
wonder < wonder/wunder < wundor
mother <moder < mōdor
month < month/moneth < monaþ
other < other < ōþer
brother < brother < brōþor
So, out of 6 examples, he's wrong 4 times.

Not necessarily. I'd have to check, but it seems possible that the sound was already short /u/ in Middle English and was spelled <o> due to the neighboring letters - with the fact that it happens to come from Old English /o:/ here being just a coincidence. And in any case, from the POV of modern orthography it hardly matters what the historical reason for the inconsistency in spelling is, when it's clearly an inconsistency in spelling.

The historical development of the vowels in these words is actually relatively complex. But not everything is so complicated. And anyway, history doesn't matter very much; the main thing that matters is the modern phonemic variants that exist. I don't think anyone today pronounces "mother" in a way that would be inconsistent with the spelling "muther."

Furthermore, a lot of current spellings don't reflect the history anyway. I keep a list, since this is the kind of thing I find interesting; some examples are room, gloom, droop, coop, loop, stoop, troop. None of these were ever pronounced with /oː/, as their spelling falsely suggests; they all had /uː/ in Middle English (the following labial consonant inhibited the general diphthongization of /uː/ to /aʊ/). There's no reason we should use oo in these words, but ou in soup and group.

I have addressed your argument, so please stop.

As far as I can tell, you haven't; you've just addressed fairly trivial side issues and told the other person to shut up (almost as if you weren't actually interested in having this discussion at all... ). There are irregularities in English spelling that correspond to no dialectal differences, and a minor reform targeting such irregularities would not in any way make the spelling less usable for speakers of different dialects.

I mostly agree with Xonen. English has never had a comprehensive, organized reform. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit like the "p" in "receipt" that could be regularized without changing any of the overall rules, and without doing any harm to transdialect communication. The Panglossian idea that our current orthographical system is "the best for our language" in all aspects is unsupportable. That doesn't mean that there aren't benefits to some parts of the current system, and it doesn't mean that the non-optimal parts ought to be reformed (reforms always have costs involved).