A problem with all English spelling reform is that it is often intended to be phonetic and usually favours the pronunciation of the person proposing the change another is that it makes homophones also homonyms.
Where I come from in the South West of England bath has a long a and so does castle but in the North East they both have short a. Which one should the orthography reflect? What about house? Pronounced almost to rhyme with mice in some quarters and moose in others.
What do you do about Shrewsbury when even the locals don't all agree on how it is pronounced? Will Scots get to spell the name of a large aquatic mammal as hwale to more closely match the pronunciation? One positive change might be that in England the word wales would be reserved for the animals and we would all start referring to the country as Cymru.
If spelling reformers want to spell words differently then they should just do it the way that English has done for centuries, just do it. If you prefer to write labor rather than labour then do so. If you would rather write jeeny than genie go ahead. After all as mentioned in the article there is no English Academy to tell you not to. If others agree then the written language will adjust.
My Norwegian teacher was adamant that Norwegian is pronounced as written despite knowing perfectly well that almost every valley here has a different accent or even dialect. Norway gets away with it only by declaring that the two official forms are merely standardised written Norwegian; no one actually speaks bokmål or nynorsk.
This is a problem that other languages have already dealt with. Spelling doesn't have to represent the exact pronunciation of every word; it can represent phonemes, leaving some variation in pronunciation to dialect.
For example Vietnamese has considerable regional variation, some of which is reflected in the spelling system. The letter d represents /z/ in standard Northern Vietnamese but /j/ in standard Southern Vietnamese.
English already does something similar, as you've pointed out. In dialects that distinguish wh from w, the former can represent /hw/, whereas in most of England the distinction has disappeared and both are pronounced /w/. We don't need to respell whale because it already accommodates either pronunciation (although let's please get rid of "magic e" and spell it `wheil` to at least match the vowel).
Any linguist knows that a perfectly phonetic spelling system is not desirable. As well as what I've already discussed, pronunciation changes over time too. But I don't think that rules out spelling reform because currently English has many ways of spelling the same phoneme.
I just want "a" to make the same sound it makes in literally every other spelling system, including Cyrillic and Greek, not "ey" or "eh". Seriously, that's one of the most stable phonemes, how did it turn into "ey" in English?
Long story short you could say they rotated their vowel "wheel" a couple centuries ago - high vowels dropped lower, like a towards e, e towards i, and the lower ones got some upward movement towards a, like u and i.
The vowel probably shifted in English and the spelling wasn't adjusted. "Wal" in German is pronounced... almost like you'd expect, except it's a long 'a' without any of the usual markers for that (aa or ah). German spelling is more phonetic than English but less than Spanish.
This is a non-argument. There are no spelling system in the world that takes into account every variation in the spoken language. Heck, even the current English spelling is based on the specific pronunciation of some part of England a few hundred years ago.
What all spelling system do, is just pick one dialect as the reference dialect, and build the spelling based on that. Is it perfect? No. Does it work? Yes, if the dialect that you pick is the most widely spoken and the most prestigious.
Ah concur, so long as the Scoattish pronunciation's brought in line wi' a proper Manc twang:
«Ah pit the roobbish oot in the mornin’, then catch the booss wi’ a goon tucked doon ma kecks» («I take the rubbish out in the morning before taking the bus with a gun in my pants»).
The article’s example of “mis(c)e(l)lany” is one example that stood out to me like this - perhaps in some dialects it’s pronounced with a single S sound, but it’s definitely two for me. (And on the flip side, I wouldn’t retain the second I in “suficient”.)
It's pretty normal to have a somewhat deficient but still mostly phonetic script. So you _can_ read it purely phonetically, but you would sound robotic and/or unnatural. It also might miss some information that is obvious to native speakers.
Most Slavic languages belong to that category. E.g. Russian and Ukrainian texts usually don't mark the stressed syllables. Russian tends to reduce vowels so they are pronounced ambiguously. Czech had some vowel shifts so that some letters are now pronounced identically, etc.
It's still much better than English, where you often need to _know_ how a word is pronounced (e.g. "put" but "putty").
The most successful push on spelling was when the Chicago Tribune switched to simplified spelling in the 1940s through the 1960s.[1]
They started with about 40 words, and gradually expanded. But after McCormick died, the company gave up, retaining only "tho" for "though". That ended in 1975.[2]
> In support of its adoption of "drouth" in place of "drought" THE TRIBUNE cites the fact that most persons use the pronunciation indicated by the first — and simpler — spelling.
This one seems very strange. Do people really pronounce the final sound as /θ/?
Yes, I've heard that commonly pronounced by Americans. Not to mention that most will also try to correct you if you dare pronounce it differently than they do!
I'm an American and don't remember ever hearing this pronunciation. Wiktionary lists /draʊt/ for both the US and UK pronunciation. America has a lot of regional accents though, it's not unbelievable to me that this exists somewhere.
Colonel McCormick actually got together with a bunch of other large newspaper owners to push the simplified spelling. Not for any kind of altruistic reason, but to save on ink and paper.
All these people who have pushed for simplified spelling since don't realize they're carrying water for another era's long-dead barons.
/Former Tribune employee who heard it from the old-timers.
"Literate people have spent years learning the spelling of leaden and its likes and will be reluctant to admit that if the adjective acquires the form leden, their troubles were not worth the effort. In my opinion, our only hope to make progress is to adopt a minimalist program, trying to reach the desired goal by alienating no one and taking one small step after another over possibly several decades."
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This is an odd example to lead with. Leaden's root is lead, and one of its meanings is "made of lead". If we change its spelling to leden, then what do we do with "lead"? If we change lead to led, then we replace one confusing homonym with another homonym that's a homophone to boot. If we don't, we make it harder for readers unfamiliar with the meaning of leden to deduce its meaning from the root. This is not an unambiguously good change.
The reality of English is that there is no central authority on spelling, pronunciation, grammar, or even vocabulary. Dictionaries merely catalogue what is in common use. This may make the language anarchic to some, but it also welcomes foreign loan-words, idioms, etc. in a way that serves international users and enriches native speakers. The accepted spelling of some words has changed over time because of common usage. This society, instead of looking for some way to enact sweeping reforms, should just pick a couple or even just one word that could be simplified without causing side-effects and promote that change. If that change catches on, people may generalize it to similar words on their own.
As a non native speaker, I would highly value a spelling reform to enforce sound encoding.
Pronouncing never heard before words is practically impossible today. Sure it's irrelevant for native speakers, but it's excluding non native speakers the same way kanjis are excluding non native readers who didn't spent decades of their youth learning Japanese.
> Pronouncing never heard before words is practically impossible today.
Pronunciation rules do exist. They're not perfect but if you know them you'll get the right pronunciation most of the time. The problem seems to be that they're rarely taught and usually just absorbed through exposure. Most people aren't even aware of them and just do it automatically because of that.
For example, a common gotcha word is "'ghoti is pronounced 'fish'" - except it's not. Ask a native speaker and it's nearly guaranteed they'll say something like "go-tee" or "go-tie", because to get the "fish" pronunciation you have to break multiple English pronunciation rules: The "f" sound for "gh" never occurs at the start of a word, and the "sh" sound for "ti" requires a vowel after it. The "h" also prevents the "g" from being pronounced like a "j" when it starts the word. I can't remember if there was a rule violation for the "o".
As a non-native speaker, I’d be happy if we all could just adopt an easy neutral language for international communication and leave hurdles of the various national languages to their native speakers. Probably not happening, but one can dream.
It’s also the most successful attempt of its kind, by far. Which might be a little depressing, but hey, at least the language is still alive and well and not totally unknown! That’s something. :-)
Have you talked to Gen Z about this? In so many countries now, young people are growing up with hours a day spent on English-language social media, and they absorb it by osmosis. These young people don't have the same perception of English being "hard" or not "neutral" as older generations.
A lot of 1990s or early-millennium advocacy for language diversity and non-English interlinguistics doesn't resonate with many young people today. In fact, avoiding English (like antiglobalization ideas more generally) has become associated with the far-right in some countries.
Well, any language becomes relatively easy when you learn by immersion. That’s how I finally managed to learn English with little effort, after struggling with it for years. Doesn’t mean the language in and of itself is easy. And it most certainly isn’t neutral; just the fact that it’s the native language of several countries and an inherent vehicle of cultural influence disqualifies it as such.
I’m not in any way doubting the success of English as a widespread second language, I just find it unfortunate we haven’t gone with an easy, neutral language instead.
It has already been adopted for international communication. Quite an easy and forgiving language, probably because of the above. English it's historically a mix of different language families.
You have a certain liberty in English with how you can arrange your sentences, which you haven't in most other languages, in my experience.
There are no hard-to-learn parts in English such as genuses (Germanic) or complicated verbs (Latin). And the word "did" does a lot of heavy lifting to make it easier.
The great problem with English is that the spoken language has nothing to do with the written language, so you can never know from reading how a word should be pronounced, and vice versa.
I don’t feel like the sentence structure in English is particularly flexible. It relies on word order for things other languages prefer to express with cases, prepositions, or context.
I think the disparity between the written and spoken language is big enough of a problem to make the language difficult; certainly not less so than extra verb forms or gender in other languages. For example, I don’t find French remarkably more difficult than English, because even though it has both of those features, reading it is fairly straightforward, which makes the language so much more comfortable.
Another part of English that I personally always found challenging (and which still trips me up from time to time) are the verb tenses. Just wrapping my head around them and all the context switching to know which one to use for the past/present/future relative to what I’m talking about right now. Perhaps most people don’t feel as strongly about them, though.
All that said, I consider English among the easier languages to learn, but still quite challenging. Difficulty-wise, one can do far, far better.
For many years now, any non-native speaker of English can use a site like Forvo to hear the pronunciation of a word just as this English speaker uses it for other languages with such uncertainties.
ninalanyon 1 day ago
Where I come from in the South West of England bath has a long a and so does castle but in the North East they both have short a. Which one should the orthography reflect? What about house? Pronounced almost to rhyme with mice in some quarters and moose in others.
What do you do about Shrewsbury when even the locals don't all agree on how it is pronounced? Will Scots get to spell the name of a large aquatic mammal as hwale to more closely match the pronunciation? One positive change might be that in England the word wales would be reserved for the animals and we would all start referring to the country as Cymru.
If spelling reformers want to spell words differently then they should just do it the way that English has done for centuries, just do it. If you prefer to write labor rather than labour then do so. If you would rather write jeeny than genie go ahead. After all as mentioned in the article there is no English Academy to tell you not to. If others agree then the written language will adjust.
My Norwegian teacher was adamant that Norwegian is pronounced as written despite knowing perfectly well that almost every valley here has a different accent or even dialect. Norway gets away with it only by declaring that the two official forms are merely standardised written Norwegian; no one actually speaks bokmål or nynorsk.
wdutch 1 day ago
For example Vietnamese has considerable regional variation, some of which is reflected in the spelling system. The letter d represents /z/ in standard Northern Vietnamese but /j/ in standard Southern Vietnamese.
English already does something similar, as you've pointed out. In dialects that distinguish wh from w, the former can represent /hw/, whereas in most of England the distinction has disappeared and both are pronounced /w/. We don't need to respell whale because it already accommodates either pronunciation (although let's please get rid of "magic e" and spell it `wheil` to at least match the vowel).
Any linguist knows that a perfectly phonetic spelling system is not desirable. As well as what I've already discussed, pronunciation changes over time too. But I don't think that rules out spelling reform because currently English has many ways of spelling the same phoneme.
Joker_vD 1 day ago
Vaphell 1 day ago
Long story short you could say they rotated their vowel "wheel" a couple centuries ago - high vowels dropped lower, like a towards e, e towards i, and the lower ones got some upward movement towards a, like u and i.
ahartmetz 1 day ago
stevekemp 1 day ago
chabska 1 day ago
What all spelling system do, is just pick one dialect as the reference dialect, and build the spelling based on that. Is it perfect? No. Does it work? Yes, if the dialect that you pick is the most widely spoken and the most prestigious.
andrewshadura 23 hours ago
Often these are two different dialects.
triceratops 1 day ago
I vote we spell everything with Scottish pronunciation. Puts native and non-native speakers on level terms.
inkyoto 1 day ago
«Ah pit the roobbish oot in the mornin’, then catch the booss wi’ a goon tucked doon ma kecks» («I take the rubbish out in the morning before taking the bus with a gun in my pants»).
t23414321 2 hours ago
com2kid 1 day ago
Simplify the orthography to make it phonic, and then people spell words however they are pronounced in their local dialect.
roryirvine 21 hours ago
You'd end up with something pretty close to early 2000s txtspk, so it might actually be a surprisingly easy conversion for many people.
rmccue 1 day ago
Vaushite 1 day ago
cyberax 1 day ago
Most Slavic languages belong to that category. E.g. Russian and Ukrainian texts usually don't mark the stressed syllables. Russian tends to reduce vowels so they are pronounced ambiguously. Czech had some vowel shifts so that some letters are now pronounced identically, etc.
It's still much better than English, where you often need to _know_ how a word is pronounced (e.g. "put" but "putty").
Animats 1 day ago
[1] https://www.spellingsociety.org/uploaded_media/tribune-media...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/30/archives/thru-is-through-...
tdeck 1 day ago
This one seems very strange. Do people really pronounce the final sound as /θ/?
xboxnolifes 1 day ago
Freedom2 1 day ago
tdeck 1 day ago
cratermoon 1 day ago
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/drought-or-drouth
reaperducer 1 day ago
All these people who have pushed for simplified spelling since don't realize they're carrying water for another era's long-dead barons.
/Former Tribune employee who heard it from the old-timers.
beloch 1 day ago
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This is an odd example to lead with. Leaden's root is lead, and one of its meanings is "made of lead". If we change its spelling to leden, then what do we do with "lead"? If we change lead to led, then we replace one confusing homonym with another homonym that's a homophone to boot. If we don't, we make it harder for readers unfamiliar with the meaning of leden to deduce its meaning from the root. This is not an unambiguously good change.
The reality of English is that there is no central authority on spelling, pronunciation, grammar, or even vocabulary. Dictionaries merely catalogue what is in common use. This may make the language anarchic to some, but it also welcomes foreign loan-words, idioms, etc. in a way that serves international users and enriches native speakers. The accepted spelling of some words has changed over time because of common usage. This society, instead of looking for some way to enact sweeping reforms, should just pick a couple or even just one word that could be simplified without causing side-effects and promote that change. If that change catches on, people may generalize it to similar words on their own.
techiferous 1 day ago
Noe2097 1 day ago
Pronouncing never heard before words is practically impossible today. Sure it's irrelevant for native speakers, but it's excluding non native speakers the same way kanjis are excluding non native readers who didn't spent decades of their youth learning Japanese.
Izkata 1 day ago
Pronunciation rules do exist. They're not perfect but if you know them you'll get the right pronunciation most of the time. The problem seems to be that they're rarely taught and usually just absorbed through exposure. Most people aren't even aware of them and just do it automatically because of that.
For example, a common gotcha word is "'ghoti is pronounced 'fish'" - except it's not. Ask a native speaker and it's nearly guaranteed they'll say something like "go-tee" or "go-tie", because to get the "fish" pronunciation you have to break multiple English pronunciation rules: The "f" sound for "gh" never occurs at the start of a word, and the "sh" sound for "ti" requires a vowel after it. The "h" also prevents the "g" from being pronounced like a "j" when it starts the word. I can't remember if there was a rule violation for the "o".
Here's someone's attempt at organizing and formalizing them: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html
F3nd0 1 day ago
quesera 1 day ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
D-Coder 13 hours ago
F3nd0 1 day ago
carlosjobim 1 day ago
F3nd0 1 day ago
> neutral
> leave hurdles of the various national languages to their native speakers
> (context)
Of all the possible languages in the world, how did my comment make you think of English?
TFNA 1 day ago
A lot of 1990s or early-millennium advocacy for language diversity and non-English interlinguistics doesn't resonate with many young people today. In fact, avoiding English (like antiglobalization ideas more generally) has become associated with the far-right in some countries.
F3nd0 1 day ago
I’m not in any way doubting the success of English as a widespread second language, I just find it unfortunate we haven’t gone with an easy, neutral language instead.
carlosjobim 1 day ago
F3nd0 1 day ago
carlosjobim 22 hours ago
There are no hard-to-learn parts in English such as genuses (Germanic) or complicated verbs (Latin). And the word "did" does a lot of heavy lifting to make it easier.
The great problem with English is that the spoken language has nothing to do with the written language, so you can never know from reading how a word should be pronounced, and vice versa.
F3nd0 16 hours ago
I think the disparity between the written and spoken language is big enough of a problem to make the language difficult; certainly not less so than extra verb forms or gender in other languages. For example, I don’t find French remarkably more difficult than English, because even though it has both of those features, reading it is fairly straightforward, which makes the language so much more comfortable.
Another part of English that I personally always found challenging (and which still trips me up from time to time) are the verb tenses. Just wrapping my head around them and all the context switching to know which one to use for the past/present/future relative to what I’m talking about right now. Perhaps most people don’t feel as strongly about them, though.
All that said, I consider English among the easier languages to learn, but still quite challenging. Difficulty-wise, one can do far, far better.
TFNA 1 day ago