
The Pioneer Ov Simplified Speling (1912) - tintinnabula
http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/the-pioneer-ov-simplified-speling-vol-1-no-1-1912/
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baldfat
I run a STEM Lab for 240 3-5 year old child who are 100% below the poverty
line. We use a computer program for teaching literacy. (Our Literacy Program
is horrible but all the other programs out there are just as bad or worse)

I continually am frustrated at the lies we tell about phonetics and the sounds
of letters. Sound out the letters. C and K are the same. X has a word end
sound of KS. Z and C have a S sound that they both use. There has to be a
logical way to teach sounds to pre-readers that doesn't fumble all over the
place.

P.S. If anyone is creating a new Literacy Program for Pre-Schoolers and
Kindergarten students I would love to be a part of it. Have worked one on one
with hundreds every week.

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news_to_me
An interesting perspective by Mark Twain (1899):
[https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/twain/mark/what_is_man/chap...](https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/twain/mark/what_is_man/chapter11.html)

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DonaldFisk
I don't think a big bang approach will work, but gradual small changes which
don't conflict with local Standard English pronunciations will, and is already
happening.

I pronounce "herd", "bird" and "word" with different vowels, which can be
reliably predicted from the spelling. I pronounce "good" and "food" with the
same vowel. Most spelling reformers merge the first three and distinguish the
second two, because _their_ accent does that. A better approach would be to
distinguish them all.

A few words with silent letters could be simplified, e.g. "knight" and "night"
could both be spelt "nite" and disambiguated in context, as all accents agree
they're homophones.

Webster did get a few limited spelling reforms adopted in the USA, however.
Other Americanisms are gradually being adopted. Hardly anyone in the USA
writes "theatre" nowadays (as in "Firesign Theatre"), and in the UK we no
longer write "computer programme". I still hold out with "connexion" (from
Latin "connexio") but it's becoming a lost cause. There's been a regression
with "-ize" (the spelling favoured by Fowler and the OED), now increasingly
spelt "-ise" in the UK, largely I suspect due to Microsoft's spelling checker.

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jcranmer
Why did English spelling reform never take off?

First off, English has a rather complex phonemic reservoir for the Latin
alphabet. We have about 20 vowels and 25 consonant phonemes (exact numbers
depend on dialect and how you count them), yet our script allows only 26 one-
character targets. 28 if you want to bring back þ and ð. Adding diacritics or
new characters runs into the major problem of support, as anyone who's had to
take a foreign language like France or Spanish while using en-US keyboards are
all too aware. Indeed, þ was dropped from the language in part because of the
lack of support in printing type.

A second problem is that phonetic spelling is somewhat vague as to what the
goal is. Should you try to give only one spelling to each phoneme, so that you
can perfectly spell given pronunciation? Or should you be able to predict the
pronunciation given the phoneme? It's also worth pointing out that
pluralization and verb inflection rely heavily on simple morphological rules
(add -(e)s/-(e)d to the end of the word) which would be complicated by
insisting on phonetic purity (note the 'z' sound in words like dogs or says).
Demanding only one spelling of phonemes seems a bit harsh, especially if
you're going to admit digraphs. I like being able to distinguish words like
meet and meat.

Another problem is that there are some phonemes without clear representation.
The 'th' digraph (retained in all spelling reforms I've been aware of)
actually represents two distinct phonemes (say "Thy thigh" to hear the
difference clearly). Of course, there is a very natural pair of letters to
represent it, courtesy of Icelandic (þ and ð), but see above (also, people are
liable to assume ð is approximately a "d" sound, which isn't right). The "sh"
is natural to many people, but its voiced counterpart (ʒ in IPA) has no
natural counterpart. The soft g or a j is a dʒ sound; "zh" crops up in some
Romanizations of Chinese, but it's not attested in English; and the places
where it does come up (e.g., vision) don't lend themselves to a natural
borrowing.

Which brings us to the biggest problem of spelling reforms: they target the
wrong thing. When showing off these reforms, there's often big hoopla about
things like "-tion is pronounced /shun/ and that makes no sense!" whereas the
s/tion/ʃun/ pronunciation rule is one of the most productive and least
exceptional in the English language (cation is the only word that comes to
mind as an exception, and even then it's not really an exception because the
word is derived from cat·ion, so the -tion isn't really a group). The real
travesty of English spelling is that we borrow words from foreign languages
and reuse the same spelling _and_ pronunciation. Words like gyros ("yee-rohs")
or quinoa ("keen-wah") are absolute travesties and really should be changed in
either spelling or pronunciation. But insisting that we must change "advise"
to "advaiz" and "advice" to "advais" seems overly pedantic when they're
perfectly predictable with standard phonetic English rules.

That's one final thing to bring up: English is already quite phonetic.
[http://www.zompist.com/spell.html](http://www.zompist.com/spell.html) gives a
list of ~60 substitution rules to convert English spelling to pronunciation
that covers ~80-90% of words. The main real travesties (in non-imported words)
are a few vowel digraphs like -ea-, which has several pronunciations with no
real rule to pick which one applies.

~~~
gizmo686
Nitpick, the pluralization phoneme in English is /z/, not /s/. To see this,
note that we can have an [s] sound following a voiced sound at the end of a
word, (eg. floss vs flaws), but never have a [z] sound following an unvoiced
sound at the end of a word.

More relevantly, the difference between phonemic and phonetic representations
can normally be derived from the phonetic context. For example, in the -s
example mentioned above, English has a general rule that a /z/ sound following
an unvoiced sound at the end of a word becomes [s]. Further, these rules come
naturally to (native) speakers, so it is likely that we would not need to
teach them much when we teach reading.

>meet and meat.

While this is a nice property, it seems like we only have it for some
homophones by chance, not anything productive. Further, there is no productive
way of knowing which writing is which meaning.

> The 'th' digraph (retained in all spelling reforms I've been aware of)
> actually represents two distinct phonemes.

This is a valid critism of existing attempts, but is probably a reflection of
their pragmatic nature. If the ambiguity doesn't end up being a problem, then
it is not worth introducing a new digraph to fix it. Most of the fixes in
spelling reforms have been focused on removing oddities from the spelling
system, instead of adding them to better accommodate the spoken system.
Incidently, if we were to fix this, I would recomand adding the "dh" digraph
for ð (as d is the voiced counterpart of t).

> dʒ sound is not attested in English

Judge

>the places where it does come up (e.g., vision)

How do you pronounce "vision". I only recal hearing it with the "ʒ" fricative,
the "dʒ" affricative sounds weird.

The bigger problem with spelling reform is is simple momentum. Adults already
know the current spelling at a fairly deep level, so retraining them would be
a massive effort for a payoff that they themselves would likely never see.

Additionally, spelling reform would not be a one-time thing. As the language
continues to drift, we will likely need a new set of reforms every few
generations.

