You could delete these rules, I'm fine with that, the effects would be largely unnecessary. There is a length of morphological complexity that prevents english boundaries from being drawn on the lines of say the long-short vowel correspondence or the complex vowel reduction rules.Xonen wrote:Anyway:I believe the point is that such rules are needless and could be removed in a reform.qwed117 wrote:Thirdly, your own source shows why "have" is spelled "have" and not "hav". In fact, it's rule 3.
There are small changes that I'd "accept". But part of most orthographical treatises are the long-short-reduced vowel problem, which extends much further than straight phonology - diving deep into morphology and derivational patterns. I, personally, prefer puristic derivational morphology, so divine and divinity would have to keep the same intermediate vowels, and receipt and receive should optimally have the same middle consonant. Those weird -sion, -tion should be kept. Because they enable quick translational benefits between languages such as French and Spanish (hooray for lazy cognate translation!). Names also get butchered. "Nathan" and "Nathaniel" are no longer perfect matches. (And I would prefer spelling repronounciation. "receipt", "receive" and "reception" are a lovely derivational pattern. Now if we only pronounced it that way...Sumelic wrote:Etymology? (I mean, "troop" and "troupe" should be "troup"). That's part of the reason we have "-ize". "eye" should be spelled differently. But what?Xonen wrote:Anyway:
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 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).Xonen wrote: 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.
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)The original complaint was the comparison of English as to other languages. To put it this way, Finnish's page on Phonology is roughly half the length of English. Finnish's page on grammar well more than makes up for that. And I'm sure, shortening the phonology page of English will make our grammar page much longer.
(That being said, there are plenty of caveats, like subpages)
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