

English accents and their implications for spelling reform - gnosis
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/accents_spellingreform.htm

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idlewords
Chinese has an almost comically severe version of this problem. Not only do a
number of mutually unintelligible languages share the writing system, but
converting everything to pinyin would also make the bulk of Chinese literature
incomprehensible.

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GiraffeNecktie
That's one reason why I disagree with the author of the article when he writes
"Everyone pronounces sight, site and cite identically, so it is absurd (except
for advocates of etymological spelling) that we have to learn to spell them
all differently."

What he overlooks is that having three different spellings helps a reader to
distinguish between the three different meanings. The sentence "Cite the
sighting of the site." is much easier to understand than "Site the siting of
the site."

If you only use pinyin to learn Chinese, you end up (or at least I did)
getting confused by words like 在 zài (located) and 再 zài (again).

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Tangurena
Dewey (the guy we get the numbering system used in many libraries) was looking
to simplify English spelling. From the movement he was part of, we get
spellings like _tho_ for _though_ and _thru_ for _through_.

George Bernard Shaw used to mock English spelling with the word GHOTI. This,
he pronounced _fish_ as it took the _gh_ from _enough_ (or _tough_ ), the _o_
from _women_ , and the _ti_ from _nation_.

As for changing spelling and grammar, that is a very difficult task, as we
tend to get pedantic jerks like Samuel Johnson who were so enamored of Latin,
that they cobbled up rules like "splitting infinitives is forbidden" because
the infinitive form of latin (you may be more familiar with Spanish) verbs is
a single word that cannot be split. And some people still get bent by the
opening sequence of Star Trek ... _to boldly go_... omg! a split infinitive!

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gb
Interesting article. There was an something on the BBC News website a while
back with two sides of a similar argument, only one side was written in a
style that was supposed to be easier to read; it certainly wasn't for me as it
was written with a more southern (southern English that is) accent and I had
to re-read certain words several times to work out what they were supposed to
be.

I know this part was only covered briefly, but English did used to have two
different letters for the "th" sounds - ð (like the) and þ (like thin), I
suppose they were dropped for simplicity of the written alphabet in the end.

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Tangurena
The letter thorn (þ), when hand-written, looks a lot like the letter Y [1]. So
it remains, somewhat, in stuff like "Ye Olde Shoppe." Wikipedia claims that
eth and thorn died out in common use (in English, anyway) between 1300 and
1500.

Notes:

1 - It gets drawn in one motion, down to the center from the upper left, then
looping up to the upper right, back down to the center and down from there. So
it looks like a sloppy Y.

~~~
gb
Wow, that's really interesting, I never realised that's where "Ye" came from.

I suppose a similar thing happened with yogh (ȝ) - instead of being replaced
with something less ambiguous it became z in some cases, but is still
pronounced the original way. I think it only survives in some Scottish names
in that form though.

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ars
Spelling reform is never going to happen, so this is not something to worry
about.

It might evolve and change over time, but a directed reform will not happen.

There is just too much inertia in the form of written material, and people who
learned a certain spelling to ever change it.

And there is no one with enough authority to force it.

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tokenadult
Wells has good credentials as a linguist on this subject. But perhaps if he
wrote from America, the land of English as a koine language, he would be more
optimistic about a mediating spelling that reflects plurality (and perhaps
majority) practice in pronouncing English as a worldwide language. I don't see
any world example that shows that a spelling must be "ideal" in the way he
defines it to be practical for a broad speech community. Spanish, since its
most recent spelling reform, continues to have dialectal variation (as one
would expect given the wide territorial extent of Spanish-speaking countries,
and their history of both conquest of and immigration by non-Spanish-speaking
peoples). But people who speak Spanish seem to cope reasonably well with
current standard spelling, and so also for speakers of German.

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messel
Optimal communication, written, verbal and data transmission is an area that I
don't see enough development in. I assume that much like the qwerty keyboard
we are stuck with the devil we know. The Esperanto fans tried building a new
one, but it has yet to gain wide acceptance.

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tokenadult
_The Esperanto fans tried building a new one, but it has yet to gain wide
acceptance._

There are good reasons why Esperanto never gained wide acceptance.

<http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/>

Esperanto doesn't deliver what it promises, which is an easy-to-learn language
with broad international reach. In fact, Esperanto is about as hard to learn
as any language, and its reach is confined mostly to certain parts of Europe
where people speak other more widely spoken languages as interlanguages
anyway.

