Radical spelling reform or partial modification?

>>There should be no spelling reforms of this great language.<<

Just the opposit, Adam! Like it or not, English is a "great" language. That's why we need spelling reform attempts.

The main reason I see for *not* doing orthographic reform for English is simply that it might be nearly impossible to both effectively create a new orthography that covers practically all of English reasonably well and which will be acceptable to the vast majority of the current literate natively English-speaking population. For example, I would expect that if a minoritarian approach (that is, trying to preserve as many features as possible and trying to preserve as conservative forms as possible) were to be chosen it would not be very acceptable to very many natively English-speaking North Americans (very likely a majority of native English-speakers at that), or if a majoritarian approach (that is, using a weighted average of extant English dialects to construct an artificial dialect which the orthography is to be for) were to be chosen it would not be very acceptable outside of English-speaking North America.

The fundamental problem is that a supermajority of natively English-speaking individuals today live in North America, and are presumably mostly NAE dialect-speaking, while at the same time most NAE dialects have lost very many distinctions that exist outside of English-speaking North America; if anything, they only real phonological conservatisms that I know of existing in many NAE dialects, especially those away from the Atlantic coast of North America, which are absent in many English-speaking areas outside North America, are rhoticness and the lot-cloth split (in dialects which aren't cot-caught merged). Hence, one ends up with a situation where if one were to take a minoritarian approach, almost certainly a majority and likely a supermajority would have *very many* distinctions that they would be forced to learn by rote, while if one were to take a majoritarian approach, very many outside English-speaking North America would end up having many differently pronounced words which would end up being spelled the same.

Furthermore, this is exacerbated by political and cultural factors. It is is unlikely that most English-speakers outside of North America would accept a new orthography based primarily on NAE dialects and in particular their phonologies, despite NAE dialects having supermajority weight, which should alone be grounds for primarily using them as the basis of a new orthography. Probably the only exception to this is that a primarily NAE dialect-based orthography might be more acceptable to non-North Americans were it to be based primarily off Northern Atlantic American English dialects and Maritime Canadian English dialects than English dialects more typical of the whole of the US and English-speaking Canada. The other way around, I doubt that many Americans would accept a new orthography based primarily on non-North American dialects, and those who likely would would probably be primarily limited to the Northeast, even though many English-speaking Canadians might be more flexible in this regard, with their stronger cultural ties with the UK.

Actually, there is one other distinction which at least some NAE dialect preserve today (even though it is dying out at the present), which is that between /w/ and /W/, which has been lost altogether today in at least English English; however, though, I think it is still present or has been transformed into a different distinction in many Scottish English dialects.

Which would you prefer personally, a minoritarian approach or a majoritarian one? My presumption is, even if minoritarian approach were to be chosen, non-NAE people would not accept it. Even now, some speakers spell "center", and others "centre". Then, your majoritarian approach could be better? I would not think so.

>>The fundamental problem is that a supermajority of natively English-speaking individuals today live in North America, and are presumably mostly NAE dialect-speaking, while at the same time most NAE dialects have lost very many distinctions that exist outside of English-speaking North America; ...<<

If "udder" and "utter" were to be spelled the same, I would hesitate to accept it.

>>Hence, one ends up with a situation where if one were to take a minoritarian approach, almost certainly a majority and likely a supermajority would have *very many* distinctions that they would be forced to learn by rote, while if one were to take a majoritarian approach, very many outside English-speaking North America would end up having many differently pronounced words which would end up being spelled the same. <<

Personally, I would like to visually distinguish "ern"(earn) and "urn" even if these are pronounced the same. In my thinking, "ear" as in "learn" would be spelled like "er", and "our" as in "journal" would change to "ur". I would prefer "jurnal" over "jernal". I prefer some partial modifications.

>>Furthermore, this is exacerbated by political and cultural factors. It is is unlikely that most English-speakers outside of North America would accept a new orthography based primarily on NAE dialects and in particular their phonologies, despite NAE dialects having supermajority weight, which should alone be grounds for primarily using them as the basis of a new orthography.<<

And vice versa. English speakers in North America would be unlikely to accept a new orthography based on non-NAE dialects.

>> Probably the only exception to this is that a primarily NAE dialect-based orthography might be more acceptable to non-North Americans were it to be based primarily off Northern Atlantic American English dialects and Maritime Canadian English dialects than English dialects more typical of the whole of the US and English-speaking Canada. The other way around, I doubt that many Americans would accept a new orthography based primarily on non-North American dialects, and those who likely would would probably be primarily limited to the Northeast, even though many English-speaking Canadians might be more flexible in this regard, with their stronger cultural ties with the UK.<<

Anyway, unlike some people, I don't want to think English spellings should be left intact.

New Spelling

This system was devised by the Simplified Spelling Society (SSS) of Great Britain, and the Simpler Spelling Association (SSA) of the USA. These two groups developed spelling systems independently, and then on meeting together they resolved the differences and so created the New Spelling system.

The designers of New Spelling decided to avoid double consonants such as occur in the words 'matter' and 'curry'. Instead, they wrote long vowel sounds with an extra 'e' - for example: maet (mate), reed, ried (ride), roed (rode), puer (pure). Other long vowels and diphthongs were written with specific spellings - including faer (fare), faather (father), haul, muun (moon), mount, join, and hur (her).

This spelling of long vowels created a problem when two vowel sounds followed each other. In these cases a dot was used to separate the two sounds - for example, hapi.est (happiest), die.et (diet), sie.ens (science).

The symbol 'dh' was used for the voiced 'th' sound as in dhe (the). The 'k' sound was spelt consistently with a 'k' - as in kat (cat), and kwik (quick).

Here is a sample of New Spelling:

We instinktivly shrink from eny chaenj in whot iz familyar; and whot kan be mor familyar dhan dhe form ov wurdz dhat we hav seen and riten mor tiemz dhan we kan posibly estimaet? We taek up a book printed in Amerika, and "honor" and "center" jar upon us every tiem we kum akros dhem; nae, eeven to see "forever" in plaes of "for ever" atrakts our atenshon in an unplezant wae.

New Spelling came very close to being accepted as the standard. It was presented to the British parliament in 1949 and rejected by only 87 votes to 84. Another bill actually passed its first stage reading in 1953, but was withdrawn after opposition by the Minister for Education.

So the idea of avoiding double consonants, and of spelling long vowels with an extra 'e' did not survive. One reason for its failure could have been that the system seemed to introduce too many major changes.


http://www.e-speec.com/new.htm

I admire "New Spelling" in that it is neither BrE-oriented nor NAE-oriented. At the same time, I have to admit that using ae,ee,ie,oe,ue always would make some problems even if it would be an easy solution.

What if New Spelling had been accepted as the standard before I was born?

As much as to me New Spelling seems a bit imperfect from a design standpoint, which is just my own personal opinion of course, I myself from this point still wish that the British gov't actually had accepted it back in 1949 or 1953, as that might alone have been the impetus which would have been needed to get it to be accepted throughout the English-speaking world; as I have seen proposals for orthographic reform which make New Spelling not that bad at all, its having been accepted would still probably have been better than sticking with the current orthography.

Congratulations on forming one sentence with close to 100 words! (give or take)

Impetus! Yes!

>>...; as I have seen proposals for orthographic reform which make New Spelling not that bad at all, its having been accepted would still probably have been better than sticking with the current orthography. <<

I am very interested! What kind of proposals have you seen ?

>>Which would you prefer personally, a minoritarian approach or a majoritarian one? My presumption is, even if minoritarian approach were to be chosen, non-NAE people would not accept it. Even now, some speakers spell "center", and others "centre". Then, your majoritarian approach could be better? I would not think so.<<

Well, the two are two different overall extremes, and I would probably choose one point in between them. It would probably be majoritarian in that features which are overly innovative or overly conservative compared to the overall weighted average would be excluded, except for an overall bias towards favoring conservatism over innovation when in doubt, which would be leaning towards a more minoritarian design. Therefore, I would probably still include phonemic distinctions which, while not common in large areas of North America, are still very common elsewhere, including in eastern North America, but at the same time I would strongly favor rhoticness, both of which are conservative, while the former is minoritarian and the latter is majoritarian.

In particular, the reason to include rhoticness and exclude nonrhoticness is that vowel and consonant patterns in most nonrhotic dialects can clearly be derived from the rhotic patterns of such. Similarly, the reason for maintaining in writing distinctions such as father-bother Mary-merry-marry, horse-hoarse, mirror-nearer, worry-hurry, and so on is that their noninclusion would be simply too much practically all non-North American English dialects, and because in most cases, in most NAE dialects, what the pronunciation in any given dialect for any given word "should" be can be pretty easily derived from the unmerged versions. Furthermore, these distinctions are already present, in most cases, in the current orthography, so one would not be really imposing anything extra on anyone by forcing NAE-speakers without these distinctions to at least learn these few basic distinctions that they just happen to lack.

At the same time, I would tend towards favoring many features of Scottish English, such as front/back distinctions for rounded high vowels, and of various Australian and New Zealand English dialects, such as phonemic vowel length distinctions independent of nonrhoticness, which would be majoritarian but not necessarily conservative in nature, as I suspect the vowel length distinctions in various Australian and New Zealand English dialects are actually related to Middle English /E:/ and /O:/. Basically, anything that is not in a significant majority of NAE dialects *and* is not in most English English dialects would be slated for exclusion. On the other hand, features that Irish, Scottish, Australian, and or New Zealand English dialects share with many NAE dialects which English English dialects generally lack would usually be slated for inclusion, as would features that are present in practically *all* English dialects outside North America which would not be too problematic for most NAE-speakers even if they themselves don't have them, such as the inclusion of the father-bother distinction.

Hence, I would probably favor an approach which is generally majoritarian within reasonable bounds, but which favors conservatism when in doubt, whether conservatism would favor majoritarian or minoritarian results. The "within reasonable bounds" part means that exclusions or inclusions which, while technically majoritarian in nature, would be simply unreasonable when considering the whole of the English-speaking world would not be done, if practically possible. Hence, I would probably end up favoring something that would generally end up probably looking like:

Is rhotic
Lacks phonemic vowel length (that resulting from nonrhoticness is covered by the rhoticness part above)
Lacks rounded front vowels
Lacks /x/ outside loanwords
Has lot-cloth split
Has merger of /i/ and /I/ word-finally
Lacks father-bother merger
Lacks Mary-merry-marry merger
Lacks mirror-nearer merger
Lacks horse-hoarse merger
Lacks worry-hurry merger
Lacks foreword-forward merger
Lacks unstressed /@/-/V/ merger
Lacks cot-caught merger
Lacks pin-pen merger
Lacks lax-tense /{/ split
... and so on.

You probably get the picture. Basically, something moderately close to what people tend to call "General American", with the very important exceptions that most of the mergers which have been applied to what has become it which are not present in most other English dialects outside North America would be excluded, and that non-NAE dialect features would be taken into account in weighting different competing forms within North America where there is no other clear way to choose what would be best. Also, most local innovations in NAE dialects and most innovations in southern English English dialects would be excluded. If anything, in many ways the results would probably be closer to northern English English dialects than Received Pronunciation and southern English English dialects such as Estuary English. overall.

<<Lacks lax-tense /{/ split>>

What's the tense-lax /{/ split? What does it sound like and what are examples of some of the words where each /{/ sound occurs? Is it an American version of the trap-bath split?

The lax-tense /{/ split is a vowel split in some NAE dialects in the Mid-Atlantic region in which the variation between lax and tense historical /{/ has become phonemic, as opposed to in most other NAE dialects where any variation between lax and tense in the realization of /{/ is purely allophonic in nature.

As a learner, now I just hope pass-passive split in BrE will be deliberately ignored in the future orthography. Same with lot-cloth split in NAE.

You are not against the current spelling system. You must be right.

>>...; as I have seen proposals for orthographic reform which make New Spelling not that bad at all, its having been accepted would still probably have been better than sticking with the current orthography. <<


I suppose this is one of the proposals for orthographic reform which make New Spelling not that bad at all.

http://www.e-speec.com/world.htm

World English Spelling

This system was developed by the Simpler Spelling Association (SSA) in the U.S.A. It was developed from New Spelling.

New Spelling had apparently been rejected by the authorities in England because it seemed to be too drastically different from traditional spelling. So World English Spelling attempted to minimise the differences. For example, 'th' was retained for the sound in 'the', instead of 'dh' as in New Spelling (but 'thh' was used for unvoiced 'th' as in 'thhin' (thin)). But 'k' was kept as in 'kat', and also the system for long vowels, such as 'ae' for long 'a' as in 'maet' (mate).

So the result was an interesting improvement on New Spelling - but it still retained too many unnecessary differences from traditional spelling, as can be seen from a sample:

Forskor and seven yeerz agoe our faatherz braut forthh on this kontinent a nue naeshon, konseevd in liberti, and dedikaeted to the propozishon that aul men ar kreeaeted eekwal. Nou wee ar en.gaejd in a graet sivil wor, testing whether that naeshon, or eni naeshon soe konseevd and soe dedikaeted, kan long enduer. Wee ar met on a graet batlfeeld ov that wor.

>>You are not against the current spelling system. You must be right.<<

Well, I think that the current spelling system is highly flawed, but at the same time think that the practical implementation of a new spelling system for *all* of English to replace such would be very problematic, both at the technical and the political levels. As much as I am personally for it, actually doing it would be very difficult in practice; however, such does not in itself make me want it any less. On the other hand, I often would rather stay with the current orthography, as flawed as it is, than accept a rather imperfect new orthography, as if what is to be in place is to be highly flawed, why invest all the time in effort involved in putting a new orthography in place in the first place? Furthermore, it would be easier to replace the highly flawed current orthography with a good orthography than a flawed *new* orthography which has already been put in place.