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Radical spelling reform or partial modification?
>>''If we try to use "Aufsehen erregend" as an adverb, how do we ...? That's why "aufsehenerregend" is better than "Aufsehen erregend".''
''This is a learner's point of view.''
So draw the conclusion that german orthographic reform should be terminated and classical german orthography should be restored!
In classical german orthography, there's a word called ''krebserregend'' meaning carcinogen, carcinogenic or cancer-causing. If you write it in two words, the meaning is changed somewhat!<<
Good! As for this, you are persuasive! Your classical orthography is better than the "new" one even if it is not perfect at all.
>>''Then, if some publishers still continue to use the old one, will they be
ordered to suspend business? If that happens, there is no democracy in Germany any more!''
Most likely not. According to the judgement of the federal court
(''Verfassungsgericht'') after leaving school and outside of a department
office, everybody is free to write as he or she likes. To my mind,
in Germany was never democracy, is no democracy and will never be democracy! <<
The fact was that people in general could not take part in decisions about spellings. That was not any democracy. But if everybody is free to write as he or she likes, it is not so extremely bad. You might say, "You claim that!".
>>Eito: Human beings are not logical, don't behave logical ..., so how can you expect that their languages will be logical? And which kind of logic? See Aymara language for a language with inherent three-value logic! What might seem logical to you might not seem logical to a native speaker. You try to enforce your logic on other languages and their spelling system. Thinking that way, you never will really learn a foreign language. <<
I am not so much logical as I wished. And you are more passionate than logical. As I learned some languages, I know that languages are not logical. "Der Frühling kommt. Die Sonne scheint. Das Wetter ist schön." These are not logical.
Am I trying to "enforce" my logic on other languages and their spelling system? No! I am not a person in authority. I am just expressing my opinion about something.
Will I never really learn a foreign language? That reminded me of one of my teachers of German, saying "No good if you cannot feel German is attractive!". No way! That may be part of the reason my German has been poor.
''>>Once again, do you know what you are talking about? If there are reformed spellings, you force the people to read that reformed spelling. Once you have learnt to read, you are going to read automatically, if you see something written. So performing a spelling reform in every case means forcing people to read odd spellings. Maybe most of them don't write them, but all people are forced to read them! Reading is also using orthography! <<
Oh, you wrote, "forcing people to read odd spellings"! According to your logic, you can also say, "If there are misspellings, that means you force people to read odd spellings." You must be a sheer purist!''
From the point of view of the most people -- the people which already passed school -- these are odd spellings. Spellings in the public normally aren't misspellings, and if so, in most cases, are due to play on words with such misspellings.
To my mind, it is quite normal to find an existing, evolved orthography in a certain language community. This orthography is part of the people who already learnt that orthography and will be part of the those who are born into this community and lean the language. It also becomes part of the people who learn this language not as their mother tounge.
Sounds are recognized by the ears, signs and words by the eyes. In every case, there's cerebral processing of that input respectively, and you must train to get it working. Performing reforms means a later change of that cerebral mechanism. As there is a certain age in which children can learn the sounds of a language -- and not only the sounds, but also the grammer -- quite easy, and after that age, it'll be very hard to become fluent in the way one becomes fluent in his mother tounge he or she learnt in that age, performing reforms means to ''reprogramm'' the cerebral mechnisms. Doing this will never be the same as the initial training, will never be so effectively, will lead to confusion.
It sounds rediculous to reform the sounds of a language, and that will hardly happen from one day to another. This will most likely take decades or longer. Learnig to read also means to ''program'' your brain to recognize certain shapes and associate them to a certain meaning. So if it is rediculous to reform the sounds of a language i.e. the oral recognition mechanism of the brain, it is also not good to reform the visual recognition mechanism of the brain. This is what I think. I don't really know that. I even don't know if there's some scientific investigation on that topic, but most likely, it is. But I think my argumentation is most likely right, because I know that there are such a certain age in which you can grasp your mother tounge from the world you live in very easily. Everybody knows that.
''Good! As for this, you are persuasive! Your classical orthography is better than the "new" one even if it is not perfect at all.''
We are here in a forum dedicated to the english language. One of the most wellknown proverbs of English is: Nobody is perfect!
What you consider ''perfect'' depends on your personal point of view! So, what you consider as ''perfect'' may be worst in someone else's mind and vice versa.
''The fact was that people in general could not take part in decisions about spellings. That was not any democracy. But if everybody is free to write as he or she likes, it is not so extremely bad. You might say, "You claim that!". ''
The fact IS that people never really can take part in decisions about spellings, because a spelling cannot or should not be ordered by a government. A spelling growes over the decades and centuries. Many people work on it if they use it.
In that sense natural evolved spellings are the most democratic thing, because everyone using that language can contribute to that certain spelling by dayly use.
If some usage fits better than another, this special spelling will survive in that language community. If it doesn't fit, it will be abandoned sooner or later. This takes lots of time: decades, maybe centuries. Spellings are undemocratic in the sense that if you want to create it by means of a poll or a democratic procedure, you will end up in desaster. As you know from real politics, there're always people in opposition, there always other opinions. And as you can't set a policeman behind everyone who writes down something, controlling if he or she uses the right spelling, you can never force the people to use such a artificital derived spelling, even if it is derived by a democratic process.
''I am not so much logical as I wished. And you are more passionate than logical. As I learned some languages, I know that languages are not logical. "Der Frühling kommt. Die Sonne scheint. Das Wetter ist schön." These are not logical.''
I'm passionate, yes. But see my argumentation: Isn't it logically derived form facts?
To be logical doesn't mean anything because the result of a logical reasoning depends of the premisses you start form. The sentences you mentioned are statements, which can be either true or false.
''Am I trying to "enforce" my logic on other languages and their spelling system? No! I am not a person in authority. I am just expressing my opinion about something.''
But you recomment spelling reforms, without really knowing what that means to a certain language. If you propose some spelling changes, you ''inforce'' your logic on that spelling. Good, maybe ''enforce'' is too hard! Of course, you're not in authority.
''Will I never really learn a foreign language? That reminded me of one of my teachers of German, saying "No good if you cannot feel German is attractive!". No way! That may be part of the reason my German has been poor. ''
If you want to learn English, but only in a reformed spelling you propose, so you don't learn the real English. So you don't really learn that foreign language, but the picture of it you made by your own.
>>We are here in a forum dedicated to the english language. One of the most wellknown proverbs of English is: Nobody is perfect!<<
In this forum, I have seen some spellings, such as "Brittish"(British) and "ment"(meant). English spelling is not so stable. I still hope it is gradually changing. Not everyone, but some people think the same. I am not alone.
Why don't you visit and join another discussion, Bardioc?
http://www.antimoon.com/forum/t584.htm
Thank you for having chosen me as an opponent. Without you, I might not have bought a new German dictionary.
Speaking of orthographic reform, and the previously mentioned subject of trying to make an orthography that strongly favors maintaining any distinctions present, and which strongly favors conservative forms over progressive forms, one thing which I have been uneasy about such is that it would likely result in an extremely minoritarian as opposed to majoritarian approach to orthographic design. For example, even if one only considered North American English dialects, it would be very likely that Northeastern American and Maritime Canadian English dialects would be by far the strongest influence on the actual standardized orthography, with probably the sole exception that it would almost certainly be rhotic rather than non-rhotic and not cot-cought-merging, and the vast majority of English-speaking Americans and Canadians would simply be forced to memorize very many distinctions that they themselves do not have.
This would be even further amplified if one were to try to create a single orthography for all of English, as while practically about 73% (using 1997 statistics) (thank you Wikipedia) of all native English speakers live in the US and Canada, and probably a very significant majority of those live outside the northeast US and maritime Canada. Hence, it is likely that even a *supermajority* or close to of native English-speakers would end up using an orthography which would be effectively determined by the dialects of the other remaining approximate third of native English-speakers. Hence, in practice, such would be a highly minoritarian approach to creating a new standardized English orthography, and the only reason I really see for even trying such in practice is to make such politically acceptable to the rest of the English-speaking world outside of North America. This would be at the cost that to a very significant majority of native English-speakers, it would no longer be even close to representative of what they think of as "standard" or as formal language or of their native dialects, but rather would instead be learned in nature, and would not be that far from the current orthography in that respect.
Furthermore, the resulting orthography would likely be extremely complex in nature, and would likely require intimate knowledge of various particular dialect groups which may significantly differ from much of the rest of English. In particular, it is likely that phonemic vowel length distinctions would be introduced at the orthographic level were Australian English dialects to be included, and furthermore it would likely become even more complex were Scottish English dialects to be included. For example, distinctions between, for example, /u/ and /y/, /U/ and /Y/, /k/ and /x/, and /@`/ and /r=/ would likely have to be introduced, at least from what I have heard Scottish English speakers say about Scottish English dialects on here. If anything, from what it seems to me, were Scottish English at all to be included, very many aspects would be added to the resulting orthography that would effectively have to be simply memorized by the *vast* majority of native English-speakers (that is, practically all without a direct knowledge of Scottish English and or Scots itself). On a more local level, in an orthography for all of English, it would probably not be best to include things like the (apparently) phonemic /@I/ in my dialect, which would be something that the vast majority of native English-speakers would end up being forced to simply memorize, and would only help further inflate the complexity of the resulting orthography.
Indeed people would end up being forced to simply memorize many distinctions that they themselves do not phonemically have, but we need distinctions such as cot/caught, ferry/furry and Mary/marry/merry, at least, when we write. And I think we need miner/minor distinction visually.
To create a single orthography for all of English should not mean it may include every feature of all dialects.
>>On a more local level, in an orthography for all of English, it would probably not be best to include things like the (apparently) phonemic /@I/ in my dialect, which would be something that the vast majority of native English-speakers would end up being forced to simply memorize, and would only help further inflate the complexity of the resulting orthography. <<
I hope nothing would just help further inflate the complexity of the resulting orthography.
There should be no spelling reforms of this great language.
Saturday 08/01/2005
Revelling in the richness of English spelling
Summary:
Revelling in the richness of English spelling. In the first of four programs, Robert Dessaix examines the case AGAINST spelling reform.
Robert Dessaix: Not long ago in Melbourne, at the bohemian end of Brunswick Street, I was about to go into a restaurant for lunch, when I noticed that coriander had been misspelt on the blackboard outside. I hesitated, re-read the chalked-up menu and then found myself wandering further up the street to look for somewhere else to eat. I know what you're thinking, but let me explain.
English spelling, and surely we can all agree on at least this, is messy. There's a pattern to it, it's not a free-for-all, you can't spell 'parrot' with a C, for example, but it is messy.
Noah Webster, of Webster's Dictionary, went even further, calling it 'evil' and 'barbarous'. And George Bernard Shaw, not to be outdone, declared that civil war was a price worth paying for reforming the alphabet. 'The waste of war is negligible', he wrote, 'in comparison to the daily waste of trying to communicate with one another through an alphabet with sixteen letters missing.'
(I'm not sure, by the way, how he came up with the number sixteen; standard British English would actually need at least 44 symbols for all its separate sounds, although you can make some do double duty in combination, of course, like TH and SH).
On the other side of the fence there are those (like Vivian Cook, the author of a recent book on the subject called Accomodating Brocoli in the Cemetary, Or: Why can't anybody spell?) who think that the richness and resourcefulness of English spelling should be 'celebrated', as he puts it. Quite how he doesn't say, perhaps he meant 'revelled in'?
Whether or not you feel inclined to revel in the almost boundless inconsistencies of English spelling probably depends on what you think spelling is for. The Finns, for example, clearly think that spelling is there to indicate exactly how a word sounds. If Finns can read Finnish, they can pronounce it correctly, and if they can pronounce it correctly, they can also write it. There's only one possible way to write 'Helsinki', and having written it, only one possible way to say it. Very efficient. No surprises if you're Finnish.
The French have adopted a more whimsical approach, as you might expect. The roots of the modern tongue have been (pleasingly, some might say) preserved in the spelling.
That P on the end of 'champ', for example, as in Champs-Elysees, is of no use in working out how to pronounce C-H-A-M-P, which means 'a field', but it does link 'champ' visually to other words connected with fields, such as 'champignon' (mushroom), 'campagne' (countryside) and even, I suppose, remotely, to 'champagne'; and distinguishes it as well from 'chant' spelt C-H-A-N-T (singing), which in turn has a silent T on the end to link it with 'chanter' (to sing).
There's a price to pay, of course, for indulging in these little pleasures: while your chances of knowing how to pronounce a French word from the spelling are pretty good, knowing how to spell it from the pronunciation can be trickier.
English presents a worst-case scenario: we can't tell, without assiduous training, how to pronounce what we read, and without years of practice, we can't write what we say—stymied in both directions, in other words.
Oh, we know why it's messy, that's no mystery. We know why even the most highly educated pedant will occasionally have to resort to looking a word up in a dictionary, even common words like 'occasionally'. English orthography is chaotic, firstly, because we've been spelling (unlike say, the Maori or the Inuit—I'm not sure about the Finns) for an awfully long time, for millennia now (two l's and two n's, by the way) and some habits simply die hard, even though over the centuries the pronunciation has changed radically—there's been no KH in 'night' or 'light' for hundreds of years, at least in polite society.
Secondly, it's chaotic because the Normans mucked things up by introducing masses of French words in 1066 along with the French spelling, which obeyed completely different rules from Anglo-Saxon spelling and gave us horrors like 'connoisseur' and 'horror', for that matter; and thirdly (and the spelling reformers will have to come to terms with this awkward fact) it's chaotic because standard English happens to have a huge number of phonemes (sounds we recognise as distinct enough from one another to change the meaning of a word. I can hear the difference between 'Cairns' and 'Cannes', for instance—although any number of ABC presenters can't—and even, on my better days, between 'bade' and 'bad'—can you?).
Unfortunately for us, the alphabet we inherited via the Romans from the Phoenicians, Etruscans, Greeks, Celts and Germanic tribes just can't cover all these separate sounds; there are well over forty of them, as I mentioned. And so, confusingly, we give most letters several jobs to do (look at poor old A in 'hat', 'hate', 'heat', 'haughty' and 'heart', for instance, forced into shaky alliances with other letters which it then betrays in 'teat' and 'tear'. Meanwhile, all except three letters (J, V and Y, the jury's out on O) give up trying to do anything at all at times and fall silent; some, like C, X and Q, sit about doing nothing other letters aren't already doing; some hang on as if they thought we were still speaking mediaeval French; some like the S-C-I in 'prosciutto' behave as if they were Italian, and we still have no letter to cover the common vowel sound (er) in 'myrrh', 'err' and 'occur', not to mention that short vowel spelt in three different ways in the one word 'malevolent'.
But does it really matter all that much?
George Bernard Shaw, as I mentioned, thought the extraordinary tangle of English spelling did matter, mightily, because learning to spell wastes time. But I suspect there's another reason for the zeal of spelling reformers: they have an ingrained distaste for disorder and indiscipline. It's an aesthetic objection I think, as much as a practical one. Vivian Cook, on the other hand, the author of 'Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary' (and his title is misspelt in predictable ways, as a matter of fact, just in case you decide to google it), Vivian Cook, on balance, doesn't seem to think it matters much at all. Spelling for the English speaker, Cook would suggest, is about much more than efficiency in reading and writing.
Like the French, for example, we too can enjoy reminding ourselves as we read and write, of the history of our language, of the old connections between words. Take the G in 'sign', for instance, which connects 'sign' to 'signature', just as the T in 'Christmas' reminds us of what we're supposed to be celebrating each December. Or take the H in 'khaki', forever redolent of British India. 'Haemorrhage' is admittedly a nightmare, but also a homage to its Greek roots, and intimidating, which is appropriate for medical terminology. Not everyone, naturally, will find these pleasures worth the effort, but it's a point of view. I can see that spelling 'haemorrhage' H-E-M-E-R-I-J fails to reflect the full horror of a haemorrhage, and ditto for 'diarrhoea'.
Vivian Cook has a lot of fun with other ways in which the flexibility of English spelling—I'm trying to put the most positive possible cast on it here—allows us to do more than simply write for ease of reading and writing. He's particularly keen on the games we can play with names—brand names, business names, personal names and so on, the way we can pronounce Bucket as Bouquet if we want to, or spell Bucket with two Ts, for that matter (anything to allow Buckets to say 'I am not a bucket').
English spelling really comes into its own with brand names; all those Ks and Zs and Xs. Think of the difference between a company called Quick Clean, spelt in the traditional way, and spelt K-W-I-K K-L-DOUBLE E-N. The one with the Ks sounds as if it would do the cleaning in half the time, admit it.
Drug companies, you may have noticed, love X and Z—I won't read any names out, this is the ABC. That's because Ks, Zs and Xs connote dynamism, according to Cook, which is also why pop groups love them; think of INXS and Split Enz. Aliens, by the way, such as the Daleks, also like the letter K, although friendly aliens, Cook points out, often have names with lots of l's and n's in them—less plosive, you see, more like us.
Apart from a few prepositions and what Cook mysteriously calls 'structure words', we English-speakers just don't like words with under three letters—had you ever noticed that? So we add an extra G to 'egg', an E to 'axe', a D to 'odd', an L to 'ill' and so on. They're proper words, we seem to be saying, unlike 'to' and 'by', 'no' and 'so', they deserve weight on the page. English spelling allows us to give it to them.
One of the games we play with spelling in English (and it's the game I was playing in Brunswick Street) is not unlike the ones we play with accent and dress, even with garden design.
For better or for worse, good spelling in English-speaking countries is a sign of social accomplishment. To put it another way, bad spelling is a kind of bad manners, like using the wrong cutlery when you're out, or talking on your mobile phone during a concert.
What you do in the privacy of your own home (or text-messaging a friend) is one thing—Yeats, Keats, Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf were all sloppy spellers in private—but in public it's a matter of manners, of signalling that you are to be taken seriously.
This social dimension to English spelling may also be offensive to some reformers, possibly to Shaw, although he didn't say so, because it turns spelling into yet another arena we have to pass a test in, have to prove our social acceptability in, our connoisseurship, another arena where we have to play according to rules we had no part in compiling. And some will fail. What is astonishing, though, I think, given the intricate footwork required, is how few do.
The fact is that you know that woman in Nigeria who emails you with a request to park $18 million in your account is a fraud (and couldn't possibly be the ex-prime minister's wife) because, apart from anything else, she can't spell 'eighteen'. And however egalitarian you might be, (like me in Fitzroy) you could well think twice about patronizing a restaurant where the menu features 'deserts' and 'fried wantons', simply because if you're looking for class, well, bad spelling hasn't got any.
As Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son in 1750:
orthography ... is so absolutely necessary for ... a gentleman, that one false spelling may fix ridicule upon him for the rest of his life. ... even a woman of a tolerable education would despise and laugh at a lover who should send her an ill-spelled billet-doux.
Should anything be done about this web of inconsistencies and half-rules and useless and overworked letters? You may be able to work out why 'appal' needs two Ls when it becomes 'appalling', and can probably cope admirably with the H in ghost, ghastly, Ghana, gherkin, ghetto and ghoul; but perhaps some simplification of the rules would be in order. One day. Eventually. Somewhere at the seat of empire. The trouble is that at the moment in the English-speaking world there's no single authority empowered to change the rules—as there just conceivably might be in France, say, or Russia or China.
People have been proposing changes for 500 years—getting rid of the silent Es and double consonants, for instance, banishing flagrantly useless letters from words like 'laughter', 'talk' and 'sight'; but nobody in any English-speaking country, let alone across the lot of them, has the authority to bring changes in. If the British press decided to simplify English spelling, would we or the Americans necessarily follow?
And what publisher is going to risk publishing a book nobody has yet learned to read? Then there's the question of dialects: in some parts of the United States, for example, they don't distinguish between 'merry', 'Mary' and 'marry', and I suspect most Canadians don't distinguish between 'cot' and 'caught', either, or 'tot' and 'taught'. To us the difference is vital.
So whose phonological system should we go with when reforming? 'Tomayto, tomahto, potayto, potahto ... let's call the whole thing off', seems to be the present consensus.
Jill Kitson: Robert Dessaix. Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary by Vivian Cook is published by Profile Books. And that's all for this week's Lingua Franca.
And Adam still can't debate with his own words...
>> Revelling in the richness of English spelling <<
"Richness"! What a beutiful euphemism!
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