What do you all think about spelling reform? I find some of these proposals interesting, but I don't really think the benefits are worth the cost. This is a good page describing some of the problems of reform and making a proposal that is much better than some I've seen: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/accents_spellingreform.htm
Spelling reform
<<I find some of these proposals interesting, but I don't really think the benefits are worth the cost. This is a good page describing some of the problems of reform and making a proposal that is much better than some I've seen.>>
I agree.
My biggest problem with the ever proposed spelling reforms is that they are based exclusively upon one particular language variety / accent / dialect. The current spelling system isn't "logical" at all but it doesn't cause serious difficulties to people speaking different varieties of English. For example, the word "stork" is spelled as "stork", nevertheless, it is homophonous with "stalk" for many people (non-rhotic speakers) and thus is pronounced as "stok" (approximately). The explanation of this is the R-dropping rule in the case of non-rhotic speakers. As opposed to that, if the spelling "stok" were introduced instead of "stork" it would cause serious problems to rhotic speakers. The rule should be re-named to "r-gaining rule" or something like that. And so on, and so on, ad infinitum.
Not all the succesfully introduced spelling reforms are that successful in fact. A good example would be the German spelling reform, which was introduced a couple of years ago. I don't really know all the instances of the change but probably the most important part is spelling "ß" as "ss" in certain positions. That is based on the following analogy:
ß - if the preceeding vowel is long
ss - if the preceeding vowel is short
Why? I fail to see the logic behind it. It was perfectly okay for most native Germans and foreign learners to write "ß" in all positions, or if you can't find the charecter on the keyboard you could write "ss" any time you need double "s". I think it is clear to native speakers where to pronounce a long vowel or a short vowel. It isn't instinctively so in the case of the most non-native speakers but you need not be a genius to master it. (I managed to, so there is hope for anyone! :-))
Then the problem continues with German course books...in most of them the spelling is rather inconsistent (a mixture of old and new spelling). However, if you want to pass a language exam you MUSTN'T mix up the old and the new spelling. It's okay to use old spellings consistently, but do not mix them up with the new, and the other way round...Crystal clear, isn't it?
Not to mention that some people haven't mastered the nuts and bolts of the new system yet...Some deliberately refuse to use it.
In my opinion, the aim of a spelling reform is to make spelling easier and/or more logical for everyone. So, the above mentioned example is the typical case of making everyone's life (including your own) more complicated.
I'm not anti-spelling-reform, but...
I agree.
My biggest problem with the ever proposed spelling reforms is that they are based exclusively upon one particular language variety / accent / dialect. The current spelling system isn't "logical" at all but it doesn't cause serious difficulties to people speaking different varieties of English. For example, the word "stork" is spelled as "stork", nevertheless, it is homophonous with "stalk" for many people (non-rhotic speakers) and thus is pronounced as "stok" (approximately). The explanation of this is the R-dropping rule in the case of non-rhotic speakers. As opposed to that, if the spelling "stok" were introduced instead of "stork" it would cause serious problems to rhotic speakers. The rule should be re-named to "r-gaining rule" or something like that. And so on, and so on, ad infinitum.
Not all the succesfully introduced spelling reforms are that successful in fact. A good example would be the German spelling reform, which was introduced a couple of years ago. I don't really know all the instances of the change but probably the most important part is spelling "ß" as "ss" in certain positions. That is based on the following analogy:
ß - if the preceeding vowel is long
ss - if the preceeding vowel is short
Why? I fail to see the logic behind it. It was perfectly okay for most native Germans and foreign learners to write "ß" in all positions, or if you can't find the charecter on the keyboard you could write "ss" any time you need double "s". I think it is clear to native speakers where to pronounce a long vowel or a short vowel. It isn't instinctively so in the case of the most non-native speakers but you need not be a genius to master it. (I managed to, so there is hope for anyone! :-))
Then the problem continues with German course books...in most of them the spelling is rather inconsistent (a mixture of old and new spelling). However, if you want to pass a language exam you MUSTN'T mix up the old and the new spelling. It's okay to use old spellings consistently, but do not mix them up with the new, and the other way round...Crystal clear, isn't it?
Not to mention that some people haven't mastered the nuts and bolts of the new system yet...Some deliberately refuse to use it.
In my opinion, the aim of a spelling reform is to make spelling easier and/or more logical for everyone. So, the above mentioned example is the typical case of making everyone's life (including your own) more complicated.
I'm not anti-spelling-reform, but...
<<the spelling is rather inconsistent>>
Not "the" spelling, just spelling
Not "the" spelling, just spelling
I forgot the link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_spelling_reform_of_1996
Sorry for going off-topic. I know that this thread shouldn't be about German issues, but I'd like to know if anyone finds that reform senible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_spelling_reform_of_1996
Sorry for going off-topic. I know that this thread shouldn't be about German issues, but I'd like to know if anyone finds that reform senible.
>>What do you all think about spelling reform? I find some of these proposals interesting, but I don't really think the benefits are worth the cost. This is a good page describing some of the problems of reform and making a proposal that is much better than some I've seen: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/accents_spellingreform.htm<<
My main problem with this kind of proposal is that it results in two many words which are not homophones in some dialects being written as homographs; it is most likely easier for someone to know that a particular written distinction does not correspond to a spoken one in their dialect than for individuals to have to determine how homographs ought to be pronounced from reading them. Yes, people may have to learn how to spell words (sorry, you'll still have spelling bees), there will be less ambiguity in actually reading texts, as many distinctions between words will be preserved even if they are not natively present in the reader's own dialect.
Furthermore, it seems to seek a lowest common denominator for English, eliminating any distinctions that aren't very common throughout all English dialects, rather than aiming at a greatest common denominator, so to speak, where it seeks to include all dialects' distinctions to a reasonable extent, even if one must remember what mergers and like have occurred in their own dialects. It does not seem to seek to be univerally applicable to all dialects but rather universally inapplicable to all dialects.
My main problem with this kind of proposal is that it results in two many words which are not homophones in some dialects being written as homographs; it is most likely easier for someone to know that a particular written distinction does not correspond to a spoken one in their dialect than for individuals to have to determine how homographs ought to be pronounced from reading them. Yes, people may have to learn how to spell words (sorry, you'll still have spelling bees), there will be less ambiguity in actually reading texts, as many distinctions between words will be preserved even if they are not natively present in the reader's own dialect.
Furthermore, it seems to seek a lowest common denominator for English, eliminating any distinctions that aren't very common throughout all English dialects, rather than aiming at a greatest common denominator, so to speak, where it seeks to include all dialects' distinctions to a reasonable extent, even if one must remember what mergers and like have occurred in their own dialects. It does not seem to seek to be univerally applicable to all dialects but rather universally inapplicable to all dialects.
<<My main problem with this kind of proposal is that it results in two many words which are not homophones in some dialects being written as homographs>>
Were you intending a pun there with "two many words" or was that an odd coincidence that you wrote that in that sentence?
Were you intending a pun there with "two many words" or was that an odd coincidence that you wrote that in that sentence?
>>Were you intending a pun there with "two many words" or was that an odd coincidence that you wrote that in that sentence?<<
That was just a coincidence; I did not realize I'd written that until you pointed it out to me.
That was just a coincidence; I did not realize I'd written that until you pointed it out to me.
I find spelling reform proposals generally more interesting that practical, and this one is no exception. Languages like English with such a wide variety of pronunciations and no single standard are not really suitable for phonemic spelling, in my opinion. The thing about all these proposals is that they take it for granted that the main purpose of an alphabetic system is to convey the pronunciation, when I don't think it has to be. Obviously English does fairly poorly in that regard, but it is excellent as a guide to etymology and to variation in modern English.
There are a few changes that I might support though. First, the pseudo-Classical spellings added to some words to make them seem more literate (debt, island, ptarmigan); I think the change in these few words would be fairly painless (det, iland/ailand, tarmigan). The other one is to remove distinctions that are not made in any modern accents, like write-rite, or spelling words in "-alk" as "-auk"
There are a few changes that I might support though. First, the pseudo-Classical spellings added to some words to make them seem more literate (debt, island, ptarmigan); I think the change in these few words would be fairly painless (det, iland/ailand, tarmigan). The other one is to remove distinctions that are not made in any modern accents, like write-rite, or spelling words in "-alk" as "-auk"
The main solution I have favored for this kind of problem is to not attempt to have a purely phonemic orthography, but rather seek a crossdialectal orthography that is based on diachronics rather than that the current state of any given variety and which seeks to maximize the number of ancestral distinctions possible while excluding distinctions which are innovations within individual dialect groups (and leaving it to the reader to understand that such are there) and which overall favors conservative forms over progressive forms. Such a orthography would be either phonemic or morphophonemic with respect what it seeks to represent, but it would not be phonemic or morphophonemic with respect to any given extant variety. It is in no fashion a complete solution, but it allows for a more effective crossdialectal orthography than a purely phonemic approach which focuses on "write as you speak and speak as you write".
Josh said
"I don't really think the benefits are worth the cost."
You don't see the benefit of a child learning to read and write in 3 to 6 months rather than 3 to 6 years? There have been studies where a child learning a second language which had a regular orthography could spell that second language better than they could spell their own language.
Liz said:
"The current spelling system isn't "logical" at all but it doesn't cause serious difficulties to people speaking different varieties of English."
On the contrary it causes numerous difficulties for many speakers of all accents. The fact that the number of difficulties is roughly the same for all accents does not mean that it is small. In a reformed orthography the number of difficulties any accent would have with the spelling system would be trivial by comparison.
http://www.englishspellingproblems.co.uk/
Germans use ß and ss for the same reason they use single 'b' and double 'bb' or single 't' and double 'tt' except that they can't use 's' and 'ss' because single 's' between vowels is pronounced /z/ not /s/
Travis said:
"My main problem with this kind of proposal is that it results in two many words which are not homophones in some dialects being written as homographs"
Which would cause a pronunciation problem for that accent, not a spelling problem nor a reading comprehension problem.
"it is most likely easier for someone to know that a particular written distinction does not correspond to a spoken one in their dialect than for individuals to have to determine how homographs ought to be pronounced from reading them. Yes, people may have to learn how to spell words (sorry, you'll still have spelling bees), there will be less ambiguity in actually reading texts, as many distinctions between words will be preserved even if they are not natively present in the reader's own dialect. "
How to deal with this issue depends on why the accent pronounces the two words differently. Does it have a phonemic distinction that other accents don't have? eg 'made' v 'maid' in Welsh English. One approach is to keep a phonemic distinction in the spelling system if at least 30% of speakers have it. Even if the made/maid distinction doesn't fit in the 30% bracket reducing it to one spelling would benefit Welsh English speakers as they wouldn't have to learn: made, maid, break, gauge, weight, straight, they, vein, day, etc.
Or is it a case of an accent pronouncing a word with a different phoneme eg accents that distinguish for example horse and hoarse by pronouncing hoarse with their 'coat' phoneme rather than their 'caught' phoneme. This can be dealt with by allowing a few cases where a word has two spellings spellings. As can also be done with words like 'patriot' where the 'a' is pronounced differently either side of the Atlantic.
A humorous look at objections to spelling reform here:
http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ortho.html
"I don't really think the benefits are worth the cost."
You don't see the benefit of a child learning to read and write in 3 to 6 months rather than 3 to 6 years? There have been studies where a child learning a second language which had a regular orthography could spell that second language better than they could spell their own language.
Liz said:
"The current spelling system isn't "logical" at all but it doesn't cause serious difficulties to people speaking different varieties of English."
On the contrary it causes numerous difficulties for many speakers of all accents. The fact that the number of difficulties is roughly the same for all accents does not mean that it is small. In a reformed orthography the number of difficulties any accent would have with the spelling system would be trivial by comparison.
http://www.englishspellingproblems.co.uk/
Germans use ß and ss for the same reason they use single 'b' and double 'bb' or single 't' and double 'tt' except that they can't use 's' and 'ss' because single 's' between vowels is pronounced /z/ not /s/
Travis said:
"My main problem with this kind of proposal is that it results in two many words which are not homophones in some dialects being written as homographs"
Which would cause a pronunciation problem for that accent, not a spelling problem nor a reading comprehension problem.
"it is most likely easier for someone to know that a particular written distinction does not correspond to a spoken one in their dialect than for individuals to have to determine how homographs ought to be pronounced from reading them. Yes, people may have to learn how to spell words (sorry, you'll still have spelling bees), there will be less ambiguity in actually reading texts, as many distinctions between words will be preserved even if they are not natively present in the reader's own dialect. "
How to deal with this issue depends on why the accent pronounces the two words differently. Does it have a phonemic distinction that other accents don't have? eg 'made' v 'maid' in Welsh English. One approach is to keep a phonemic distinction in the spelling system if at least 30% of speakers have it. Even if the made/maid distinction doesn't fit in the 30% bracket reducing it to one spelling would benefit Welsh English speakers as they wouldn't have to learn: made, maid, break, gauge, weight, straight, they, vein, day, etc.
Or is it a case of an accent pronouncing a word with a different phoneme eg accents that distinguish for example horse and hoarse by pronouncing hoarse with their 'coat' phoneme rather than their 'caught' phoneme. This can be dealt with by allowing a few cases where a word has two spellings spellings. As can also be done with words like 'patriot' where the 'a' is pronounced differently either side of the Atlantic.
A humorous look at objections to spelling reform here:
http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ortho.html
>>How to deal with this issue depends on why the accent pronounces the two words differently. Does it have a phonemic distinction that other accents don't have? eg 'made' v 'maid' in Welsh English. One approach is to keep a phonemic distinction in the spelling system if at least 30% of speakers have it. Even if the made/maid distinction doesn't fit in the 30% bracket reducing it to one spelling would benefit Welsh English speakers as they wouldn't have to learn: made, maid, break, gauge, weight, straight, they, vein, day, etc.<<
I myself am favoring whether such is a conservative distinction or a progressive distinction. As the distinction between /e:/~/eI/ and /EI/ is conservative, I am representing it; consequently I would spell "made" as "meed", "maid" as "meid", "weight" as "weit", "straight" as "streit", "they" as "dhei", "vein" as "vein" (and "vane" as "veen"), "day" as "dei".
The matter is that I do not seek basing a new orthography off of just General American and Received Pronunciation but rather off of all extant English dialects (excluding Scots, as I do not consider it to be part of English), as I seek a *universal* English orthography which is just as applicable to someone in Northumbria or the rural South (of the US) as to someone in the Home Counties or Iowa. Yes, that includes Welsh English. At the same time, simply including all distinctions possible would result in far too many distinctions being present to reasonably represent.
However, simply picking and choosing distinctions would inevitably result in favoring the primary standard varieties, GA and RP. Consequently, a fair and unambiguous means of choosing what distinctions and pronunciations are to be included is needed. The only real solution there is to purely favor more conservative forms, without regard to what dialects they are present in.
More practically, I would favor excluding all new distinctions and shifts in vocabulary dating from Early New English past the breakup of North American English and English English. At the same time, I would favor including all surviving distinctions from Middle English, even if their current ranges are quite limited, save distinctions that have survived solely through transmission to Scottish English via Scots (aside from the fir-fur-fern distinction due to its presence in Standard Scottish English). At the same time, new distinctions that arose during the course of the 1600s which did not affect the a very large portion of the English-speaking world would be excluded, especially if they are not very consistent in the words the affect; hence the lot-cloth and trap-bath distinctions would be excluded, even though the foot-strut distinction would be included.
As for words that have arisen since then, one has to be a bit more arbitrary, especially because multiple pronunciations may not be reconstructable to any historical one; then often the only thing that can be done is to either arbitrarily choose a pronunciation (generally the most widespread one) or to allow multiple different forms to be in use. At the same time, cases like /A/ being used in one dialect and /Q/ being used in another dialect may allow one to make decisions like to use /Q/ in the particular case even if the words are not strictly reconstructable back to a single original pronunciation.
>>Or is it a case of an accent pronouncing a word with a different phoneme eg accents that distinguish for example horse and hoarse by pronouncing hoarse with their 'coat' phoneme rather than their 'caught' phoneme. This can be dealt with by allowing a few cases where a word has two spellings spellings. As can also be done with words like 'patriot' where the 'a' is pronounced differently either side of the Atlantic.<<
In the case of "horse" versus "hoarse", I myself would just have fixed spellings for them which would be present throughout the entire orthography. (In my current thoughts on such, such'd be "hoars" and "hoors" respectively.) Yes, the reader would have know how to distinguish the two in writing if they did not natively have the distinction in speech, but at the same time would not leave readers who do have such having to distinguish them by context alone.
As for cases like "patriot", though, I myself might favor having multiple spellings just to avoid having to choose between, say, NAE and English English forms (in this case "peetriët" and "patriët" respectively); it would be hard to really make a particular choice here.
I myself am favoring whether such is a conservative distinction or a progressive distinction. As the distinction between /e:/~/eI/ and /EI/ is conservative, I am representing it; consequently I would spell "made" as "meed", "maid" as "meid", "weight" as "weit", "straight" as "streit", "they" as "dhei", "vein" as "vein" (and "vane" as "veen"), "day" as "dei".
The matter is that I do not seek basing a new orthography off of just General American and Received Pronunciation but rather off of all extant English dialects (excluding Scots, as I do not consider it to be part of English), as I seek a *universal* English orthography which is just as applicable to someone in Northumbria or the rural South (of the US) as to someone in the Home Counties or Iowa. Yes, that includes Welsh English. At the same time, simply including all distinctions possible would result in far too many distinctions being present to reasonably represent.
However, simply picking and choosing distinctions would inevitably result in favoring the primary standard varieties, GA and RP. Consequently, a fair and unambiguous means of choosing what distinctions and pronunciations are to be included is needed. The only real solution there is to purely favor more conservative forms, without regard to what dialects they are present in.
More practically, I would favor excluding all new distinctions and shifts in vocabulary dating from Early New English past the breakup of North American English and English English. At the same time, I would favor including all surviving distinctions from Middle English, even if their current ranges are quite limited, save distinctions that have survived solely through transmission to Scottish English via Scots (aside from the fir-fur-fern distinction due to its presence in Standard Scottish English). At the same time, new distinctions that arose during the course of the 1600s which did not affect the a very large portion of the English-speaking world would be excluded, especially if they are not very consistent in the words the affect; hence the lot-cloth and trap-bath distinctions would be excluded, even though the foot-strut distinction would be included.
As for words that have arisen since then, one has to be a bit more arbitrary, especially because multiple pronunciations may not be reconstructable to any historical one; then often the only thing that can be done is to either arbitrarily choose a pronunciation (generally the most widespread one) or to allow multiple different forms to be in use. At the same time, cases like /A/ being used in one dialect and /Q/ being used in another dialect may allow one to make decisions like to use /Q/ in the particular case even if the words are not strictly reconstructable back to a single original pronunciation.
>>Or is it a case of an accent pronouncing a word with a different phoneme eg accents that distinguish for example horse and hoarse by pronouncing hoarse with their 'coat' phoneme rather than their 'caught' phoneme. This can be dealt with by allowing a few cases where a word has two spellings spellings. As can also be done with words like 'patriot' where the 'a' is pronounced differently either side of the Atlantic.<<
In the case of "horse" versus "hoarse", I myself would just have fixed spellings for them which would be present throughout the entire orthography. (In my current thoughts on such, such'd be "hoars" and "hoors" respectively.) Yes, the reader would have know how to distinguish the two in writing if they did not natively have the distinction in speech, but at the same time would not leave readers who do have such having to distinguish them by context alone.
As for cases like "patriot", though, I myself might favor having multiple spellings just to avoid having to choose between, say, NAE and English English forms (in this case "peetriët" and "patriët" respectively); it would be hard to really make a particular choice here.
Like Josh, I think spelling reforms are interesting thought exercises, but I don't think I've seen any proposal that I've really liked. (Wells' idea that the "lot" and "thought" classes should be written the same, for example, strikes me as too radical.) I think that if a reformed spelling is used, it should be kept as close to the current orthography as possible.
For example, I'd like to keep the current, distinctively "English" values of "long A", "long E", "long I", etc.; one reason for this is that I'd prefer not to have to change the names of the letters. I also think that schwas should be spelled as if they were full vowels, like in "patriot", because otherwise we'd have an excessive proliferation of a's, e's, or whatever letter we systematically chose to represent schwa.
I agree that if we do have a reform, we should start with some "easy", superficial changes like <debt, doubt, island> to <det, dout, iland>. Other changes like this would be <friend, people> to <frend, peple>, and <view> to <vue> or <vew>.
I think that the reformed spelling should be phonologically conservative. It should show that original distribution of the cot-caught distinction; it should ignore the lot-cloth split, because the split's distribution has never been shown orthographically, and its distribution is largely predictable anyway. Likewise it should ignore the trap-bath split. I think the orthography should show fern-fur-fir-unmerged pronunciations, in order to accommodate Scottish dialects, and because to reform these words would result in a cumbersome excess of either er's or ur's.
One systematic reform that I might consider would be changing <ea> to <e> whenever it has the value of "short e", as in "head, earn, steady, etc". I don't know if we should elmininate other values of <ea>, though; maybe <break, week> would become <brake, week>? If we totally eliminate <ea>, then this raises the question of whether we should likewise eliminate <oa>; if we do eliminate it, how do we distinguish <horse, hoarse>? But then you could point out that the distribution of the horse-hoarse merger is to such a great extent unpredictable from the orthography, that we might as well just merge the two lexical sets in spelling entirely.
One proposal, which was supported by Theodore Roosevelt (see http://www.childrenofthecode.org/code-history/300words.htm ), is to eliminate non-syllabic <ed>, giving us participles like <affixt, clapt, crost, mist, past, prest>. But then again, there are some words like "beloved" where the pronunciation varies, so maybe I woudn't support this.
Another issue is that American English reformed the spelling of some words like <instill, fulfill, enroll>, in order to better reflect the pronunciation, but only when the root occurs a separate word (still, fill, roll). This leaves us with cases like <compel, rebel, annul>, which are left unreformed. So I think either we should implement this reform completely, with <compell, rebell, annull>, or we should reverse it entirely, with <instil, fulfil, enrol>. Spellings like <instil, fulfil, enrol> were favored by some American spelling reformers in the past, as you can see in that Roosevelt-era proposal.
One thing that I might like to reform would be the "three-letter rule", which gives us "egg, odd, ebb, err". (Compare "beg, nod, inter, infer".) Spellings like "eg, od, eb, er" would be consistent with the way we spell other words.
For example, I'd like to keep the current, distinctively "English" values of "long A", "long E", "long I", etc.; one reason for this is that I'd prefer not to have to change the names of the letters. I also think that schwas should be spelled as if they were full vowels, like in "patriot", because otherwise we'd have an excessive proliferation of a's, e's, or whatever letter we systematically chose to represent schwa.
I agree that if we do have a reform, we should start with some "easy", superficial changes like <debt, doubt, island> to <det, dout, iland>. Other changes like this would be <friend, people> to <frend, peple>, and <view> to <vue> or <vew>.
I think that the reformed spelling should be phonologically conservative. It should show that original distribution of the cot-caught distinction; it should ignore the lot-cloth split, because the split's distribution has never been shown orthographically, and its distribution is largely predictable anyway. Likewise it should ignore the trap-bath split. I think the orthography should show fern-fur-fir-unmerged pronunciations, in order to accommodate Scottish dialects, and because to reform these words would result in a cumbersome excess of either er's or ur's.
One systematic reform that I might consider would be changing <ea> to <e> whenever it has the value of "short e", as in "head, earn, steady, etc". I don't know if we should elmininate other values of <ea>, though; maybe <break, week> would become <brake, week>? If we totally eliminate <ea>, then this raises the question of whether we should likewise eliminate <oa>; if we do eliminate it, how do we distinguish <horse, hoarse>? But then you could point out that the distribution of the horse-hoarse merger is to such a great extent unpredictable from the orthography, that we might as well just merge the two lexical sets in spelling entirely.
One proposal, which was supported by Theodore Roosevelt (see http://www.childrenofthecode.org/code-history/300words.htm ), is to eliminate non-syllabic <ed>, giving us participles like <affixt, clapt, crost, mist, past, prest>. But then again, there are some words like "beloved" where the pronunciation varies, so maybe I woudn't support this.
Another issue is that American English reformed the spelling of some words like <instill, fulfill, enroll>, in order to better reflect the pronunciation, but only when the root occurs a separate word (still, fill, roll). This leaves us with cases like <compel, rebel, annul>, which are left unreformed. So I think either we should implement this reform completely, with <compell, rebell, annull>, or we should reverse it entirely, with <instil, fulfil, enrol>. Spellings like <instil, fulfil, enrol> were favored by some American spelling reformers in the past, as you can see in that Roosevelt-era proposal.
One thing that I might like to reform would be the "three-letter rule", which gives us "egg, odd, ebb, err". (Compare "beg, nod, inter, infer".) Spellings like "eg, od, eb, er" would be consistent with the way we spell other words.
Another source of confusion in English spelling is foreign words. We seem to have an aversion to respelling these words to match our system, even when they come from a language that doesn't use the Roman alphabet! The digraph 'ch', for example means [S] when it comes from French, [tS] from Spanish, [x] from Scots or German, [k] from Greek, etc. I think standardizing our spellings of foreign words would probably help without causing too much hardship. I don't think we should disturb long-standing borrowings, like Greek and Latin ones, but more recent ones that haven't been entirely incorporated into English yet. We already have a de facto "foreign word pronunciation system" that uses the IPA values for the vowels, and I think it could be extended to standardize the spellings of loan words. Here's a few off the top of my head:
jalapeno-> halapinyo [hal@"pinjo]
spaghetti -> spagetti [sp@"gE.4i]
cocoa -> koko [%ko."ko]
jalapeno-> halapinyo [hal@"pinjo]
spaghetti -> spagetti [sp@"gE.4i]
cocoa -> koko [%ko."ko]
Stork and stalk don't really rhyme in the Received Pronunciation.
Hear that s t o r k is (sto::k) and s t a l k (sto:k). With the silent r the so called short vowels are prolonged.
cared (kæd)
cad (kad)
card (ka::d)
calf (ka:f) There's no r sound.
In dictionaries the colon ":" means that an r in American English is pronounced but in British English it disappears except before any vowels.
Phonics books don't want to make so much difference between "bother and father", that the o and a in these two words almost rhyme for most English speakers. In fact, b o t h e r is ('bC-dh^) and f a t h e r is ('fa:-dh^).
Hear that s t o r k is (sto::k) and s t a l k (sto:k). With the silent r the so called short vowels are prolonged.
cared (kæd)
cad (kad)
card (ka::d)
calf (ka:f) There's no r sound.
In dictionaries the colon ":" means that an r in American English is pronounced but in British English it disappears except before any vowels.
Phonics books don't want to make so much difference between "bother and father", that the o and a in these two words almost rhyme for most English speakers. In fact, b o t h e r is ('bC-dh^) and f a t h e r is ('fa:-dh^).
<<Stork and stalk don't really rhyme in the Received Pronunciation.>>
The OED says they do. The vowel in 'stalk' is long anyway. stork, stalk [stO:k].
<<cared (kæd)
cad (kad)
card (ka::d)
calf (ka:f) There's no r sound.
In dictionaries the colon ":" means that an r in American English is pronounced but in British English it disappears except before any vowels.>>
I don't know what kind of transcription system your using. This is X-SAMPA:
cared [kE@d] or [kE:d]
cad [k{d]
card [kA:d]
calf [kA:f]
There is no /r/ in the last word in American English, or any other variety that I've ever heard. There are several long vowels in RP that do not correspond with a vowel+r sequence in American English: /i:/ in 'fleece', /u:/ in 'goose', /O:/ in 'thought', /A:/ in 'palm' and 'bath', etc.
<<Phonics books don't want to make so much difference between "bother and father", that the o and a in these two words almost rhyme for most English speakers. In fact, b o t h e r is ('bC-dh^) and f a t h e r is ('fa:-dh^).>>
All British dictionaries I've seen show this distinction. In X-SAMPA, it's bother ["bQ.D@] and father ["fA:.D@].
The OED says they do. The vowel in 'stalk' is long anyway. stork, stalk [stO:k].
<<cared (kæd)
cad (kad)
card (ka::d)
calf (ka:f) There's no r sound.
In dictionaries the colon ":" means that an r in American English is pronounced but in British English it disappears except before any vowels.>>
I don't know what kind of transcription system your using. This is X-SAMPA:
cared [kE@d] or [kE:d]
cad [k{d]
card [kA:d]
calf [kA:f]
There is no /r/ in the last word in American English, or any other variety that I've ever heard. There are several long vowels in RP that do not correspond with a vowel+r sequence in American English: /i:/ in 'fleece', /u:/ in 'goose', /O:/ in 'thought', /A:/ in 'palm' and 'bath', etc.
<<Phonics books don't want to make so much difference between "bother and father", that the o and a in these two words almost rhyme for most English speakers. In fact, b o t h e r is ('bC-dh^) and f a t h e r is ('fa:-dh^).>>
All British dictionaries I've seen show this distinction. In X-SAMPA, it's bother ["bQ.D@] and father ["fA:.D@].