Spelling is ruining the English language

[monster]

Originally Posted by Kingswood

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. .

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.

[DanaC]

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.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by The Teapot

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.

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.

uninteligable

You've just managed to make that word unintelligible to the ear. 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.

Lets not worry too much about being 'right'.

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.

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

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.

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by monster

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.

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.

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by DanaC

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.

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?

Originally Posted by DanaC

Go away and find a less shaky example to support your claims and make our Shawnee eat a smilie.

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.

[DanaC]

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.

[Shawnee123]

Originally Posted by Kingswood

I can make up a few short sentences that illustrate the point quite nicely.

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.

[Flint]

u got orly'd dawg

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Shawnee123

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.

*applauds* Lovely.

[Cyber Wolf]

Originally Posted by Kingswood

Don't misrepresent what I say.

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...

Originally Posted by Kingswood

It would be spelt on a similar pattern to words like sit, him, dish? Do you have trouble with these words?

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.

Originally Posted by Kingswood

The redundant silent e in "leave" is only there so that you know it's not a u.

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?

[DanaC]

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

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by Shawnee123

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.

Time for you to eat a smilie, Shawnee123. (Please don't eat this one: 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).

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by DanaC

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

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.

[lumberjim]

Originally Posted by DanaC

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

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: