Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- What do "regular" writing systems do when different dialects use different sounds for the same word? Do different people write the same word differently? Or are people forced to confirm to a standard dialect? Both seem bad.by advisedwang
- The article doesn't go into it but G B Shaw went so far as inventing an alternate orthography for English called Shavian -- publishing a book printed in it -- and then commissioned another alphabet by Kingley Read called Quikscript. Both alphabets are phonetic.by imglorp
- "Literate people have spent years learning the spelling of leaden and its likes and will be reluctant to admit that if the adjective acquires the form leden, their troubles were not worth the effort. In my opinion, our only hope to make progress is to adopt a minimalist program, trying to reach the desired goal by alienating no one and taking one small step after another over possibly several decades."
-------------
This is an odd example to lead with. Leaden's root is lead, and one of its meanings is "made of lead". If we change its spelling to leden, then what do we do with "lead"? If we change lead to led, then we replace one confusing homonym with another homonym that's a homophone to boot. If we don't, we make it harder for readers unfamiliar with the meaning of leden to deduce its meaning from the root. This is not an unambiguously good change.
The reality of English is that there is no central authority on spelling, pronunciation, grammar, or even vocabulary. Dictionaries merely catalogue what is in common use. This may make the language anarchic to some, but it also welcomes foreign loan-words, idioms, etc. in a way that serves international users and enriches native speakers. The accepted spelling of some words has changed over time because of common usage. This society, instead of looking for some way to enact sweeping reforms, should just pick a couple or even just one word that could be simplified without causing side-effects and promote that change. If that change catches on, people may generalize it to similar words on their own.
by beloch - If they really want to reform English spelling, they should write a spell-checking library in every major programming language that builds on every major platform and can be easily integrated into chat, message, and mobile keyboard applications which defaults to “English 20xx”, but still supports default English.
All it would need to do is not highlight “improved spellings” as incorrect in “English 20xx” mode at the start. Then it could slowly turn the knob as they see increasing usage.
If you want to do even more then you can implement speech-to-text and transcript generators that default to “English 20xx”.
by Veserv - This is a good start, albeit I don't share the author's enthusiasm for eliminating letters that are used in sounding out the word. I would rather we focus on popular words and remove any ambiguity in how someone would speak them if they read it for the first time. I think it is essential for the future of English that people communicating online (using text) can avoid the ambiguity in how the receiver would read and speak their message. For that reason, truncating smaller words to use fewer letters while retaining how they sound is far more valuable.
As an example, bothering with miscellany is a waste of time. Almost no one uses it when writing a tweet or a text message. It's a bigger bang for buck to change words like through to thru or knife to nyfe and so on.
by glitchc - Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
- The most successful push on spelling was when the Chicago Tribune switched to simplified spelling in the 1940s through the 1960s.[1] They started with about 40 words, and gradually expanded. But after McCormick died, the company gave up, retaining only "tho" for "though". That ended in 1975.[2]
[1] https://www.spellingsociety.org/uploaded_media/tribune-media...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/30/archives/thru-is-through-...
by Animats - A problem with all English spelling reform is that it is often intended to be phonetic and usually favours the pronunciation of the person proposing the change another is that it makes homophones also homonyms.
Where I come from in the South West of England bath has a long a and so does castle but in the North East they both have short a. Which one should the orthography reflect? What about house? Pronounced almost to rhyme with mice in some quarters and moose in others.
What do you do about Shrewsbury when even the locals don't all agree on how it is pronounced? Will Scots get to spell the name of a large aquatic mammal as hwale to more closely match the pronunciation? One positive change might be that in England the word wales would be reserved for the animals and we would all start referring to the country as Cymru.
If spelling reformers want to spell words differently then they should just do it the way that English has done for centuries, just do it. If you prefer to write labor rather than labour then do so. If you would rather write jeeny than genie go ahead. After all as mentioned in the article there is no English Academy to tell you not to. If others agree then the written language will adjust.
My Norwegian teacher was adamant that Norwegian is pronounced as written despite knowing perfectly well that almost every valley here has a different accent or even dialect. Norway gets away with it only by declaring that the two official forms are merely standardised written Norwegian; no one actually speaks bokmål or nynorsk.
by ninalanyon