Spelling is ruining the English language

Originally Posted by Kingswood

Welcome to the Cellar. I especially recommend the Image of the Day.

As for the point you raise, for spelling reforms in English it is an approach that can work quite well.

It would make the most sense for those words where a particular misspelling of a word is already in widespread usage, with some of these particular misspellings being almost as common as the standard spelling itself. Minuscule is the standard spelling, but miniscule is seen so commonly that it is often found in edited text and a few dictionaries even include it as a variant. If a reform was introduced that gave the miniscule spelling the status of an acceptable variant spelling, it would find ready acceptance because many people already use this spelling.

I don't know how you pronounce "Minuscule", but the way I pronounce it would make "Miniscule" phonetically incorrect, compounding the problem you're complaining about.

How do you propose to phoneticize the spellings of words that are pronounced differently in different parts of the country? Will you go by majority rule, and add an "R" to "Wash"? How will you spell "Warm"; "Warm", "Werm", or "Wuorm"?

The other day, on my board, I mentioned that I was building a pullet brooder, and my friend from Michigan asked me what a pullet is, and whether it rhymes with "Mullet" or "Bullet".

As far as I know, pullet, mullet, and bullet all rhyme. But in her region, apparently they don't.

How do you spell to solve for regional variations, if you're spelling phonetically?

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by Tiki

I don't know how you pronounce "Minuscule", but the way I pronounce it would make "Miniscule" phonetically incorrect, compounding the problem you're complaining about.

How do you propose to phoneticize the spellings of words that are pronounced differently in different parts of the country? Will you go by majority rule, and add an "R" to "Wash"? How will you spell "Warm"; "Warm", "Werm", or "Wuorm"?

The other day, on my board, I mentioned that I was building a pullet brooder, and my friend from Michigan asked me what a pullet is, and whether it rhymes with "Mullet" or "Bullet".

As far as I know, pullet, mullet, and bullet all rhyme. But in her region, apparently they don't.

How do you spell to solve for regional variations, if you're spelling phonetically?

Phonetic spelling runs into trouble with regional variations, as you correctly point out. It is easy to find spellings that would be one word for a particular regional accent and a different word for another.

Some examples:
* The British English pronunciation of "heart" is very close to the American English pronunciation of "hot".
* The Scottish English pronunciation of "stir" sounds like the American English pronunciation of "steer" (if it wasn't for the rolled Scottish R, the pronunciations would be very similar).

There are many regional variations, and England has even more regional variation than the USA. In some parts of England, words like toe and tow are pronounced differently, and in other parts of England bail and bale are pronounced differently.

A reasonable approach is not to worry about how individual groups pronounce a word, but instead look to the body of speakers as a whole and identify where the consensus among the different accents shows a spelling to be flawed. Everyone would agree that from an orthographical point of view the i in friend is redundant. (Whether they would choose to do something about it is another matter.) On the other hand, hoarse must remain distinctly spelt from horse because some people pronounce these differently.

I personally find one of the most pleasing aspect of English the way it evolves so rapidly, both as spoken and as written. It is an exceedingly flexible language.

[Perry Winkle]

Originally Posted by Tiki

I personally find one of the most pleasing aspect of English the way it evolves so rapidly, both as spoken and as written. It is an exceedingly flexible language.

All natural language evolves similarly. It's quite beautiful.

Spelling and grammar prescriptivism are efforts to propagate what is most widely understood. It's a good idea to master the rules for those that want their ideas to be understood by the largest possible number of people.

If you want your children to have the most possible power over their destiny they should be taught these things to a high level of mastery.

The most beautiful thing about language is that efforts to codify the mainstream do not much hamper the natural evolution of the language. I'd say those efforts might even encourage it. Constraints fuel artfulness.

[wolf]

Originally Posted by Perry Winkle

All natural language evolves similarly. It's quite beautiful.

Except French. They have a Language Purity Committee to keep those awful cross-overs from destroying their language.

Why they need to say more than "Je me rends," I have no idea.

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by wolf

[all natural languages evolve] Except French. They have a Language Purity Committee to keep those awful cross-overs from destroying their language.

Why they need to say more than "Je me rends," I have no idea.

The French are quite parochial about their language and culture. It is not just their need to defend their language against invasion by foreign words. In France, all radio stations that play music are required by law to play a high percentage of songs by French artists.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Geez, it's up to 103 posts just because Kingswood refuses to learn how to spell.

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Geez, it's up to 103 posts just because Kingswood refuses to learn how to spell.

Why the ad hominem attack? The thread has a lot of posts because other people have posted in it too.

It's not wrong to question tradition. If a tradition is truly sound, it will stand up to scrutiny. However, the tradition of English spelling may not be one of these, and the pedants who believe that spellings are immutable don't like being told that.

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by Perry Winkle

All natural language evolves similarly. It's quite beautiful.

Spoken language does evolve. However, in English the spellings are not allowed to evolve to keep pace with changes to the spoken word. The result is a gradual divergence of spelling from pronunciation which in the case of the English language has diverged to the point where it is considered perfectly normal to consult a dictionary to find out how some words are pronounced.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Kingswood

Spoken language does evolve. However, in English the spellings are not allowed to evolve to keep pace with changes to the spoken word. The result is a gradual divergence of spelling from pronunciation which in the case of the English language has diverged to the point where it is considered perfectly normal to consult a dictionary to find out how some words are pronounced.

This is actually true of any language that accepts its dictionaries as authoritative -- which I think is all of them that actually have them. Writing preserves the transcription of older pronunciations.

Should we call for a new character for, say, the southern English exhalatory pronunciation of the letter R? This seems to have developed since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while the American dialect retains the harder R of earlier times.

Shall we call for a set of vowels to represent A E I O U as spoken by Australians in full yowly-vowel Strine?

A phonetic forty-character system systematically representing today's English really only delays the pronunciation problem for a few centuries, which rather seems to make the exercise bootless.

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

This is actually true of any language that accepts its dictionaries as authoritative -- which I think is all of them that actually have them. Writing preserves the transcription of older pronunciations.

Should we call for a new character for, say, the southern English exhalatory pronunciation of the letter R? This seems to have developed since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while the American dialect retains the harder R of earlier times.

Shall we call for a set of vowels to represent A E I O U as spoken by Australians in full yowly-vowel Strine?

A phonetic forty-character system systematically representing today's English really only delays the pronunciation problem for a few centuries, which rather seems to make the exercise bootless.

The different accents differ in the realization of individual phonemes, but this is done systematically. The vowel assignments of Australian English are almost the same as British English; the pronunciations vary somewhat but when one groups words by pronunciations of the vowels the two accents would by and large group the words the same. There is absolutely no need to use different letters for these accents. American English differs quite a bit from British and Australian English but again no separate treatment is required for the most part.

We do not need 40 letters for the 40 or so phonemes. We make do with digraphs instead, some of which arose out of pronunciation changes to which you alluded to in your first paragraph quoted above. It is unlikely in the extreme that the whole orthography is to be thrown out and a whole new alphabet introduced. If any repair of English orthography was to be done, the only approach that has any hope of succeeding would use the existing rules but simply apply them more consistently.

Your point about the older pronunciations being preserved in orthography is most accurate for those languages that have complex orthographies. Finnish has a pure phonemic orthography, and to a lesser extent so does Italian. The orthographies for these languages do not preserve the older pronunciations if they have changed. Modern Greek has an orthography that evolved from Ancient Greek and hence it is somewhat complex but they manage just fine. French used to have a silent s in words like hôpital and être (which used to be spelt hospital and estre) before an 18th-century spelling reform elided the s and marked where it used to be with a circumflex. German uses sch for the consonant in the word shoe. Old English used to use sc for the same consonant because it was once an allophone of the consonant cluster "sc" (pronounced as in "disc"). The name of the English Language in c.1000 was "Englisc", pronounced as spelt (but not as you think: E-N-G-L-I-S-C; all letters were pronounced separately and the consonant we now represent by "ng" in sing did not yet exist). Finally, a lot of the irregularity in older words in English orthography derive from words that changed their pronunciations in different ways: food, good and blood once all had the same vowel, as did break, meat and leather.

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by Tiki

I don't know how you pronounce "Minuscule", but the way I pronounce it would make "Miniscule" phonetically incorrect, compounding the problem you're complaining about.

I would like to revisit this point because Tiki has made a good point that I would like to expand upon.

Some people do pronounce "minuscule" as if it was spelt "miniscule". For such people, a "miniscule" spelling makes more sense which is why that spelling is seen so often. We have a similar situation already with the two spellings aluminium and aluminum: the two spellings correspond to different pronunciations. What generally happens with this word is that one would assign one's own pronunciation to both spellings. The extra or missing i doesn't cause trouble.

Tiki's point about "compounding the problem" may be reasonable or in error, depending on the exact approach to spelling reform that would be chosen. Tiki appears to have made an implicit assumption that words with really bizarre spellings would not be remedied, such as colonel (the l is pronounced like "r") and lieutenant (with the British pronunciation of "leftenant" where the "u" is pronounced "f"). If such words were not remedied, the problem is indeed increased. However, it is possible that such words would be scrutinized and new alternative spellings proposed. This would be more likely to lead to a net reduction of words with spellings that do not correspond to a plausible pronunciation of the word.

The two words colonel and lieutenant have an interesting history which explains their unusual pronunciation in relation to their spellings.

Colonel is a 16th-century borrowing of an obsolete French word coronel (note the spelling). This in turn was borrowed from an Italian word colonnello (note the spelling) meaning a column of soldiers. If the word was spelt as it was borrowed from the French, it would be spelt coronel: it would still be a little tricky to spell the vowels but at least the consonants would all be correct. The word appears to have been hypercorrected to have an l rather than an r to correspond to the Italian origins. While this is where the word does come from, it is not from the Italian that the word was borrowed but from the French, where the pronunciation of the word appears to have changed between the borrowing from Italian and the reborrowing into English. I feel that if the spelling of a word is to reflect its origins, it should reflect the spelling in the language from where the word was borrowed, and not attempt to trace the word all the way back as far as we can because such efforts to trace a word are sometimes speculative and subject to error.

So far as I can tell, lieutenant intentionally had its pronunciation changed by the English so as to put some distance between the word and its French origins. While the word has been in the English language, the English have fought a few wars with the French and my understanding is that it is during one of these wars (possibly the Napoleonic wars) that the pronunciation was changed. Before the 17th century, u did double duty as vowel and consonant, so the word was pronounced as if spelt "levtenant" (with the i being silent). The following voiceless consonant t appears to have devoiced the v, giving the "leftenant" pronunciation that the British use today. I do not know the origins of the more logical American pronunciation, but it appears that the Americans have retained the older pronunciation (if the word did change during the Napoleonic war). The pronunciation of this word in Australian English is altogether more bizarre: the pronunciation follows British English or American English depending on which branch of the armed forces that the officer is serving in.