Spelling reform

I still think that stalk and stork do not rhyme. The fact that books depict this [stO:k], is completely wrong. The r in the British English has three ways as indicated below.

car (kA::), not (kA:) nor (kar)
Cat in R.P. and cot in A.E. should not rhyme.

caring (kE@ring)
care (kE@)

I hate spam or thread.

English is mainly spoken at a correct origin by British, who made it. It is not made in Poland or Russia.

What prick?

Anon said:

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.

They don't in mine which is somewhere between RP and Estuary. But it's because I have a vocalised 'l' even in words like stalk, calm, calf. My calve is not the same as my carve


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."

No, it means that the vowel is pronounced long regardless of whether there is an 'r' in the spelling or not.

"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^)."

In most accents in North America they rhyme, in most accents outside North America they don't rhyme

>>English is mainly spoken at a correct origin by British, <<

Oi mate. I dun' fink many Bwits speak propuh vuh way you say. Most of us dun' speak RP aw woteva you fink correct is. Vis is 'ow it's mainly spoken nowadays.

>>who made it<<

Yeah but that was long before RP and Estuary came about, innit?

In RP, "stork" and "stalk" (or more generally, historical /O/ and historical /Or/) are definitely pronounced the same.

<< 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! >>

I agree. We also seem strangely inconsistent in how we pronounce foreign words. For instance, many French words are still pronounced as in French, or at least with a reasonably French-like pronunciation. Spanish words also tend to be pronounced as in Spanish. But look at German loan words. It seems English really doesn't give a crap about German words, so we pronounce "wiener" with a "w", and we think Hitler's girlfriend (Eva Braun) was "Eva Brawn" and not "Eva Brown". A lot of people seem to seriously believe that the common German surname pattern "-stein" is pronounced "-steen" in German. Where'd that idea come from??

Real-world languages are spoken languages first and written languages second. Why do we copy the spelling when it sometimes dooms us to mispronounce the word for all eternity?

- Kef

English spelling reform is a "non-issue."

For starters, English is far too widespread and "decentralized" for anyone to ever come to any formal agreement on such reform. There is (than heavens!) no silly "Académie anglaise" capable of imposing its decisions upon Americans, Australians, Britons, Canadians, Indians, New Zealanders and so forth.

More importantly, I'm not at all convinced of its utility in the long run. English doesn't seem to be suffering because of it. On any given day I'm out and about London, the number of spelling mistakes on signage, menus and in the media appears utterly negligible.

True, I often encounter errors in "Mom and Pop" signage, but - guess what? I've routinely encountered such errors in, for example, German and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian signage at the "homemade" level too (and these are languages with very standardized spelling systems).

<<English is mainly spoken at a correct origin by British, who made it. It is not made in Poland or Russia.>>

Er, uh-hum...Don't get me started on the "neither-British-nor-American-English-is-more-original-than-the-other" rant again! Who is talking about Poland or Russia anyway?

<<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.>>

But they are shortened again when being followed by a voiceless stop.

>>For starters, English is far too widespread and "decentralized" for anyone to ever come to any formal agreement on such reform. There is (than heavens!) no silly "Académie anglaise" capable of imposing its decisions upon Americans, Australians, Britons, Canadians, Indians, New Zealanders and so forth.<<

That is something that would help prevent any such reform across the whole of the English-speaking world, making it so that such could really only occur within a limited section of it on a unilateral basis (which would be undesirable, as it would be far better to still have a single shared orthography for the entire English-speaking world).

>>More importantly, I'm not at all convinced of its utility in the long run. English doesn't seem to be suffering because of it. On any given day I'm out and about London, the number of spelling mistakes on signage, menus and in the media appears utterly negligible.<<

It's more a matter of simply that it has to be done sometime more than anything else, lest we end up with an extremely archaic orthography (like, say, Tibetan orthography). The kind of proposal I am for would at least move what the orthography generally represents a couple of centuries into the future, from the 1400s to the 1600s, and moving it further into the future is limited significantly by the breakup of English as a single unified dialect continuum around that point in time.

For those people who tend to spell erroneously orthography resolution means something necessary even if they speak perfectly. Memerization is not all to accept how this spelling is actually. Italians has not that trouble.

If this website had an audio recording I would pronounce convincedly that Stork and stalk don't really rhyme in the Received Pronunciation. It's just the way given for learners to pronounce according to those books. This should be changed some day. I respect those gentlemen that pronounce both words at the same sound. It's ridiculous the English is so but that's how it is. Some make a difference but others don't care or want to.

I don't opine English spelling must change right away, because this crazy effort might not have a good result after all. There's no exact spelling to say that should be, just the one we already have. Scientific spellers spelling reformers waste time in what most conservatives oppose. Nobody is so powerful to attack with a new way to write. We're in the Middle English. The actual English is supposed to be the last one at all. If it changes, also its name must.

<<It's more a matter of simply that it has to be done sometime more than anything else, lest we end up with an extremely archaic orthography (like, say, Tibetan orthography). The kind of proposal I am for would at least move what the orthography generally represents a couple of centuries into the future, from the 1400s to the 1600s, and moving it further into the future is limited significantly by the breakup of English as a single unified dialect continuum around that point in time.>>

I just read about the Tibetan system--wow! It hasn't changed since the 9th century, according to Wikipedia. That makes English look good. As I mentioned in the first post of the thread though, I think the costs of changing the system probably outweigh any benefits gained by it. I also think the difficulties of English spelling (for native speakers, that is) are probably exaggerated; the fact that we notice misspellings shows that they aren't that common. And of course any change in orthography (especially a radical one) will mean retraining people to read it and reprinting older materials to reflect it. Not to mention that a radical change would limit readers to material printed after it. And of course there would be a lot of people who refused to change; probably a few newspapers and publishers, which would be enough to undermine the process. Even in French, where one country (France) is dominant, and the language is semi-officially controlled by the Academie, a fairly minor spelling reform has been largely ignored; the situation in English is much more difficult.

I agree that orthographic reform is not practical in the case of English, for reasons like those you have outlined, even though I still desire it nonetheless.

Ai egrý dhat oarthográffik ryfoarm iz not praktikal in dhe kees ov ingglisj, foar riezenz laik dhooz ju hav autlaind, yven dho ai stil dyzáir it nundheles.

I'm afraid I remain sceptical about spelling reform; I believe the case is overstated.

The Chinese manage to cope handily in terms of literacy with a writing system that demands the memorization of tens of thousands of characters.

It is not the spelling that fucks me , it is the pronunciation of alphabets in words that fuck me hard - they sound different in each word. Take an example of "ch" , it has many sounds. Make it fucking regular so that we can guess a correct pronunciation of a word just from the word itself.

27--

you smart ass, what do you think about my dick position on this whoe issue?

"Guest":

Your language is underwhelming.

I suggest you take a hike.

Thanks for your suggestion. Now go back to my question.