Spelling is ruining the English language

[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.