I expanded on it in my post, but here it is again: People like me who found the ideosyncracies of spelling rules intriguing and helpful when it came to remembering how a word was spelt. Greater uniformity in spelling makes for less variety, for me that would have made it harder to learn, not easier. I remembered how to spell 'see' precisely because it was different to 'sea'. As a kid I would read voraciously and often come across words for the first time. Sometimes I'd read it wrong, and have an incorrect pronuniation in my head for that word. Months or years might go by without me hearing that word, but nonetheless encountering it in print. Or I would hear someone say the word, but because they pronounced it differently I would think them two different words *chuckles* 'recipe' was one. For a long time when I was a kid I thought that was pronounced re-cype. I'd see it and that's how it would sound in my head. Then I'd get that moment of discovery when I'd find out how it should sound. I used to love that. It was like I'd found something really cool.

Still happens. oh so rarely these days, but nice when it does. When I was little there were a lot of words like that. Usually they were words that I wouldnt really need to use, but would find in books that were a little too old for me. Guarantee those are the words I will never forget how to spell.

I like the shape of the words. On the page. It's more than just symbols, they have a shape and a visual flow and rhythm. I would miss that.

English is a an amalgamation of words from all around the world. I would love a standardize spelling but I doubt it will happen.
So for now English is a lot like traditional Chinese writing you just have to know.

Not true for the most part. We can muddle along most of the time. However, in some cases it is easy to demonstrate that the current standard spellings are not optimum and we would be better off with some revision to standard spellings.

I remember a story a little while ago about a Canadian newsreader working for a US television network who pronounced "lieutenant" the British way (as if it was spelt "leftenant"). However, his employers wanted him to pronounce it according to the American pronunciation (he was working for a US network). To do that, they had to eschew the correct spelling on the autocues and instead use the spelling "lootenant".

This need to depart from correct spelling in this way wouldn't be necessary if the two pronunciations had two spellings to go with them. There are precedents for this in English orthography, see: aluminium/aluminum.

For some words, it is possible for them to be spoken but not transcribed without loss of meaning. Example: If one mentioned "axes" in face to face conversation, the listener would know immediately whether "axes" was the plural of "ax" or "axis", but the reader won't know unless context was supplied. Maybe 30 words cannot be disambiguated readily because both meanings are nouns or both verbs.


That's not my problem.

If you're reading a single word, with no context whatsoever, it's irrelevant whether it's the plural of, using your example, ax or axis. Unless you're at Home Depot and can't remember if the word on the paper is to remind you to pick up a couple axes, in which case there is context.

It's not really mine either. (Oh wait, did I mean mine as in "belongs to me" or "someplace to get coal and stuff"?) ;)

How would you know that it is always irrelevant? How do you know that context is always available?

If the context is missing then it is the fault of the speaker/writer, not the listener/reader.

It is really odd how you find it acceptable to go for years before getting a simple word with an irregular spelling right. What's worse is how you think that's more acceptable than any effort to remove the deadwood from English spelling so as to reduce the learning time for others.

You fear the making of any change because you feel that would make it harder to read for those who have mastered the traditional spellings. There are different approaches to reforming English orthography, and not all of them make large changes.

Consider SR1 (Staged Reform 1). This was a simple rule for reform: wherever a vowel was pronounced the same as the "e" in "bet", it was always spelt with "e". No other rules. This would have the effect of altering the spelling of relatively few words in running text, but every now and again one would read words like "fether" where a surplus letter had been quietly cut. While traditionalist pedants would recoil in horror at that spelling ("You can't do that! It's spelt wrong!"), there is no reason why the "feather" spelling is considered the correct one, other than force of tradition.

But in reality, it is unlikely that anyone would have difficulty recognising the word "feather" with its surplus silent letter cut. At least, not more than once.

Here's a test for you. How well can you read Hamlet's soliloquy, from the First Folio? I won't put in the long esses but this is otherwise much as it was published in 1623.
How much trouble do you have reading that? Some, I'm sure: the usage of the letters u and v is not the same as we use them now. However, you should be able to read the odd spellings. Probably not with the same speed, but you won't have too much trouble recognising the words that are still in use.

If you can read that, you should have little trouble reading texts in modest reforms that only make small changes.

Honestly? I have absolutely no problems whatsoever reading that soliloquoy in it's original. I similarly have very little difficulty reading Chaucer in the original middle-english.

Also, I wasn't saying that I 'fear' any changes. Nor was I saying that I 'fear' them because I : 'feel that would make it harder to read for those who have mastered the traditional spellings.' As it stands, I wouldn't have any problems reading under the new spelling system. I have learned to read and decode language in a variety of forms. I may, however, have found it harder to master when I was learning to read.

I was making a comment about learning styles. It's something I recognise in my own way of learning: ideosyncracies make it easier for me to spot patterns. I was also drawing on my experience of teaching functionally illiterate adults to read.


For some of those adults, the inconsistencies in spelling made for profound difficulties in learning. For some others it made it easier. My point is this: whatever system you come up with, whatever changes are wrought in our spelling, or indeed in the way we teach, it will advantage some and it will correspondingly disadvantage others. For some of the people I taught, your system would have made all the difference. For others, and this counts for both my students and myself, it would have placed an additional stumbling block in their place.

It's not about what people already know (although, that does suggest that several millions of people would suddenly find their own understanding of their language made arbitrarily obsolete), it's about how people learn.

You are positing this as the solution to people's difficulties in learning to spell (amongst other things). I am saying to you, that in my experience, that is unlikely to be the case. It will help some and hinder some. And then you'll be left with a bunch of people who find it difficult to learn to read and recognise words for whom the old system would have been a breeze...and some people who'd have had difficulty before would find it somewhat easier.


Essentially, you are suggesting we replace one flawed and problematic system with another equally flawed and problematic system. We would simply be swapping one set of problems for another.

These questions make no sense. OK, I'll play. Show me an example, one word on a piece of paper, with no context whatsover, where you would be completely confused as to the meaning of that word and that knowing the meaning of that word is essential for any purpose. I contend that if no context exists (and this is your argument, I think there is always context) then the meaning of the word is irrelevant. It is, then, only an arrangement of letters.

If I'm wrong, I'll eat a smilie.

oh oh oh - can I play too?
Here is your word....

practice

Yeah...and what do you need to know about that word?

Just trying to play along ... sorry if this was strictly a 2 player game.
Either way - I 'm out.

Does Kingswood rhyme with Kings Food? if not why did the OP choose this as a username?

:lol: He really meant "Kingswould."

What do you mean you're out? You were well on the way to helping me make my point. Could you not answer the question?

:headshake

Uh - I don't have any idea. I can't even make a guess. I thought YOU were going to answer some question. I only offered a word that was PFA. :neutral:

Oh my.

Well, anyway, what is PFA?

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=PFA

See number 5, but air is the PC term. Try a bit lower and behind you.

Ok, I get it now.


But wait...what?

Pulled from ASS. no not a donkey - Geez, get your context right no not the opposite of left, the other right as in correct.... oh nevermind.

C-man, what the hell are you smokin'? I can't understand anything you just said, aside from PFA can mean either Pulled From Air or Pulled From Ass.

I'm still working on "tray a bit and..."

:confused:

I corrected that silly woman! There was a misspelling in the post - no not a post for a fence, the internet kinda post.

Ohhhhhhh...maybe it's me. ;)

I think you're both swaying pretty high in the breeze actually. lol

I got yer breeze right here

I encountered an article on Wikipedia on the weekend about the upcoming Magic:the Gathering expansion Zendikar. It reads in part: "Zendikar (codenamed Live) is a Magic: The Gathering expansion set, set to be released on October 2, 2009." Can you tell from that context alone whether the codeword "live" is the adjective or the verb? You can't.

Fortunately for you, I don't have to force-feed you a smilie right now, as context is provided in an infobox elsewhere in the article. The code names for this block of three expansions are given there, as live, long and prosper. However, the context that is needed to disambiguate this also requires knowledge of Star Trek and the thematic naming conventions employed in MtG expansions.

Now, why must we endure that kind of rigmarole? Why must we keep resorting to context in this manner just because some stuffy old pedants won't allow any needed changes to be introduced? If we cut the totally useless silent e from live (the verb; the silent e in live the adjective is OK because it marks the long vowel), then we wouldn't need any context to identify the shade of meaning of the word when given in isolation, as it is in the article.

Except then it would read Liv...which is a woman's nick name.

So, Kingswood, tell me, wuold you also have a page of disambiguation to assure us that the Liv in question didn't refer to a female character in that game?

Thank you for your post. It is this kind of well-thought out post that I was seeking when I chose to post this thread.

I also did not give you sufficient credit at the time in your previous post, as I had the distraction of a heavy and nasty cold at the time. Only later, as the combination of the cold symptoms and side effects of medication prevented my sleeping did I give further consideration to your little remark about "word shapes". That is important. The French Academy introduced accents to the French language in the 18th century for that exact reason - to reform the orthography without changing the word shapes too much.

Let's suppose that spellings were reformed in a reasonable manner. Many of the changes would involve single-letter alterations (deletions, substitutions and additions). Deleting a letter from hearken, leather would give harken, lether (harken is already an established variant spelling); inserting a missing letter into shadow would give shaddow; substituting a letter in meadow would give meddow. While these spellings won't be liked by the fans of current spellings, these are all plausible spellings that would have resulted had English spelling been updated systematically sometime in the last 250 years. The shape of the word does not change much, but irregularity is removed.

The shape of words would change more if words containing the notorious tetragraph ough had that combination removed. I venture that the word shapes of the ough words is not actually that useful for word recognition, as in some words one must look carefully at the other letters in the word just to work out which of ten different pronunciations to use for the ough. Which is easier to read: tough, though, through, trough, thorough, or tuff, tho, thru, troff or thurro?

Your point about some people being worse off is important. However, if changes were done with care, the number of people made worse off would be substantially fewer than those who would benefit.

Stretchiiiiiiiiiiiiiii *snap*. Sorry, you stretched too much and it broke. You are seriously scraping the bottom of the barrel with that one.

Come back when you know how proper nouns are spelt.

The name 'Liv' is in common currency. In a title like the one you just mentioned, 'Live' is spelt with a capital letter. In the title you suggest the article would read:

"Zendikar (codenamed Liv) is a Magic: The Gathering expansion set, set to be released on October 2, 2009."


Tell me again, why 'Liv' in that context couldn't refer to a female character called 'Liv'?

In what way have I demonstrated that I don't know how to spell proper nouns? Because I used a nick-name? They are commonly used in fiction, so why not gaming? You offered an example of how spelling reform might disambiguate but in fact it offers alternative areas of confusion. It's no more a stretch than your original example.

For all I know the character's in-game name might be Liv Tyler. *smiles* unlikely yes. But there's no reason why a character wouldn't be called Liv. Any more than there's a reason there wouldn't be a 'Liz' or a 'Bob' or a 'Chuck'.

Well...except I don't pronounce 'thorough' as 'thorro'. I am from the North of England; I pronounce it 'thoruh'. And in some accents 'trough' is not troff, it's truff.

Which 'accent' and indeed which 'version' of English are we going to privelege in our spelling reforms? There is very little parity of pronunciation. Between countries it varies enormously. Between the regions (and indeed between towns and villages within those regions) of my tiny little island there is huge variance in pronunciation. Even the rhythms and stresses of speech are different region to region. And indeed, class to class (we have the famed North South Divide. This stuff matters).

What about 'schedule'? It has two pronunciations: skedule and shhedule. Which do we privelege? 'Almond' is pronounced 'allmond' and 'ahhmond' depending where in the UK you live. Indeed it can also be pronounced allmund or allmond.

Who decides which accent is 'correct' ?

How do you know this? What figures do you have that you can point to that in any way back up your assertion that substantially fewer people would be disadvantaged? How can you possibly know this?

Oh well hell, certainly a game and a stupid show and movie have shown me the errors of my ways.

No, it has context. You pointed out the context yourself. If you are buying the game, you know the reference. No one is going to think it means Lie-ve long and prosper. Even if you don't know Star Trek you won't think it's lie-ve, because that doesn't make sense.

No, I won't be eating a smilie today. You have not proven anything. Again, show me an example, one word on a piece of paper with no context, where not knowing the meaning of that word makes any difference whatsoever.

Also...since when was reading an 'infobox elsewhere in the article' considered 'rigmarole'?

How bout people employ a little patience and make the assumption (which will usually be borne out in fact) that if they read the article the context will become clear.

Plus, just a minor point, but you'd also rob journalists and social commentators of what is a commonly used rhetorical device: word confusion *

(*wusion? :P)

These spellings were just examples so there's no need to get worked up about them. But for the record, I pronounce "thorough" the same as you, but prefer a spelling based on the American pronunciation because its kinda hard to put a short "u" at the end of a word because it doesn't naturally occur there. The spelling I demonstrated is easier to derive from the traditional spelling: cut off the last 3 letters; whereas your suggestion of "uh" involves a bit of slicing, dicing and splicing.

In both cases, the spellings I selected as examples for these words were closer to the traditional spellings than the ones you mentioned as alternatives. More on that below.

You also ducked the question about which you found easier to read. Obviously it was easier for you to nitpick some obvious examples than for you to admit the validity of my demonstration. (Which was all the more telling considering that the traditional spellings have been in your books for centuries whereas at least two of the spellings I had selected you may have never seen before.)
What accent is "thorough" spelt in? What about "trough", "though"? Do you know anyone that says "trough" as "tr -ou- *phlegm*" anymore? What about "heather", or "one", what accents are these? How about "ptarmigan"? Who says the "p" in that word? How about "colonel"? Who says both els and both oes in that word? What accent says the "b" in "debt" and "doubt"?

It's better to base the spelling standard (and it's a SPELLING standard we're discussing here, not a PRONUNCIATION standard) on someone's living speech rather than on the speech of people that have been corpses for centuries, or farcical etymological errors that have never been pronounced by anyone, ever.

Some spellings are still based on living speech, such as the difference between "tow" and "toe" or "see" and "sea". These should be kept.
Whose pronunciation did we "privelege" when choosing a spelling for aluminium? Sorry, aluminum? Would you look at that, it has two spellings! Perhaps a few words may end up with two spellings, to join the 2000 existing words that already have multiple correct spellings. Variant spellings for variant pronunciations should not be overdone, but in the specific case of "schedule" variants can be accommodated if this particular word is to be respelt.

Your accent question does come up a lot even among spelling reformers. One approach that I believe can work is to use the traditional spellings as a guide, and if there's a conflict to select a new spelling that closest to the traditional spelling. Sometimes this would cause a spelling to remain unchanged. This reduces the number of changes to spelling in a systematic manner.

We can get too carried away with that approach, however. Most people do not pronounce "blood" the way it is spelt any more. Maybe a few pronounce "blood" with the same vowel as "food", but I know of no accent anywhere that still does this. Some do pronounce it with the same vowel as "good", but this is mostly found among people who also pronounce "budding" and "pudding" with the same vowel. For most of us, the two words "blood" and "flood" would make more sense if the spelling was allowed to evolve to keep up with the evolution in the pronunciation; in other words, replacing the "oo" with a "u". For people that pronounce "budding" and "pudding" with the same vowel, "blud" and "flud" fit right in alongside these words, and this doesn't do any harm to them at all. For the rest of us, we would spell "blud" and "flud" with the same vowel as we now use in "hum" and "cut", which makes more sense than the current spelling does.
Who decides what is "correct" now? You tell me that, and maybe you'll have an answer to your own question.
How can you possibly know that disadvantage would be great enough to make it greater than the potential advantages? How can you, without seeing any detail, form the opinion that spelling reform must create disadvantage no matter what the changes may be? How can you claim to speak for everyone when you are only going by your own experiences, and the experiences of a few people you know? That is an awfully small sample in comparison to the hundreds of millions that speak English as native speakers.

I can't. And neither can you. But the system we have is the system we have. We have no way to know that intorducing a new system wouldn't cause greater harm. And I can only really judge my own experience and those of a small group of people. But the hundreds of millions of English speakers are not an amorphous mass; they are made of of lots of small groups each with their own experience of the language and no more reducible to a formula for change than they are to a formula for stasis.

As to which of the spellings I find easier to read: the ones with the 'ough'. Because that's what I am comfortable with. The second set of words jar for me and were I to find them in a piece of writing they would startle me from the text.

'Who decides what is correct now' Well, currently it appears to be a combination of 'official' dictionaries, netwide calls for updated information on spelling trends (conducted by the OED amongst others) and the rather more democratic sweep of natural change over time. All conducted on an uneven and unequal playing field arrived at after many generations of evolution, control, downright dishonesty, political and ideological movements and the arbitrary timing of the codifying of spelling through the printing press.

What you are suggesting is as artificial and 'top down' as the drive to latinize our spellings and grammar ever was. It will also irritate as many people as it will please, and appears to take no account of the profoundly political and nationalist elements of 'spelling'.

The English language is ruining spelling.

kthxbai

I hope you don't use a "DRIVE THRU" very often, as you would be so startled by that spelling that you would probably rear-end the car in front. :rolleyes:

The "tho" and "thru" spellings are both found in dictionaries, both listed as "informal". The "thru" spelling has a long pedigree; it was in widespread use before 1750 but was not preferred by Johnson when he published his Dictionary.
A top-down approach is used - and does work - for French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and most other major languages. There is no such standards body for the English language. It is the dictionary publishers that regulate the spelling in English, and they do a decent job but are not able to promulgate any needed changes.

There is one aspect of spelling reforms that you do not appreciate. They are not generally done in the same manner as metrication, where something new is introduced by fiat and the public are expected to change. Instead, they tend to be more democratic - new spellings are introduced by a government and the public is free to either use them or ignore them. Spellings like "program" and "catalog" were both introduced in this way in America about 100 years ago and gained sufficient acceptance to supplant the older spellings that are still current in British English. Other similar spellings introduced at the same time, like "leag", did not. However, the public were allowed to choose by usage.

Allowing spellings to change will cause some resentment, if your indignation at the mere idea of discussing the topic is anything to go by. However, current spellings also cause resentment, as many whose spelling is not as strong as they would like can tell you.

Some spellings are also indefensible - irregularity is allowed to accumulate for no good reason; spellings are not allowed to evolve to keep up with changes to the spoken language; and some words break so many rules that only a warped mind can find justification in their retention. If the spellings of some individual words that I have discussed were actually defensible, someone would have defended them by now.

*shakes head*

I'm not 'indignant' at the mere idea of discussing it. I've been discussing it with you. I simply hold a different viewpoint. I am positing potential problems with your schema. I see more problems in it than I see solutions; primarily because I do not share your interpretation of what is or is not problematic in the English language.

As to the use of 'thru'. It's entirely contextual. If I see that online or in a phone text message it reads perfectly fine, and indeed, I use it on occasion myself. But it would jar if I saw it in a newspaper article or a novel. It would seem inappropriate.

I don't like the top-down approach to language reform. By which I mean, I don't like governments getting involved in what is or is not correct in language. Any more than I would appreciate a government agency telling me what i can and can't call my child. The European governments who impose language change also, on the whole, have rather more input into what I personally consider deeply private matters, than the British government does.

I have more trust in the people who compile dictionaries, frankly, than in the State, to decide what may or may not be a useful spelling change.



[eta] which government would decide on English changes btw? Or would there be some kind of joint decision-making, in which case, should disagreement arise, who would have the casting vote? There is already a slow burning resentment in the UK at the 'loss of our culture' and the 'Americanisation' of our language (including spelling). Should Britain try to impose her standard? Not really, given that American English is more widely spoken in the world. What about Australia? New Zealand? Canada? It's hard enough trying to reach agreement within a nation, let alone bringing together multiple nations united by a language they each feel ownership of.

I have to ask...

Aside from your wanting it to be so, what's to stop 'liv' from being pronounced with a drawn 'i', similar to the word 'leave'? The standard issue vowel 'i' has the potential for three sounds. This allows for your commuted 'live' to have three forms: 'liv' as in 'I live in the US.', 'leeve' as in "We leave in 10 minutes." and 'live' as in "Saturday Night Live". Does your rule bank on the fact that we currently use the 'ea' to create the 'ee' sound in 'leave' to remove that sound from the list of possibilities? Do you have a rule in your New Spelling Order transform 'leave' into 'leev' to fix that problem?

In addition to Dani's very sensible response, I would like to add that DRIVE THRU is used in the UK seldom to never.
Yay for antiquated spelling! Look, it didn't catch on then, so why should it now.
How many of those languages do Dwellars spell in? Through trade routes, imperialism and the doggedness of American culture, English is the most widespread of all these languages despite its faults.

I am interested in your argument. I like to see different sides to issues, even if I didn't even know they were issues to start with. But this is a non-starter. English - as has been eloqently explained - is an adaptive language. And it will continue to adapt.

say we agree. your point is that words that rhyme should have similar spellings, no?

And yet words which rhyme for Americans don't for Brits and/or Aussies (and all possible permutations of that concept). For example, some Brits would agree that thorough rhymes with colour/color. I'm pretty sure few americans would. So how should be "improve" those spellings?

The problem is people see two extreams.

Either you have a stagnent, strict, conservative language, in which you preserve the meanings and thus protect yourself from the 'slippery slope' of communicative collapce.

On the other hand you have the everything goes aproach, in which you avoid the counter productive and pointless dogma of literacy, but can lead to some serious comunication problems.

Anyone who read Lord of the Rings at twelve can tell you that you can only read 'thou' so many times before the desire to scratch out your own eyes begins to overpower.

However, as I see it language evolves and there is nothing you can do about it. You can have in place structures to slow the mutation of words, but eventualy you're going to have a language in writing that doesn't make any sence in comparison to the verbal one.

I think the fear that its all going to become uninteligable is silly, because if people don't understand, it isn't going to pass on its message, which puts a natural cap on how much language can change.

Lets not worry too much about being 'right'.

That depends on whether the spelling of the word is dysfunctional for everyone.

The number of words where the pronunciation differs in a non-systematic manner between British English and American English is not large, on the order of one percent or so. Many of these words already have reasonable spellings in one or the other of these accents, so for such words we can justify leaving them as they are.

Where change is demonstrably needed is in those words where the spelling matches nobody's pronunciation.

There is a reasonable point about a possible dilemma regarding the choice of pronunciation for these words, but I have already made a suggestion that can work: choose the pronunciation that is closest to the spelling. This approach will permit words to remain unaltered if their spellings are plausible in someone's national or regional pronunciation. DanaC discussed the word "almond", and how some people actually pronounce it as spelt in some parts of England. By the rule I outlined, no change is needed here.

Some words may need to have different spellings to go with the different pronunciations, but that is best done if there is a demonstrable difference in meaning. I have discussed "lieutenant" and how we would be better off if the British Navy pronunciation of that word had a separate spelling. I will take the opportunity here to correct an error I made earlier: it seems the army-navy distinction is a lot older than I guessed. There are 14th-century spellings like "leeftenaunt" known for this word. Americans may only use the old Army pronunciation of this word, but given what the Americans thought of the British Navy around the time of the American Revolution, this is not really that surprising.

Don't misrepresent what I say.
It would be spelt on a similar pattern to words like sit, him, dish? Do you have trouble with these words?
Again, you are misrepresenting what I have said.
The redundant silent e in "leave" is only there so that you know it's not a u.

As for the ea digraph, I count it as a regular spelling. I have already said that.

If the available context was good enough for Shawnee123 to avoid "eating a smilie", it is good enough for you.
Proper nouns always begin with capital letters, and can be easily disambiguated from similarly-spelt words by that alone. How can you tell the difference between bob and Bob? Do you confuse bob and Bob?

This name "Liv" is not as common as you suppose, and it is certainly less common than either pronunciation of the word "live". It would reduce confusion; and how much confusion can there be with two words pronounced the same? There would be no more confusion with liv and Liv than there currently is with bob and Bob, or rob and Rob: one is a verb, the other is a shortened version of a name. The rules for disambiguation would therefore be very similar as well.

Why do you consider it OK for two common words with different pronunciations to have the same spelling, but if we respell them and there's a slight chance one of the respellings can be confused with a relatively rare proper noun that always begins with a capital letter and that (presumably) shares the same pronunciation, somehow that's worse?

http://vogons.zetafleet.com/files/orly.jpg

you must mean words overall, (i.e. including "and", "the"...) not just words that might need changing?

Because otherwise I'd love to see where you got the 1% from. having lived a significant time in the US and in two different accent areas of England, I find that figure hard to believe. Or in other words, I call BS on your stats.

http://blog.barfoo.org/wp-content/up.../ya_rly001.jpg

First off: yes I know that generally speaking, the context would show that Liv is a proper noun and liv a verb; however, you showed as your example to Shawnee a sentence in which the verb 'Live' is capitalized. Unless you are suggesting we also change the rules on capitalization in titles, then the example you found (and I think you probably had to reach quite hard to find one) would not give the context through capitalization. It is Live in your example; therefore, it would be Liv in my counter example.

In most contexts, even without the clue of capitalization, it would be obvious that Liv and liv are not the same thing; however, again, I must point out, that you chose as your example a game title. Games contain characters, and stories and in that context a subtitle of 'Liv' is just as likely to be a character name as a verb.

Liv is in common currency in the UK. Olivia was the most popular girls name in 2007 and is often shortened. This is about to get even more confusing of course, since the actress Liv Tyler has gone some way to popularising the shortened form Liv as a full name.

Kingswood. You managed to find a very shaky example of a single time that Shawnee's point didn't stand. I pointed out that this very example has room for confusion even if you change the spelling. Your response is to cast aspersions on my ability to spell or to correctly use the English language. Go away and find a less shaky example to support your claims and make our Shawnee eat a smilie.



[eta] oh and to pick up on Monnie's Bullshit call: there's variance between towns and regions of the UK in pronunciation of far more than 1% of the language. That's just region to region in our little island, let alone between British English and American English, and Australian English.

Doesn't happen a lot in LOTR, though. I think the boss Nazgûl says it, just once. A better example might be the Book of Mormon. I finished LOTR the first time at fifteen, and only regret that I did not first read it at twenty-one, when I enjoyed and appreciated its literary depth so much more. A twelve-year-old might get twitchy with LOTR's slow start, but the trilogy amply repays the mature reader.

You've just managed to make that word unintelligible to the ear. :yelsick: You're forcing it to rhyme with "gable" or perhaps the Monty Python "un-sing-ABLE." A G followed by an A will be hard, the improbably-spelt "gaol" being the only exception I can think of. Also a spelling I almost never use.

Clearly you don't -- but I recommend that you worry a little harder. The absence of the tadpole in the contraction Let's is bothering me, and really, it's no effort to get contractions right, nor spelling either.

Let's not worry too hard about Kingswood being stubborn about this, either. I can think of worse hobbyhorses to ride, and if this is his, it's still a reasonably amusing couple of laps around the carousel.

The only stubbornness in this thread are those people who get too precious when their views on the immutability of spelling are challenged, and who resort to puerile name-calling and other gutter tactics when they cannot refute a point any other way.

I could have done the same quite easily. However, I did not. It's clear where the moral high ground lies, and it is not with those who chose to demonize rather than refute.

Is it wrong to point out that some words in the English language have spellings that are demonstrably flawed? No. It's a shame that some people here simply cannot handle having this pointed out to them.

Is it wrong to question authority or challenge orthodoxy? No. If we never did this, women would not have the vote in any country and citizens of the USA would still be British subjects, being taxed without representation.

Did you miss the bit about systematic variation?

Speakers with the General American (GA) accent do not round the lips when they say words like "pot" and "bomb". The result is pronounced differently. So too does the Received Pronunciation (RP) accent not pronounce the letter R before a consonant. Americans pronounce words like "past" using a conservative pronunciation, but the British accent uses a broad vowel. These and other similar variations are entirely systematic, and the pronunciations of these words can be predicted just from knowledge of the general properties of the accents in question without hearing the individual words in advance.

It is only a minority of words that vary non-systematically, and hence in an unpredictable way between the RP and GA accents. Aluminium (which has a separate spelling "aluminum" in American English), vase, thorough.

Oh you poor baby!! You didn't have any problem when several posters did the same to me: they made personal remarks directed at me, my ability to spell, my intelligence and a few other libellious remarks about me. Now I allegedly did the same to you suddenly it's a bad thing?
Why don't you go away and answer several of my questions?

I can make up a few short sentences that illustrate the point quite nicely. Every one of those sentences would be gramatically complete. Every one would have a clearly obvious meaning when spoken (such that you can correctly answer a question about the sentence) but are ambiguous when written (such that you cannot answer the same question when written).

No doubt you or some other poster will say something about it being good enough. Really, it's not that hard to break English orthography in this way. If it's possible to write several complete sentences that can be understood clearly when spoken but not when written, that is proof enough that English orthography is flawed and cannot represent the spoken word with 100% accuracy.

I notice you don't pick up on any of my actual points.

Kingswood. This is pointless. I am officially out of this conversation. I have engaged with you, as best I can. I give up.

Bullshit. Then do it. You can't even do it with a single word, I would love to see you write a sentence in which no context exists.

u got orly'd dawg

*applauds* Lovely.

It would seem, just from reading through this thread, that you'd like to see a change in how English is presented for those who would read, write and speak it. I gather this from how vigorously you defend, explain and elaborate on your position on the subject. This is what you present to the forum, even if this isn't what you intended. Given this, how am I misrepresenting you when I say 'your wanting it to be so'? Isn't a change what you want? Or is all this just a mental exercise for you? It might help to clarify.

Now, back on topic...

I don't. But I can see where people could have problems with that. That rule wouldn't clear anything up. It would just shift the problem to a different set of people.

Where exactly does this 'u' come in here? The word and pronunciations involved here don't have a 'u' or any sounds associated with the vowel. Or do you mean 'u' in the sense that it's how we know it's not any other letter?

I suspect he may be referring to a convention applied, when u and v looked very similar in print.

Time for you to eat a smilie, Shawnee123. (Please don't eat this one: :greenface it looks like it's spoilt and might make you ill.)

Here are ten words, each put into grammatically-complete sentences (so an adequate amount of syntactic context is present). Each word is either a noun or a verb with two meanings and each meaning has a different pronunciation. The sentences do not have any semantic context supplied. Each sentence has a short question associated with it. If the sentences were spoken to you, you would be able to answer all the questions correctly. However, the sentences are written, not spoken. This makes the meaning ambiguous; you cannot answer the questions because as written both answers are plausible.

He is putting on the first.

• Is he playing golf or doing something else?

She showed her mother a tear.

• Did she show her mother a rip or some liquid from someone's eye?

He has been promoted to lieutenant.

• Does he serve in the British Navy or the US Army?

They read the newspaper every day.

• Present or past tense?

He resigned yesterday.

• Did he terminate his contract or extend it?

When they entered the hall, the musicians were bowing.

• Were they still performing or acknowledging the applause afterward?

She placed the lead on the table.

• Did she place on the table a cable or a lump of dense metal?

She bought a rare viola.

• Did she buy a plant or a musical instrument?

Bob hit a skier.

• Did Bob hit a ball into the air or did he hit someone on skis?

Our teacher drew some axes on the whiteboard.

• Does the teacher teach mathematics or woodworking?

To gain some insight into how the ambiguity can cause difficulty, it is instructive to experiment with text-to-speech engines. Text-to-speech engines can use syntactic context to disambiguate, but they cannot make use of semantic context because it is very difficult - if not impossible - to program computers to understand semantic context with 100% accuracy, and certainly not possible with the current state-of-the-art in desktop operating systems.

If you have Windows XP or Windows Vista, you can access the built-in text-to-speech engine in this way: Control Panel, then Speech. There is a prompt there that says: "Use the following text to preview the voice." If you paste the sentences into this prompt, and then click the button that says: "Preview Voice", it will read it out.

However, the sentences I provided do demonstrate the limitations of the technology. For example, the first sentence I gave reads as follows: "He is putting on the first." The text-to-speech engine assumes that the verb is "put", not "putt". Even if you add the word "green" to the end of the sentence (which provides some semantic context for golf that you can disambiguate as a human), the text-to-speech engine still says it as if the verb was "put". This shows that computers (or, to be more precise, Microsoft's text-to-speech engine) cannot understand semantic context very well.

Syntactic context is different. Computers understand this relatively easily. If you have it read the text: "We estimate to make an estimate." (a little contrived but it demonstrates the point adequately), the text-to-speech engine reads both occurrences of the word "estimate" correctly even though the two instances are pronounced differently (the last syllable of the verb has a clearly-pronounced vowel and the last syllable of the noun has a reduced vowel).

You're close but not quite right. Sorry about that, so I'll clarify this.

The letters u and v were once the same letter, which looked a bit like this: capital letter V, minuscule letter u. Around the time of Shakespeare, the letters began to be differentiated, but the modern usage of vowel=u, consonant=v was not settled until the middle of the 17th century. I posted some First Folio text in this thread. If you read it, you can see that the modern values for the letters was not yet standardized at the time of the publication of the First Folio in 1623.

Sometimes you can see examples of the letter V being used as a vowel even now. The façade of building 10 of the MASSACHVSETTS INSTIVTE OF TECHNOLOGY is one example. (Photo here).

Before the letters were differentiated, the way of disambiguating them was: if a consonant followed, it was a vowel; if a vowel followed, it was a consonant. See how it works with the sample MIT text above. Similar rules also existed for the letters I and J, and Classical Latin had these rules too.

The upshot of this is that the spelling of many English words with V in it still have a relic of the pre-split days. Many words with V in them (especially when V would be at the end of the word) are spelt with a silent E after the V. Those rare English words that do end in V are generally recent neologisms or foreign borrowings.

A related curio is that few English words have a double V in it, and those words that do are relatively recent neologisms such as bovver. In English, we generally double consonants that follow short vowels such as hammer, bubble and running. But we don't do it for V in older words because VV is an old digraph that eventually evolved into W. Early printers didn't always have boxes of W's available (it was a letter unknown in Europe), so they often made do with VV. The doubled V to mark a short vowel simply wasn't available.

If we put these together, it gives reasons behind some of the odder spellings in English when the letters o, u, v and w occur together. For example, we spell "woman" where "wuman" would be expected. Now try spelling it using the older conventions and we get: "uuuman". That's hard to read, so changing the vowel u into o was necessary to aid readability (uuoman), especially in handwritten mauscripts. There are not many words in English with the sequence "wu", but there are plenty of words that are pronounced as if spelt that way. Same goes for "uv"; few are spelt that way but many are pronounced that way.

That's nvts..

i was looking for where they say N V T S, nuts! in history of the world part1, but i found the mighty joint scene: