Spelling is ruining the English language

[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.

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by Jill

Seriously? I mean really. When was the last time you read a book or an article where a violist was mentioned and a) there was no context, or b) the story was compromised by the omission of same?

Are you serious? Do you really expect to be spoon-fed context every time something is written down just because some words have ambiguous pronunciations?

Suppose you read the following in a book:

"Your friend is putting on

The page happens to end here. Quick, before you turn the page, tell us how "putting" is pronounced?

Did you assume the verb is "put"? Wrong. This person is playing golf:

the first green".

Sure, there's usually context. However, sometimes the context hasn't come up yet, is not sufficient, is missing altogether, or page breaks happen to be placed in inconvenient locations. Context is not the best method of conveying meaning. If the needed context is two lines down, or five pages later, or not supplied at all, what then?

Why is it better to rely on context rather than having words stand on their own?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
James Nicoll, 1990

Thanks, Kingswood -- looks like what I'd seen, unattributed, was one of those "improved" versions that epigrammatic quotes are so vulnerable to. [ending a sentence a preposition with] Let me see if I can find an old favorite from history: "All is lost, save honor."

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by DanaC

. . . I don't see it as a matter of spelling reform per se...more that certain spellings shift across time and eventually the mispell becomes the standard.

Let us hope this one doesn't, even if it is one of the ones that can sneak up and snap you on the ass with a rubber band. Mis + Spell...

This does happen anyway. It happens all the time. Words fall in and out of use, spellings become outdated. The use of hyphens for example in many words have fallen out of favour and are no longer included in the dictionary listings of those words. I'm quietly confident in the people who compose and monitor the dictionaries. I think they do a fairly good job of maintaining relevance to the living language.

Brings up the question of whether hyphens should be considered part of spelling. I've always thought of them as purely punctuation, even in assembling words at the right edge of a page, back in '63 when dinosaurs ruled before word-wrap evolved. And may be evolving into wordwrap as we speak.

Something you can particularly tell us, Dana: is not "favour" is said rather like "fave-oor" in some parts of the UK? The American is distinctly short-o "fave-or," or indistinctly a schwa -- "fav'r."

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Hee hee hoo hoo ho -- this is entertaining. Seems James D. Nicoll is quite the raconteur.

I can hardly wait for the story of James D. And The Giant Peach. Should be lots of .

[DanaC]

Don't know really UG. Different parts of the country say it differently. Mostly I think the last syllable is shortened and pronounced with the schwa. What vowel sounds lives inside that shwa is very different town to town. *smiles* For me it's more of an uh sound Fav-uh (which is how it's said in Bolton) but if I was a full on Manc, I might say it as more of an short 'o' sound. Fav-o'. The 'r' is not pronounced. In Liverpool, it ends with more of an 'eh' sound (quite slight). Fav'eh. Again, the 'r' isn't pronounced.

[Jill]

Originally Posted by Kingswood

Sure, there's usually context. However, sometimes the context hasn't come up yet, is not sufficient, is missing altogether, or page breaks happen to be placed in inconvenient locations. Context is not the best method of conveying meaning. If the needed context is two lines down, or five pages later, or not supplied at all, what then?

OH NO!!! I might have to TURN A PAGE before I get the context in a book? Whatever will I do? Good grief, man, you are really reaching here.

Originally Posted by Kingswood

Why is it better to rely on context rather than having words stand on their own?

Again, I have to know if you're serious. Have you seen a dictionary? Ever?

Tell me something; does the word 'run' "stand on its own"? Do you know what I mean when I yell the following sentence?

"RUN!"

No, you say? How can that be? It's an entire sentence. It's a single word, "standing on its own." It's a pretty straight-forward spelling.

What words would you suggest for the 200+ meanings of 'run', so that they're entirely different, not reliant on different spellings (how many fucking ways could there be to spell 'run' anyway?), without needing context?

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by Jill

OH NO!!! I might have to TURN A PAGE before I get the context in a book? Whatever will I do?

This is what you would do if you were reading it out loud: you would sound a bit stupid if you had to correct your pronunciation.

Answer this: Why do the authorities that look after the other major languages of Europe all choose to avoid heterophonic homographs in their orthographies?

And answer this: If you think context is not a problem, can you state the context rules for disambiguating the 500 or so heterophonic homographs in English in such a way that one can use these rules to program a computer to read text out loud flawlessly? If you think this isn't important, ask any blind person about the inadequacies of screen reader software. Good screen readers do get it right most of the time, but some words always cause problems.

Originally Posted by Jill

Good grief, man, you are really reaching here. Again, I have to know if you're serious. Have you seen a dictionary? Ever?

Tell me something; does the word 'run' "stand on its own"? Do you know what I mean when I yell the following sentence?

"RUN!"

No, you say? How can that be? It's an entire sentence. It's a single word, "standing on its own." It's a pretty straight-forward spelling.

What words would you suggest for the 200+ meanings of 'run', so that they're entirely different, not reliant on different spellings (how many fucking ways could there be to spell 'run' anyway?), without needing context?

Now look who's reaching. You're making personal attacks (the fallacy of argumentum ad hominem), and the straw man fallacy.

Why do you make up this shit about my suggesting that the word "run" must have 200 plus different spellings to go with 200 plus different meanings when every one of those meanings has essentially the same pronunciation? I have not said that we need different spellings in this case; in fact I have explicitly said the opposite in an earlier post in this thread.

You have chosen not to answer any of my other questions regarding spellings. I'm not surprised: some of the spellings we must put up with due to the forces of tradition and social conformity are truly indefensible when scrutinized objectively.

Ultimately, the spellings we have in English are nothing more than a tradition. Some traditions don't always stand up to scrutiny. If we always stuck with bad traditions, in the USA only men with land would have the vote.

[DanaC]

And answer this: If you think context is not a problem, can you state the context rules for disambiguating the 500 or so heterophonic homographs in English in such a way that one can use these rules to program a computer to read text out loud flawlessly? If you think this isn't important, ask any blind person about the inadequacies of screen reader software. Good screen readers do get it right most of the time, but some words always cause problems.

That is the first point you've made which has given me pause on this issue. There has been technological development which has provided a context and potential need for a less problematic spelling system.

I still don't advocate top-down spelling reform; however, I can well see that technological shift driving a bottom-up change.

My guess is that the tech shift will lead to a 'computer english' being developed. A reformed spelling system into which standard texts are translated prior to being accessed through synthesised speech. That may or may not then feed into the language proper.

Right now, though, for all the people you'd help by simplifying spelling, there are a bunch of people who'd be disadvantaged by that change. The ideosyncracies of English spelling helped me to learn how to read. I don't know if I'd have loved it so much without them.

[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 DanaC

Right now, though, for all the people you'd help by simplifying spelling, there are a bunch of people who'd be disadvantaged by that change.

Please expand on this point. You claim that people would be disadvantaged by changes to spelling. Who would be disadvantaged and how?

[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.

[Cloud]

how do you feel about the spelling of "one-trick pony"?

[Shawnee123]

It seems K's point is that correct spelling is prohibitive to communication.

Have you tried reading K's posts? I can't understand a freaking word.

[Cloud]

We're not worthy, obviously.

But at least I can spell!