

Spelling Reform and the Reason It's Impossible (1998) - reitanqild
http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ortho.html

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danieltillett
It is not impossible! The only thing that seems to be impossible is to get
people here to actually consider a technical solution to spelling reform [1].
I have posted this and it has sunk without a trace [2]. To not try is a
defeatist attitude - what is the point of technology if we don’t use it to
solve problems that people think are impossible.

[1] [http://www.cutspel.com](http://www.cutspel.com)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8158579](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8158579)

Edit. Sorry for the tone, but I am feeling rather annoyed that a post saying
that something is impossible gets more attention than a post that demonstrates
the impossible is possible.

~~~
lisper
Cutspel has a lot of problems.

> "...but the “ll” in holly is kept"

I count the same number of "L" sounds on "holly" as there are in "holy",
namely, one.

> Cut unstressed vowels before l,m,n,r

So is it "betr" or "bettr"? And does that mean "better" or "bettor"?

Why is "ho" "who" and not "hoe"?

Why is "preferences" "prefrnces" instead of "prefrncs"?

Does "knight" become "night" or "nit"?

Your example text doesn't follow the rules. It spells "onwards" as "onwards"
when by the above rule it should be "onwrds".

Those are just a few examples I found on a cursory inspection.

~~~
danieltillett
In regards holy and holly in my accent they both have two l sounds - hol-lee
and hole-lee.

CutSpel just implements a subset of cut spelling (this is for performance
reasons and to avoid cutting proper nouns). This is one of the features of cut
spelling is that it is not an all or nothing reform - it can be mixed with
tradition spelling without issue.

~~~
lisper
> in my accent they both have two l sounds - hol-lee and hole-lee

If your spelling scheme spells words differently depending on the writer's
accent that is a problem in and of itself.

But what accent is it that has a double L sound? I can't even conceive of what
that would sound like. If you say two L sounds temporally adjacent to each
other without an intervening pause they would be indistinguishable from one L,
i.e. "hole-lee" sounds indistinguishable from "hoe-lee". (Hm, how do you cut-
spell "wholly"?) Putting enough of a pause between "hole" and "lee" so allow
the two L sounds to be distinguished would sound really weird. Is there some
audio of this accent on the web?

~~~
danieltillett
My accent is Australian, but in most accents there are two ls. Cut Spelling is
not my scheme - I have just used it for CutSpel.

I think you might be missing the point of cut spelling. The rules say don't
cut where the cutting will cause confusion. It has a "if in doubt don't cut"
rule. This one of the major reasons I used it for cutspel as I wanted to only
implement a subset of cut spelling.

------
pif
From Wikipedia ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-
native_pronunciations_of_En...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-
native_pronunciations_of_English#Italian)): _Italians learning English have a
tendency to pronounce words as they are spelled_.

Being Italian myself, I can't help wondering: "If not for pronunciation, what
else is spelling about?".

Just for the record, my first "shock" was with English, but learning French
was more painful. Really, when you see a sentence written in French you do
recognize its Latin origin. But, when you hear it... What went wrong during
its evolution? At least, I was happy to discover that a major problem in
learning French is common to several nationalities: there are several groups
of sounds which the non-francophones do not distinguish, while the
francophones cannot understand how they may be confused with one another.

~~~
Xophmeister
Orthography is more about disseminating communication in an asynchronous way
than pronunciation. Over time, it crystallises into something most people can
agree on and use to communicate; however, in that time, it will pick up relics
that are hard to get rid of. It is also true that while it reaches a
relatively stable point, it still evolves slowly (e.g., in texts from about
100 years ago, you sometimes see "cooperate" spelled "coöperate"; in really
old texts, you'll see the "long s", like in "highneſs").

The main point is that writing is a human invention, while language itself is
thought by most to be a natural cognitive facility, similar to face
recognition, that we've evolved to survive and flourish. When a spelling was
coined for a particular word, chances are that it was relatively close to its
pronunciation at the time, but oral language changes faster than written
tradition.

~~~
pif
> but oral language changes faster than written tradition

Yes and no! Sure, _if_ they evolve at different speed, oral changes faster
than written. But, in order to have any difference at all, you have to have
accepted them to diverge at a certain moment in the past.

Luckily :-) this was never the case in Italy. Starting at least with Romans,
written has always been meant as a phonetic transcription of the language. The
pronunciation rules did change during time, but the underlying correspondence
principle has never been given up.

------
prof_hobart
>In summary, then… as long as people understand the ways accents vary (a body
of knowledge which will clearly be one of the main influences on the system's
rules, but which any Cockney already needs for communication with
non‐Cockneys), there is no reason to imagine that there are any insurmountable
problems here

I'm not sure how the author comes to that conclusion. Assuming, as he does,
that this isn't intended to fix pronunciation, all it does is introduce a new
set of inconsistent spellings.

For example, my wife pronounces "pass" and "parse" pretty much the same way,
where as I pronounce "pass" in the same way as "ass", but pronounce "parse" in
the same way as her. As far as I can see, there's no one consistent way to
spell all of these words so that they make phonetic sense to both of us.

Or you've got "scone", should that use the same phonetic spelling as "cone" or
"one"?

------
rootbear
It's interesting to me that spelling reform almost always seem to assume that
the pronunciation of the word is definitive and it's the spelling that should
change. But there are words in English where the British pronunciation matches
the spelling (been, in RP, for example) but the American pronunciation does
not. I've always thought that any reform should leave a word alone if any
major dialect of English pronounced it as it is spelled. The changes that I
think would be the most helpful would be to get rid of archaic spellings such
as the 'ough' mess, changing ph to f where appropriate, fixing up more of the
-ice, -ise, -ize ambiguities, etc. Don't worry about things like doubled
letters, that will sort itself out later.

------
reitanqild
The language I grew up with has, to a certain degree, mangaged to adapt a lot
of words to our writing style, -chocolate for example will be written in the
obvious way.

However every time the language committee releases new recommendations people
complain loudly, blissfully unaware of our long and successful history in
adapting English word to our (saner : ) writing style.

------
Grue3
The pronounciation of words changes much faster than spelling does. People
write stuff down so that it lasts. You're optimizing the wrong thing if you
want to fit spelling to reflect the pronounciation. Making people say words as
they are written is much easier to implement. It's still a dumb idea, but it
makes much more sense.

~~~
pif
> The pronounciation of words changes much faster than spelling does.

Please, have a look at my answer to Xophmeister
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8182703](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8182703)).

