Foks Neuus kant spel.

[Jawawithagun]

Not true. In German, the Berliners say "ch" as English "k", the Southerners and Austrians say it as English "sh" or German "sch", and elsewhere it is spoken as the famous guttural sound most people think of when they think German. Remember, as I pointed out earlier, for a given accent, a given phoneme tends to be pronounced consistently across the lexicon.

Of course the infamous "ch" does have two different standard pronounciations.
One like in "ich" (I) [which a Berliner would pronounce "ick"] and another like in "Schach" (chess) [which he would not].

German spelling may be standardised in large parts but that only means the existing exceptions really mess things up.

[Jawawithagun]

Am I the only person on here who speaks English as it's supposed to be spoken?

For varying amounts of "supposed" if you're not from Norfolk.

[Molyneux]

...Ozymandias is a proper name. Proper names should not be fucking spelling-optimized!

He says, of a name that's translated from another alphabet to begin with. Are you one of those "if English was good enough for Jesus" people too?

In what language was the poem written?

"Huse" in English is significantly more confusing than "whose" - my first impulse on reading it is to pronounce it as "Hughes". And I don't see what a feeding deer has to do with any of the rest of the poem.

It's only confusing because you're applying the current (broken) set of implicit pronunciation guidelines, and saying "wah wah, hart doesn't mean heart, I don't get it," is unconvincing, when we are discussing changing the phonetic scheme to begin with.

So, pray tell, HOW would hart be distinguishable from heart under your 'fixed' guidelines? Would they be spelled identically? How the hell are those changes helpful to anyone, when they make the passage more confusing than it was before?

It would be simpler and easier to just create a new language, rather than needlessly mangling a pre-existing one.[/quote]

[Drooling Iguana]

I guess something like this could work if done a bit at a time.

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.[size=0]This (except for the first line) was originally by Mark Twain. I just couldn't think of a way to smoothly include the attribution with the message.[/size]

[Terralthra]

...Ozymandias is a proper name. Proper names should not be fucking spelling-optimized!

He says, of a name that's translated from another alphabet to begin with. Are you one of those "if English was good enough for Jesus" people too?

In what language was the poem written?

Ozymandias was the reign name of Ramses II, transliterated from Egyptian to Greek to English.

"Huse" in English is significantly more confusing than "whose" - my first impulse on reading it is to pronounce it as "Hughes". And I don't see what a feeding deer has to do with any of the rest of the poem.

It's only confusing because you're applying the current (broken) set of implicit pronunciation guidelines, and saying "wah wah, hart doesn't mean heart, I don't get it," is unconvincing, when we are discussing changing the phonetic scheme to begin with.

So, pray tell, HOW would hart be distinguishable from heart under your 'fixed' guidelines? Would they be spelled identically? How the hell are those changes helpful to anyone, when they make the passage more confusing than it was before?

It would be simpler and easier to just create a new language, rather than needlessly mangling a pre-existing one.

I like how you ask me how the changes were helpful, while carefully not responding to the part of my post where I explain exactly why these changes would be helpful. To answer your other question, how would you distinguish them? By context, you idiot, just like the existing homonyms in English. Do you need "bear' and "bear" spelled differently when referring to "fuzzy predators" and the verb "to carry"

[Winston Blake]

So, pray tell, HOW would hart be distinguishable from heart under your 'fixed' guidelines? Would they be spelled identically? How the hell are those changes helpful to anyone, when they make the passage more confusing than it was before?

One solution I can think of would be to add unambiguously silent letters. This could prevent the creation of new homonyms while keeping some of the spirit of the original word, e.g. heart becomes hxart, if x is no longer used. Similarly, unused digraphs could be allocated to some phonemes to distinguish new homonyms. I don't know if 'ae' is already set in the standardisation described, but if it isn't, you could make 'heart' into 'haert'.

[Graeme Dice]

Not true. In German, the Berliners say "ch" as English "k", the Southerners and Austrians say it as English "sh" or German "sch", and elsewhere it is spoken as the famous guttural sound most people think of when they think German. Remember, as I pointed out earlier, for a given accent, a given phoneme tends to be pronounced consistently across the lexicon.

Thank you for demonstrating my point perfectly. You claim that German has standardized phonetic spelling, and in the very same post, point out three examples where the phonetic spelling doesn't match the sounds that the speakers produce.

[Duckie]

So, pray tell, HOW would hart be distinguishable from heart under your 'fixed' guidelines? Would they be spelled identically? How the hell are those changes helpful to anyone, when they make the passage more confusing than it was before?

One solution I can think of would be to add unambiguously silent letters. This could prevent the creation of new homonyms while keeping some of the spirit of the original word, e.g. heart becomes hxart, if x is no longer used. Similarly, unused digraphs could be allocated to some phonemes to distinguish new homonyms. I don't know if 'ae' is already set in the standardisation described, but if it isn't, you could make 'heart' into 'haert'.

Spanish does this with the acute accent ('), at least partially. the acute accent marks stress, but it is also used in words for distinguishing things.

for instance, Como and Cómo are pronounced the same, while Comó has the stress on the last syllable. Italian uses a grave accent (`) for this, for instance, e means and, while è means 'is'.

for instance:

Hart- hart
Hárt- heart

however, these are merely conveniences, any human being with a functioning brain can tell homophones apart in speech and thus can do so in text. Anglophones aren't used to doing it in text because of how our language is not phonetic or phonemic, but worst come to worst we read out loud if confused in the Nu Rivaizd Alfabet for a while.

[Terralthra]

Not true. In German, the Berliners say "ch" as English "k", the Southerners and Austrians say it as English "sh" or German "sch", and elsewhere it is spoken as the famous guttural sound most people think of when they think German. Remember, as I pointed out earlier, for a given accent, a given phoneme tends to be pronounced consistently across the lexicon.

Thank you for demonstrating my point perfectly. You claim that German has standardized phonetic spelling, and in the very same post, point out three examples where the phonetic spelling doesn't match the sounds that the speakers produce.

As opposed to English, where speakers of the same dialect pronounce the same letter different ways, AND speakers of the same dialect pronounce different letter combinations in the same way. Do you honestly not see the difference?

[Lusankya]

My understanding is that English spelling, while being not-so-great for ease of spelling or pronunciation, actually aids in comprehension once you've learnt the spelling. We have enough homophones that it´s actually worthwhile differentiating between them. It´s not as though all of our spelling irregularities are completely random either: sign has a silent g, but the g is pronounced in the related signal.

If you´ve studied Japanese, you might have noticed that once you learn the kanji for a certain word, it actually becomes a lot easier to read with the kanji than with the hiragana. This is partly because hiragana are all swirly (which makes distinguishing them hard), but it´s also easier than reading roomaji, which don´t have that problem. Essentially it removes ambiguity due to homophones, which means that the mind only has to recognise the word - it doesn´t have to then pick from several meaning.

[quote=¨MRDOD¨]however, these are merely conveniences, any human being with a functioning brain can tell homophones apart in speech and thus can do so in text. Anglophones aren't used to doing it in text because of how our language is not phonetic or phonemic, but worst come to worst we read out loud if confused in the Nu Rivaizd Alfabet for a while.[/quote]

You know damn well that in spoken language there´s a hell of a lot of non-verbal communication going on which vastly aids communication and in removing ambiguity.

[RedImperator]

One thing I thought of today which seems an insurmountable practical difficulty: any attempt to phoneticize English spelling would almost certainly bifuricate written English worldwide, because I just can't see a situation where all the major Anglophone countries agree to radical spelling reform. Even if there was a central body like the Royal Academy of English to decree spelling reform, there's no guarantee everyone would go along with it, especially the United States (the fact that there isn't makes it doubly impossible, since I doubt you could even get all the major actors to even agree on a single body). In the United States, there's not even a concievable legal mechanism for enforcing new spelling--we've had top-down attempts in the past go bust when newspapers, state governments, and the like just ignore the reforms.

Now I concede that, concievably, you could institute gradual, moderate reform a few words at a time and let them slowly percolate through the language (assuming you could get all the major players to agree), but that doesn't seem to be what the spelling reform advocates are proposing.

Anglophones aren't used to doing it in text because of how our language is not phonetic or phonemic, but worst come to worst we read out loud if confused in the Nu Rivaizd Alfabet for a while.

Yeah, that's exactly what I want: my reading ability knocked back to a first-grade level in some utopian scheme to fix something which isn't broken.

[Terralthra]

One thing I thought of today which seems an insurmountable practical difficulty: any attempt to phoneticize English spelling would almost certainly bifuricate written English worldwide, because I just can't see a situation where all the major Anglophone countries agree to radical spelling reform. Even if there was a central body like the Royal Academy of English to decree spelling reform, there's no guarantee everyone would go along with it, especially the United States (the fact that there isn't makes it doubly impossible, since I doubt you could even get all the major actors to even agree on a single body). In the United States, there's not even a concievable legal mechanism for enforcing new spelling--we've had top-down attempts in the past go bust when newspapers, state governments, and the like just ignore the reforms.

We've also had top-down attempts succeed before.

Now I concede that, concievably, you could institute gradual, moderate reform a few words at a time and let them slowly percolate through the language (assuming you could get all the major players to agree), but that doesn't seem to be what the spelling reform advocates are proposing.

Anglophones aren't used to doing it in text because of how our language is not phonetic or phonemic, but worst come to worst we read out loud if confused in the Nu Rivaizd Alfabet for a while.

Yeah, that's exactly what I want: my reading ability knocked back to a first-grade level in some utopian scheme to fix something which isn't broken.

Please do not mistake "I've memorized most of the ways it is broken" for "not broken."

[starslayer]

Thank you for demonstrating my point perfectly. You claim that German has standardized phonetic spelling, and in the very same post, point out three examples where the phonetic spelling doesn't match the sounds that the speakers produce.

So you think that for phonetic spelling to exist, every speaker must have the same dialect? Bullshit, as German most ably proves. That's what my post was demonstrating. So the fuck what if different regions pronounce "ch" differently? In their dialect, a certain sound is represented by a given letter or combination of letters. This sound can change depending on accent. However, when the words are written, everyone will understand what you mean. The point of phonetic spelling is for a given letter, digraph, diphthong or what have you to produce the same sound across an accent, not necessarily the entire goddamn range of possible accents/dialects. That clear enough for you?

Here's a few examples: If I say "Reichstag," you immediately know how to pronounce it. Same with "Fluss," "reisen," or any other German word, according to your accent. Why? Phonetic spelling.

[RedImperator]

One thing I thought of today which seems an insurmountable practical difficulty: any attempt to phoneticize English spelling would almost certainly bifuricate written English worldwide, because I just can't see a situation where all the major Anglophone countries agree to radical spelling reform. Even if there was a central body like the Royal Academy of English to decree spelling reform, there's no guarantee everyone would go along with it, especially the United States (the fact that there isn't makes it doubly impossible, since I doubt you could even get all the major actors to even agree on a single body). In the United States, there's not even a concievable legal mechanism for enforcing new spelling--we've had top-down attempts in the past go bust when newspapers, state governments, and the like just ignore the reforms.

We've also had top-down attempts succeed before.

Name me one that has succeeded on the scale you're talking about and I'll eat my socks. The closest analogy I can even think of is metrification, and you know how well that went. And you don't even address the entire rest of the paragraph, which is where I discuss how difficult it would be just to get to the point that there's an agreed-upon reformed spelling to impose.

Yeah, that's exactly what I want: my reading ability knocked back to a first-grade level in some utopian scheme to fix something which isn't broken.

Please do not mistake "I've memorized most of the ways it is broken" for "not broken."

There are anywhere between 470 million and a billion English-as-a-second-language speakers in the world. Obviously, whatever its deficiencies, it works well enough to be the international language of commerce. Radical spelling reform would cost a staggering amount of money and cause major disruptions even if it worked, which strikes me as terribly unlikely given the obstacles to getting a billion people on six continents to agree to a completely new spelling system. If you want to argue it's still worth it, then fine, show me some kind of cost-benefit analysis. Otherwise, even if English is broken, it's not broken enough.

[Darth Wong]

Please do not mistake "I've memorized most of the ways it is broken" for "not broken."

Don't be a retard. Language is a tool, to accomplish a particular goal. Like any tool, its function is determined by its ability to be used successfully in pursuit of that goal.

The goal of language is communication. English is successfully used to communicate by much of the modern world. Therefore, it works. Therefore, it's not broken. Comprende?

The fact that it could be hypothetically improved through some act of God (albeit not realistically through the intervention of any lesser power) does not mean it's "broken", fool.

[Terralthra]

Please do not mistake "I've memorized most of the ways it is broken" for "not broken."

Don't be a retard. Language is a tool, to accomplish a particular goal. Like any tool, its function is determined by its ability to be used successfully in pursuit of that goal.

The goal of language is communication. English is successfully used to communicate by much of the modern world. Therefore, it works. Therefore, it's not broken. Comprende?

The fact that it could be hypothetically improved through some act of God (albeit not realistically through the intervention of any lesser power) does not mean it's "broken", fool.

I didn't say the language was broken. I said the phonetic system is broken. The fact that a whole bunch of people all use the language doesn't mean the phonetic system is not massively deficient, confusing, and incredibly difficult to use compared to almost any other phonographic alphabet on the planet.

Saying "the language is for communicating, people communicate in it, therefore it's not broken" is a complete red herring. We're not talking about the language, and we haven't been for basically the entire thread. We've been talking about the phonetic system. The purpose of a phonetic system is to make it clear how to pronounce a written word. The English phonetic system does not do this effectively, therefore it is broken. When every word in a dictionary has to have within the entry a guide to how to pronounce it, the phonetic scheme is broken.

We've also had top-down attempts succeed before.

Name me one that has succeeded on the scale you're talking about and I'll eat my socks. The closest analogy I can even think of is metrification, and you know how well that went. And you don't even address the entire rest of the paragraph, which is where I discuss how difficult it would be just to get to the point that there's an agreed-upon reformed spelling to impose.

The first English prescriptivist movement in the late 1650s which standardized grammar (largely based on Latinate grammar, thus the rules against splitting an infinitive, for example) (Robert Lowth). Spellings were first standardized in the mid-1760s by various prescriptivist dictionaries (Samuel Johnson); before then, there was no standard spelling at all. To say we couldn't restandardize spelling when until 250 years ago or so, it wasn't standardized at all is facile thinking, at best. Spelling restandardization in early 1900s. The (incredibly successful) move to mark "ain't" as not being a word, despite a long history of usage. The political correctness in language movement. Should I keep going?

Yeah, that's exactly what I want: my reading ability knocked back to a first-grade level in some utopian scheme to fix something which isn't broken.

Please do not mistake "I've memorized most of the ways it is broken" for "not broken."

There are anywhere between 470 million and a billion English-as-a-second-language speakers in the world. Obviously, whatever its deficiencies, it works well enough to be the international language of commerce. Radical spelling reform would cost a staggering amount of money and cause major disruptions even if it worked, which strikes me as terribly unlikely given the obstacles to getting a billion people on six continents to agree to a completely new spelling system. If you want to argue it's still worth it, then fine, show me some kind of cost-benefit analysis. Otherwise, even if English is broken, it's not broken enough.

Seems like a false cause to me. People use English because half the world was under British hegemony, which used English, and after that, a huge portion of trade went through the United States, also using English. Learning and using English was largely a matter of necessity, not any inherent functionality of the phonetic system. Also, please do not confuse the language with the phonetic system.

Also, for those ESL speakers, according to my phonology texts, some 40% of them list mistakes in ascertaining or remembering how to pronounce a written word or how to spell a heard word as their greatest difficulty in learning the language. Maybe you wouldn't find as much resistance to restandardizing spelling as you seem to think?

[Wyrm]

I didn't say the language was broken. I said the phonetic system is broken. The fact that a whole bunch of people all use the language doesn't mean the phonetic system is not massively deficient, confusing, and incredibly difficult to use compared to almost any other phonographic alphabet on the planet.

The English writing system isn't phonetic, idiot. A simple counting of the phonemes actually used by English and comparing it to its alphabet reveals that there are too few letters. (Around 27 consonants and no less than 12 vowels no matter how you count them, compared to a mere 26 letters.) Therefore, the comparison with languages with totally phonetic writing is spurious.

The English writing system is actually partially logographic, with combinations of letters making up morphemes. The letters give a clue to how the morpheme is pronounced by a complicated set of rules, but children learn the pronunciation of English words by rote. Just like children learning Chinese.

The logographic nature of English writing is why we recognize -(e)d as the past participle ending and -(e)s as the noun pluralizing ending, even though -(e)d is pronounced /ed/, /d/ and /t/ depending on the vowel, and -(e)s is pronounced /es/, /s/, and /z/ depending on the noun.

[Terralthra]

I am fully aware of the mixed nature of the English alphabetic scheme, thank you. The problem is quite simply that the 'complicated system of rules' is in many cases, not a set of rules at all. It is an heuristic which describes a set of possible pronunciations, but does not pick one out consistently. To use your example, /ed/ describes two different morphemes - the past participle and the preterite affixes. Except for some verbs, where the past participle is /en/ and to make matters even worse, the [ed] digraph can represent or be parts of other morphemes as well as that suffix.

If you want to have a conversation about English orthography, we can certainly do so, The problem is that while it's partially logographic, it's not enough logographic to reap any of the benefits of that orthography. It is likewise not phonetic enough to be beneficially phonographic, either.

It's like we're measuring blueprints in both feet and meters on the same page. Do you honestly think that if you were to do that, it would be anything except confusing? If someone said, on looking at your blueprints, "Hey, your measurements are weird, can you convert these all to meters so they're consistent?" would "Oh, it's supposed to be that way, idiot" be your response?

[Wyrm]

I am fully aware of the mixed nature of the English alphabetic scheme, thank you. The problem is quite simply that the 'complicated system of rules' is in many cases, not a set of rules at all. It is an heuristic which describes a set of possible pronunciations, but does not pick one out consistently.

Then I guess all those irregular verbs in English must mean that the rules are simply heuristics and there are no rules at all. Oh wait.

To use your example, /ed/ describes two different morphemes - the past participle and the preterite affixes. Except for some verbs, where the past participle is /en/ and to make matters even worse, the [ed] digraph can represent or be parts of other morphemes as well as that suffix.

Here's where 'partially' comes into play. I didn't say that English orthography was totally logographic, now did I? There is also an adherence to the actual pronouncation of the word, and often the past participle and the simple past are homophones anyway (so it should be of no surprise that they're also homographs).

Which is which must be deduced from the syntax. But wait! This is true in Chinese as well, where the exact same glyphs, in different order, completely change the meaning of the phrase. Yet Chinese is more logographic than English.

If you want to have a conversation about English orthography, we can certainly do so, The problem is that while it's partially logographic, it's not enough logographic to reap any of the benefits of that orthography.

'Any'? Liar. I can tell at a glance whether 'rote' is a noun and 'wrote' is a conjugation of a verb, even though I pronounce them in exactly the same way. What about 'write' and 'right'? What about the 'caught'~'cot' merger in certain American dialects?

Furthermore, in a totally phonetic language, you can tell whether or not the other side is speaking your dialect, because —of course— different dialects pronounce the same word in different ways. If we were speaking to each other face-to-face, even if you were using the same vocabulary and grammar I was, I could instantly tell which part of the country you came from by your accent. Over the net, I could only tell if you use grammar or vocabulary peculiar to your region.

This is especially useful in certain situations. Even with grammar and vocabulary restrictions, I find certain UK accents nearly impenetrable, but written out are instantly decipherable. Chinese is the same way: it is not an exaggeration that one Chinese will ask another with a different region of China to write down what they said, and have the written form be instantly understood.

It is likewise not phonetic enough to be beneficially phonographic, either.

Perhaps, but making a language totally phonetic would prove problematic. For instance, while I pronounce 'Mary', 'merry' and 'marry' exactly the same way, other dialects (such as the Boston accent) don't. If you propose to make English orthography totally phonetic, you run the very real risk of fracturing the language along these dialectical lines. Only the children speaking the dialect the orthography was designed for will reap the benefits; other dialects will be shut out.

Any proposed replacement for the current orthography will also have to take into account dialects. The spelling would not only have to be consistent across identical sounds within the same dialect, but also across different dialects.

It's like we're measuring blueprints in both feet and meters on the same page. Do you honestly think that if you were to do that, it would be anything except confusing? If someone said, on looking at your blueprints, "Hey, your measurements are weird, can you convert these all to meters so they're consistent?" would "Oh, it's supposed to be that way, idiot" be your response?

The analogy is broken. English orthography has to encode pronounciation/meaning pairs in strings of 26 graphemes. It's not perfect, but nothing I've seen your camp proposes does the job nearly as well — usually because the proposed solution is specific to a single dialect.

[RedImperator]

The first English prescriptivist movement in the late 1650s which standardized grammar (largely based on Latinate grammar, thus the rules against splitting an infinitive, for example) (Robert Lowth). Spellings were first standardized in the mid-1760s by various prescriptivist dictionaries (Samuel Johnson); before then, there was no standard spelling at all.

Right. Because a single monarchy of a few million mostly illiterate subjects standardizing a previously unstandardized language is the same scale as a dozen or so nation states representing four hundred million mostly literate citizens massively revamping an existing standard.

To say we couldn't restandardize spelling when until 250 years ago or so, it wasn't standardized at all is facile thinking, at best.

Sure, if we ignore the fact that there was, by definition, no previously entrenched standard to replace, and we also ignore that this time around, a billion people would have to re-learn how to read their own language.

Spelling restandardization in early 1900s.

You mean that movement I mentioned in an earlier post? The one which mostly failed to achieve its own modest goals, despite being championed by no less than Teddy Roosevelt?

The (incredibly successful) move to mark "ain't" as not being a word, despite a long history of usage.

Even if I'm generous enough to call "unorganized academic snobbery" "top down", this is: 1) a movement to prevent change, not implement it, and 2) "ain't" is one word; you're advocating changing hundreds of thousands. How is five orders of magnitude the same scale?

The political correctness in language movement.

How is this even analogous? Political correctness runs the gamut from pride-saving absurdities like "sanitation engineer" for "garbageman" to replacing gendered terms like "fireman" with gender-neutral ones like "firefighter" to minority groups adopting new names for themselves to it becoming taboo to drop the n-word in casual conversation. It's not top-down, it's not a single movement (let alone a coherent one), and it has resulted in words getting changed on a case-by-case basis, not the entire structure of some component of the language being systematically altered.

Should I keep going?

As you have yet to provide a relevant example, feel free. While you're at it, perhaps you could get around to addressing any of the other serious practical difficulties I mentioned two posts ago.

Seems like a false cause to me. People use English because half the world was under British hegemony, which used English, and after that, a huge portion of trade went through the United States, also using English. Learning and using English was largely a matter of necessity, not any inherent functionality of the phonetic system.

Thanks for the history lesson. You completely missed the point, but I'm always happy to be told something I already know.

The fact people use English by necessity is irrelevant to my point. If there was no necessity, no language would become a de facto international language. The point is that despite a spelling system you claim is impossibly broken, a billion people have learned the language to one degree or another, and international commerce--as well as diplomacy, science, and aviation--is conducted in English at a scale previously unseen in human history. As I said in my first post, regardless of how "broken" you think English spelling is, it's obviously not broken enough to seriously hinder international communication--and here's a hint: if it was, the people screaming loudest for spelling reform wouldn't be linguistics nerds, it would be businessmen, diplomats, scientists, and air traffic controllers.

Also, please do not confuse the language with the phonetic system.

Way to split that hair. As if the phonetic system isn't a vital component of he written form of the language, and as if, after an entire post spent talking exclusively about how English is spelled, I'm suddenly talking about English as a whole.

Also, please stop dressing up your nitpicking as polite requests. It reeks of arrogance and it's irritating.

Also, for those ESL speakers, according to my phonology texts, some 40% of them list mistakes in ascertaining or remembering how to pronounce a written word or how to spell a heard word as their greatest difficulty in learning the language.

And fixing this justifies the disruption for native English speakers and the staggering expense for everybody entailed by restandardizing how? I asked for a cost-benefit analysis in my last post, and you haven't even tried to produce one. In fact, just as you have with the political problems involved in reform, you haven't even acknowledged they exist.

Maybe you wouldn't find as much resistance to restandardizing spelling as you seem to think?

Bluntly, you're on another planet if you think first-language speakers would accept restandardizing. Since standardization, spelling reform has been a dismal failure every time it's been attempted. There is no body with the legitimacy to impose such a reform in any English-speaking country, no legal mechanism to enforce reforms, no conceivable way to get the United States to go along with everybody else (or vice-versa), a centuries-long history of popular resistance to spelling reform from the people who actually have to use the language, and even if you could overcome all these obstacles, the taxpayers would have a stroke when they saw the bill. I made all these points in my last post and you ignored them; I look forward to your actually addressing them this time around, or conceding the debate.

[Darth Wong]

Please do not mistake "I've memorized most of the ways it is broken" for "not broken."

Don't be a retard. Language is a tool, to accomplish a particular goal. Like any tool, its function is determined by its ability to be used successfully in pursuit of that goal.

The goal of language is communication. English is successfully used to communicate by much of the modern world. Therefore, it works. Therefore, it's not broken. Comprende?

The fact that it could be hypothetically improved through some act of God (albeit not realistically through the intervention of any lesser power) does not mean it's "broken", fool.

I didn't say the language was broken. I said the phonetic system is broken.

Don't split hairs, fool. People are able to spell and pronounce English in such a manner that they can successfully communicate with each other, and in fact, academics all around the world are able to get a handle on the correct spelling of words. Therefore, the spelling system isn't broken either. It's simply not as elegant as you'd like. But there's a big difference between "inelegant" and "broken", fool.

As for phonetics, does it occur to you that not everyone pronounces English words exactly the same way anyway?

[Terralthra]

I am fully aware of the mixed nature of the English alphabetic scheme, thank you. The problem is quite simply that the 'complicated system of rules' is in many cases, not a set of rules at all. It is an heuristic which describes a set of possible pronunciations, but does not pick one out consistently.

Then I guess all those irregular verbs in English must mean that the rules are simply heuristics and there are no rules at all. Oh wait.

This doesn't actually address my point.

To use your example, /ed/ describes two different morphemes - the past participle and the preterite affixes. Except for some verbs, where the past participle is /en/ and to make matters even worse, the [ed] digraph can represent or be parts of other morphemes as well as that suffix.

Here's where 'partially' comes into play. I didn't say that English orthography was totally logographic, now did I? There is also an adherence to the actual pronouncation of the word, and often the past participle and the simple past are homophones anyway (so it should be of no surprise that they're also homographs).

Which is which must be deduced from the syntax. But wait! This is true in Chinese as well, where the exact same glyphs, in different order, completely change the meaning of the phrase. Yet Chinese is more logographic than English.

There is some adherence to pronunciation, and some to morphemic consistency, resulting in neither being consistently usable. Which was my point in the first place. Which you laughably attempt to solve by cherry-picking here:

'Any'? Liar. I can tell at a glance whether 'rote' is a noun and 'wrote' is a conjugation of a verb, even though I pronounce them in exactly the same way. What about 'write' and 'right'? What about the 'caught'~'cot' merger in certain American dialects?

Furthermore, in a totally phonetic language, you can tell whether or not the other side is speaking your dialect, because —of course— different dialects pronounce the same word in different ways. If we were speaking to each other face-to-face, even if you were using the same vocabulary and grammar I was, I could instantly tell which part of the country you came from by your accent. Over the net, I could only tell if you use grammar or vocabulary peculiar to your region.

This is especially useful in certain situations. Even with grammar and vocabulary restrictions, I find certain UK accents nearly impenetrable, but written out are instantly decipherable. Chinese is the same way: it is not an exaggeration that one Chinese will ask another with a different region of China to write down what they said, and have the written form be instantly understood.

Ok, so how does it tell the difference between bear and bear? How do you tell by looking at those two homophones and know which is the verb and which is the noun? So, the usefulness of logography is strictly limited to only some words. The benefit of logography - separating the written language from how it's pronounced - is only present in a few cases. In many other cases, it is not there at all.

It is likewise not phonetic enough to be beneficially phonographic, either.

Perhaps, but making a language totally phonetic would prove problematic. For instance, while I pronounce 'Mary', 'merry' and 'marry' exactly the same way, other dialects (such as the Boston accent) don't. If you propose to make English orthography totally phonetic, you run the very real risk of fracturing the language along these dialectical lines. Only the children speaking the dialect the orthography was designed for will reap the benefits; other dialects will be shut out.

Any proposed replacement for the current orthography will also have to take into account dialects. The spelling would not only have to be consistent across identical sounds within the same dialect, but also across different dialects.

This has already been covered and countered earlier in the thread.

It's like we're measuring blueprints in both feet and meters on the same page. Do you honestly think that if you were to do that, it would be anything except confusing? If someone said, on looking at your blueprints, "Hey, your measurements are weird, can you convert these all to meters so they're consistent?" would "Oh, it's supposed to be that way, idiot" be your response?

The analogy is broken. English orthography has to encode pronounciation/meaning pairs in strings of 26 graphemes. It's not perfect, but nothing I've seen your camp proposes does the job nearly as well — usually because the proposed solution is specific to a single dialect.

No. English orthography currently encodes either pronunciation, meaning, or a combination of both in strings of 26 graphemes. There is no reason it has to do it in only 26. There is no reason it has to encode meaning and pronunciation in varying and inconsistent amounts. It could encode only pronunciation (like the majority of other western orthographies), or only meaning, or even consistently mix the amount it represents. You are looking at the way it currently is, and saying it has to be that way.

Don't split hairs, fool. People are able to spell and pronounce English in such a manner that they can successfully communicate with each other, and in fact, academics all around the world are able to get a handle on the correct spelling of words. Therefore, the spelling system isn't broken either. It's simply not as elegant as you'd like. But there's a big difference between "inelegant" and "broken", fool.

English orthography does not consistently tell how to pronounce a written word. English orthography does not consistently tell how to write a spoken word. Contrary to the bleating of Wyrm, is also does not consistently differentiate between homophones by morphemic differences. What further attributes do you need to have of an orthography to call it broken besides "does not consistently do any of the things it is supposed to do?" It's like you've got a 2-gallon bucket with a whole that causes it to leak at the 1-gallon mark. Sure, you can still carry some water in it, but it's still clearly deficient.

As for phonetics, does it occur to you that not everyone pronounces English words exactly the same way anyway?

Already covered earlier in the thread.

The first English prescriptivist movement in the late 1650s which standardized grammar (largely based on Latinate grammar, thus the rules against splitting an infinitive, for example) (Robert Lowth). Spellings were first standardized in the mid-1760s by various prescriptivist dictionaries (Samuel Johnson); before then, there was no standard spelling at all.

Right. Because a single monarchy of a few million mostly illiterate subjects standardizing a previously unstandardized language is the same scale as a dozen or so nation states representing four hundred million mostly literate citizens massively revamping an existing standard.

To say we couldn't restandardize spelling when until 250 years ago or so, it wasn't standardized at all is facile thinking, at best.

Sure, if we ignore the fact that there was, by definition, no previously entrenched standard to replace, and we also ignore that this time around, a billion people would have to re-learn how to read their own language.

Spelling restandardization in early 1900s.

You mean that movement I mentioned in an earlier post? The one which mostly failed to achieve its own modest goals, despite being championed by no less than Teddy Roosevelt?

The (incredibly successful) move to mark "ain't" as not being a word, despite a long history of usage.

Even if I'm generous enough to call "unorganized academic snobbery" "top down", this is: 1) a movement to prevent change, not implement it, and 2) "ain't" is one word; you're advocating changing hundreds of thousands. How is five orders of magnitude the same scale?

The political correctness in language movement.

How is this even analogous? Political correctness runs the gamut from pride-saving absurdities like "sanitation engineer" for "garbageman" to replacing gendered terms like "fireman" with gender-neutral ones like "firefighter" to minority groups adopting new names for themselves to it becoming taboo to drop the n-word in casual conversation. It's not top-down, it's not a single movement (let alone a coherent one), and it has resulted in words getting changed on a case-by-case basis, not the entire structure of some component of the language being systematically altered.

Should I keep going?

As you have yet to provide a relevant example, feel free. While you're at it, perhaps you could get around to addressing any of the other serious practical difficulties I mentioned two posts ago.

Spelling changes on the scale that have been proposed have never actually been attempted for English, so it's idiotic to expect me to produce successful attempts. I have provided examples of top-down spelling changes (your quibble about ain't is stupid, it was not prevent a change, and the fact that you think it was only emphasizes how successful that 'academic snobbery' actually was).

I'll concede that there has never been a successful restandardization of the English orthographic system....because there hasn't been a serious multinational attempt to do so. As numerous posters have pointed out, other languages have been phoneticized successfully in the modern era.

Seems like a false cause to me. People use English because half the world was under British hegemony, which used English, and after that, a huge portion of trade went through the United States, also using English. Learning and using English was largely a matter of necessity, not any inherent functionality of the phonetic system.

Thanks for the history lesson. You completely missed the point, but I'm always happy to be told something I already know.

The fact people use English by necessity is irrelevant to my point. If there was no necessity, no language would become a de facto international language. The point is that despite a spelling system you claim is impossibly broken, a billion people have learned the language to one degree or another, and international commerce--as well as diplomacy, science, and aviation--is conducted in English at a scale previously unseen in human history. As I said in my first post, regardless of how "broken" you think English spelling is, it's obviously not broken enough to seriously hinder international communication--and here's a hint: if it was, the people screaming loudest for spelling reform wouldn't be linguistics nerds, it would be businessmen, diplomats, scientists, and air traffic controllers.

So, a bunch of guys take turns paying you a lot of money and pointing a gun at you to get you to use a 2-gallon bucket with a hole at the 1-gallon mark. "It's not broken!" you say, "It still holds some water!"

Also, please do not confuse the language with the phonetic system.

Way to split that hair. As if the phonetic system isn't a vital component of he written form of the language, and as if, after an entire post spent talking exclusively about how English is spelled, I'm suddenly talking about English as a whole.

Also, please stop dressing up your nitpicking as polite requests. It reeks of arrogance and it's irritating.

So, let me get this straight. If you were to say, "Don't confuse phonetics and language, you fucktard," and I were to protest your swearing, it'd be a style over substance fallacy - resulting in a summary ban - but when I say something in a manner you don't like, protesting it is totally a legitimate point? It's funny how that works.

Also, for those ESL speakers, according to my phonology texts, some 40% of them list mistakes in ascertaining or remembering how to pronounce a written word or how to spell a heard word as their greatest difficulty in learning the language.

And fixing this justifies the disruption for native English speakers and the staggering expense for everybody entailed by restandardizing how? I asked for a cost-benefit analysis in my last post, and you haven't even tried to produce one. In fact, just as you have with the political problems involved in reform, you haven't even acknowledged they exist.

Maybe you wouldn't find as much resistance to restandardizing spelling as you seem to think?

Bluntly, you're on another planet if you think first-language speakers would accept restandardizing. Since standardization, spelling reform has been a dismal failure every time it's been attempted. There is no body with the legitimacy to impose such a reform in any English-speaking country, no legal mechanism to enforce reforms, no conceivable way to get the United States to go along with everybody else (or vice-versa), a centuries-long history of popular resistance to spelling reform from the people who actually have to use the language, and even if you could overcome all these obstacles, the taxpayers would have a stroke when they saw the bill. I made all these points in my last post and you ignored them; I look forward to your actually addressing them this time around, or conceding the debate.

A cost-benefit analysis is effectively impossible, because the lion's share portion of the cost would be born by publishing houses, not the government, and the adoption rate of private purchasers would vary. Would you go out and rebuy every book you have with the new orthography? Would your parents? Would publishers republish their entire library in the new style, or just from now on? I also find it interesting how you start out by attempting to say that ESL speakers wouldn't like the changes in spelling, and when I address that, shift to native speakers instead.

[Lusankya]

Ok, so how does it tell the difference between bear and bear? How do you tell by looking at those two homophones and know which is the verb and which is the noun? So, the usefulness of logography is strictly limited to only some words. The benefit of logography - separating the written language from how it's pronounced - is only present in a few cases. In many other cases, it is not there at all.

Please note that bear (v.) and bear (n.) are different parts of speech. So one is quite able to interpret the phrase "I can't bear bare bears", despite two of the homophones being spelt identically. Why? Because grammatically, the first "bear" can only be a verb, and the second "bear" can only be a noun. Despite the common spelling, they actually cause little ambiguity.

Compare this to knight and night: both are nouns, and thus confusion can be created. This occurs in spoken language as well, but note that in written language, you don't have the option of saying, "Excuse me, but can you please clarify that?"

English orthography does not consistently tell how to pronounce a written word. English orthography does not consistently tell how to write a spoken word. Contrary to the bleating of Wyrm, is also does not consistently differentiate between homophones by morphemic differences. What further attributes do you need to have of an orthography to call it broken besides "does not consistently do any of the things it is supposed to do?" It's like you've got a 2-gallon bucket with a whole that causes it to leak at the 1-gallon mark. Sure, you can still carry some water in it, but it's still clearly deficient.

It consistently conveys meaning. Ergo, it is not broken.

I'll concede that there has never been a successful restandardization of the English orthographic system....because there hasn't been a serious multinational attempt to do so. As numerous posters have pointed out, other languages have been phoneticized successfully in the modern era.

You do realise that there's plenty of evidence suggesting that no multinational effort to standardise English spelling would get off the ground, right? Hell, Americans still refuse to conform to the correct spelling of "Aluminium", despite the international scientific community setting it at the standard.

Way to split that hair. As if the phonetic system isn't a vital component of he written form of the language, and as if, after an entire post spent talking exclusively about how English is spelled, I'm suddenly talking about English as a whole.

Are you under the impression that spelling reform is unrelated to English as a whole? Are you really that much of a moron?

A cost-benefit analysis is effectively impossible, because the lion's share portion of the cost would be born by publishing houses, not the government, and the adoption rate of private purchasers would vary. Would you go out and rebuy every book you have with the new orthography? Would your parents? Would publishers republish their entire library in the new style, or just from now on? I also find it interesting how you start out by attempting to say that ESL speakers wouldn't like the changes in spelling, and when I address that, shift to native speakers instead.

Actually, I imagine that the lion's share of the cost would be born by the government, since publishing companies would be, you know, selling stuff. And unless they make it illegal to sell stuff in the writing system that we use already, then pretty much the only sector using the reformed spelling system would be the government. I certainly wouldn't buy a newspaper written in phonetic writing when I could buy one written with the spelling I'm accustomed to. I find the latter easier to read.

[Wyrm]

Then I guess all those irregular verbs in English must mean that the rules are simply heuristics and there are no rules at all. Oh wait.

This doesn't actually address my point.

Acually, yes, it does. Rules have exceptions. That they have exceptions does not make them not rules. Twit.

Here's where 'partially' comes into play. I didn't say that English orthography was totally logographic, now did I? There is also an adherence to the actual pronouncation of the word, and often the past participle and the simple past are homophones anyway (so it should be of no surprise that they're also homographs).

Which is which must be deduced from the syntax. But wait! This is true in Chinese as well, where the exact same glyphs, in different order, completely change the meaning of the phrase. Yet Chinese is more logographic than English.

There is some adherence to pronunciation, and some to morphemic consistency, resulting in neither being consistently usable. Which was my point in the first place.

In other words, you want a hard and fast rule for spelling any English word, instead of having to recognize exceptions. Lazy cunt.

Which you laughably attempt to solve by cherry-picking here:

'Any'? Liar. I can tell at a glance whether 'rote' is a noun and 'wrote' is a conjugation of a verb, even though I pronounce them in exactly the same way. What about 'write' and 'right'? What about the 'caught'~'cot' merger in certain American dialects?

Furthermore, in a totally phonetic language, you can tell whether or not the other side is speaking your dialect, because —of course— different dialects pronounce the same word in different ways. If we were speaking to each other face-to-face, even if you were using the same vocabulary and grammar I was, I could instantly tell which part of the country you came from by your accent. Over the net, I could only tell if you use grammar or vocabulary peculiar to your region.

This is especially useful in certain situations. Even with grammar and vocabulary restrictions, I find certain UK accents nearly impenetrable, but written out are instantly decipherable. Chinese is the same way: it is not an exaggeration that one Chinese will ask another with a different region of China to write down what they said, and have the written form be instantly understood.

Ok, so how does it tell the difference between bear and bear? How do you tell by looking at those two homophones and know which is the verb and which is the noun? So, the usefulness of logography is strictly limited to only some words. The benefit of logography - separating the written language from how it's pronounced - is only present in a few cases. In many other cases, it is not there at all.

You said 'any', you fuck. I provided counterexamples of where the logographism works and speeds up communication. That you provide examples of where you have to look at the syntax of the sentence to decide between noun 'bear' and verb 'bear' does not work, does not dismiss the fact that in many cases it will work. And guess what, a phonographic system will also not distinguish between 'bear' and 'bear'. So your argument is that we should go with a phonographic system and give up being able to distinguish between a large number of words because our present system doesn't distinguish between a few pairs of words.

Perhaps, but making a language totally phonetic would prove problematic. For instance, while I pronounce 'Mary', 'merry' and 'marry' exactly the same way, other dialects (such as the Boston accent) don't. If you propose to make English orthography totally phonetic, you run the very real risk of fracturing the language along these dialectical lines. Only the children speaking the dialect the orthography was designed for will reap the benefits; other dialects will be shut out.

Any proposed replacement for the current orthography will also have to take into account dialects. The spelling would not only have to be consistent across identical sounds within the same dialect, but also across different dialects.

This has already been covered and countered earlier in the thread.

Bullshit. In order for phonographic systems to work as well as the present system, children would have to learn how to write the same performed phoneme in different ways depending on how it would be pronounced in other dialects — because other dialects would use different symbols for the same words because they pronounce them differently (by definition), unless they too had to account for differences in dialects. That means they will have to learn to spell English by rote learning.

Just like they do now.

It's like we're measuring blueprints in both feet and meters on the same page. Do you honestly think that if you were to do that, it would be anything except confusing? If someone said, on looking at your blueprints, "Hey, your measurements are weird, can you convert these all to meters so they're consistent?" would "Oh, it's supposed to be that way, idiot" be your response?

The analogy is broken. English orthography has to encode pronounciation/meaning pairs in strings of 26 graphemes. It's not perfect, but nothing I've seen your camp proposes does the job nearly as well — usually because the proposed solution is specific to a single dialect.

No. English orthography currently encodes either pronunciation, meaning, or a combination of both in strings of 26 graphemes. There is no reason it has to do it in only 26. There is no reason it has to encode meaning and pronunciation in varying and inconsistent amounts. It could encode only pronunciation (like the majority of other western orthographies), or only meaning, or even consistently mix the amount it represents. You are looking at the way it currently is, and saying it has to be that way.

But any replacement has to do just about as well as the current system in order to be considered an adequate replacement. Plus you got a billion people for which the system works. It may not work as elegantly as you'd like it to work, but it fucking works. As pointed out, you'll have to teach a billion people how to read and write their own language again. In order for this to be even worth it, the new system has to be fucking awesome! Is it fucking awesome? Fuck no!

[Rye]

Am I the only person on here who speaks English as it's supposed to be spoken?

This frere bosteth that he knoweth helle,
And God it woot, that it is litel wonder;
Freres and feendes been but lyte asonder.
For, pardee, ye han ofte tyme herd telle
How that a frere ravyshed was to helle
In spirit ones by a visioun;
And as an angel ladde hym up and doun,
To shewen hym the peynes that the were,
In al the place saugh he nat a frere;
Of oother folk he saugh ynowe in wo.

It'd be interesting if they reformed English based on Bush's dialect, words like "terrorist" and "tourist" would be incredibly difficult to set apart.