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Ugh-free English
Would we benefit from ugh-free spelling? I mean if we got rid of all the "ughs" in words such as these and found a new way to spell those words.
rough, tough cough, trough though, borough through plough, bough thought, bought caught, aught draught laugh
Spelling reform is long overdue in English (it's about 500 years overdue) but at this point it'd be far too expensive to implement, and the prescriptivists would never be able to agree on actual reforms because it would look like "lazy" English... I'd have no problem adopting something based on IPA...
Ay kan dzhust si may mudherz fes... (Translation from Skippy-bet, "I can just see my mother's face").
I think the biggest problem with phonetic spelling reform is that you'd need different spellings for all the different dialects. In Britain, Australia, etc., you'd need to get rid of a lot of the r's, for example, and even the th's in some cases.
Spelling reform in English is far, far harder than most would think it would be, due to the need for a true crossdialectal orthography, which is something that is far harder to create than an orthography for any given standard or dialect.
How would you suggest that we spell them, Divvy?
As we do these: buff, cuff off, scoff go, no; doe, floe flu, gnu how, cow taut, astronaut taut, astronaut draft, raft staff, chaff
You'd be getting rid of the "gh"s ... just to be picky. It would be mostly doable, tho one problem which springs to mind is "thorough" which is pronounced differently in different accents. (Should it be "thoro" or "thurra"?)
rough, tough ==> ruff, tuff cough, trough ==> coff, troff though, borough ==> tho, burra through plough, bough ==> thru, plow, bow thought, bought ==> thaut, baut caught, aught ==> caut, aut draught laugh ==> draft, laff eight, weight, weigh ==> eit, weit, wey straight ==> strait thigh ==> thie "Laff" should work on both sides of the TRAP-BATH split rhyming with "staff".
>>You'd be getting rid of the "gh"s ... just to be picky. It would be mostly doable, tho one problem which springs to mind is "thorough" which is pronounced differently in different accents. (Should it be "thoro" or "thurra"?)<<
At least here it is /"T@r@l/ > ["TR=:M:]. Of course, what I suspect happened here is that [o] was unrounded to [7] (which does happen sometimes for unstressed /o/ here) and then raised to [M], which got reanalyzed as /@l/.
I've had enough of Slough as I had a rough time there, worse than I ever thought possible, so I bought a single train ticket out and went straight through to Paddington where I suddenly felt hungry so I bought some doughnuts and ate too fast as I began to cough and splutter which was embarrassing so I sat down under the boughs of a plane tree and sought comfort in the late afternoon sunlight in a park just off the busy thoroughfare that was the Edgware Road.
>>Could it have been reanalysis of "thoroughly" as /T@r@l/+/i/?<<
I bet that that was a major factor in reanalyzing /l/ as being present there, and why other cases with unstressed word-final /o/ have not been reanalyzed in such a fashion. |