Very similar to A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by M. J. Shields (frequently misattributed to Mark Twain):
"For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld."
Which reminds me — I was fascinated to learn that the Spelling Bee [1] is mostly an English-speaking thing, since many English words are derived from a variety of languages [2]. There is no such thing as a spelling bee in Germany, for example.
Germany actually enacted an orthographical reform in 1996, where they modified the spelling of certain words to make the language easier to learn. This was remarkable in and of itself, since it involved an international agreement between multiple German-speaking countries. As I've been learning German, it's been a strange and pleasant feeling to hear a long word and then be able to spell it correctly 99% of the time.
Ironically, because of my parent comment above, Mark Twain also has an essay on how much he hated learning German [4] (more due to grammar than spelling, although he was learning it before the reform).
It also a very american thing. At the top levels it isnt even about language and learning rules for spelling words. Rather it is pure memorization mascarading as knowledge. Success in the final rounds is determined by whether or not you have memorized a paticular word. None of the kids in the finals actually deduce a spelling from rules. Memorizing more words helps, but in the end it is just a numbers game. Many champions compile thier own lists of likely words based on previous competions,
And American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford, which is the standard for world english. The oxford is far to large for any child to memorize.
> And American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford, which is the standard for world english.
The Oxford English Dictionary is nice, but it's a British reference, and wouldn't make sense as the source for an American spelling bee. A Brazilian spelling bee (if that makes sense) wouldn't use a Portugeuse reference from Portugal either.
>And American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford, which is the standard for world english. The oxford is far to large for any child to memorize.
The full Webster's (which is probably the closest to a standard for American English) is 263K entries (which Google tells me is what is used for the Scripp's spelling bee) vs. 350K for Oxford. So smaller but not that much smaller. The standard Webster's is "only" 75K but there's also a truncated version of Oxford that's 125K.
This surprised me, so I've just looked it up. I'm now surprised for a different reason.
"Webster's New International Dictionary" contains "more than 600,000 entries" and it's a single volume, albeit a hefty one.
"Oxford English Dictionary" on the other hand, has "301,100 main entries" and yet the last paper version was 20 volumes. Presumably because OED contains more details per word.
Of course, for anything but a spelling bee it's pretty absurd to compare dictionaries by number of entries. Beyond a certain point: you're just buying more chaff like family names and alternative spellings.
This is what Merriam-Webster says: "Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, together with its 1993 Addenda Section, includes some 470,000 entries. The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, reports that it includes a similar number." (That's different from the other list I saw.)
But absolutely agree with your point. It's not like Britain and US vocabulary differs markedly in books and speaking.
> American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford
Noah Webster literally codified, and partially invented, American spelling—whereas Oxford's dictionary is a symbol of traditional British spelling. It's patently ridiculous to suggest that US spelling contests use a British spelling reference.
Languages which spell “phonetically” have to reform their spelling from time to time (and agree on whose pronunciation is authoritative) else the language ends up with the same issues as English and French. TANSTAAFL.
Personally I find the conservative spelling of English and French easier when reading as they often encode meaning which is stripped from “reformed” spelling such as German.
I ran into this phenomenon when I was idly learning the Shavian alphabet. It's not actually a phonetic writing system for me, because I don't have the same accent as the person who devised it. So, while it wasn't too difficult for me to learn to read it, (accurately) writing it would have required about as much rote memorization as it does in any other alphabetical language I'm familiar with.
> It's not actually a phonetic writing system for me, because I don't have the same accent as the person who devised it.
The alphabet was designed to be phonemic instead of phonetic for the exact reason you claim.
> While sometimes referred to as “phonetic” it is, in truth, phonemic, as Shaw wished. A phonetic alphabet would look quite different depending on the accent it represented. Shavian, on the other hand, does not purport to represent exactly sounds, but classes of sounds. A person from London, from New York and from Sydney all pronounce the AH sound differently, but each would recognise the sound when said by the others. In Shavian they would all write 𐑭 for this sound.[1]
I think the problem that you encountered is rather that there are certain dictionaries that spell words in a dialect that you don't use (think of how a British person says "past" vs an American person). But that is a different problem from what you described. You can very well use Shavian with any accent of English because it is designed that way.
As a southern American, I use pretty much the same vowel in "y'all" that most English people would in "past" or "bath". "Past" and "bath" are the same vowel as "cat" uses in the Queen's English.
It's an immensely useful word. Cf. "yinz" of western Pennsylvania, which is a contraction of "you 'uns" of Appalachia, which is a contraction of "you ones". The popularity of rap has spread it immensely in the past thirty-odd years, because Black English is strongly influenced by long association with white Southern dialect (and vice versa).
That distinction doesn't really resolve it, though. English dialects are diverse enough that there are many pairs of words that are homophones in one accent, and sound different in another. For example, I have relatives who pronounce "pen" and "pin" identically, and are generally hard-pressed to hear the difference in how I pronounce them. On the other side, I also have relatives who distinguish between "ferry" and "fairy", which I don't.
So, depending on your native accent, Shavian might still require you to use more than one letter for the same sound (and therefore have to remember which words use which), or use the same letter for multiple sounds. Or, at least, it will if you want to have standardized orthography.
> I have relatives who pronounce "pen" and "pin" identically, and are generally hard-pressed to hear the difference in how I pronounce them. On the other side, I also have relatives who distinguish between "ferry" and "fairy", which I don't.
Yes, some hard choices do need to be made. In cases like these, it’s almost always better to err on the side of preserving distinctions even if the speaker does not recognize the distinctions. Because over time, they will start to recognize patterns and understand the distinctions more while nothing of value is lost in English.
> Shavian might still require you to use more than one letter for the same sound (and therefore have to remember which words use which)
Yes and for the most part I think this is a good thing. It is a very small concession to make considering the alternative.
> Or, at least, it will if you want to have standardized orthography.
One single prescriptive spelling for global english may be impossible for the time being. But I am very interested in further researching a kind of neo-mid-atlantic accent.
French is even weirder because the adopted words are often pronounced in a completely different way than the original. We encountered that 2 days ago when my children (who are bilingual French/German) tried to explain to me about the Highland cows they learned about in a book they got. They book had instructions to pronounce the word so it sounded like "Island" so I got quite confused, if this was cows form Ireland or maybe Iceland.
The elusive "h". It is very common (for French speaking English) to either remove an h as they did there, or insert it where it don't belong as in "hot hair balloon" or the city of "Hamsterdam".
After 20 years of speaking english (french mother-tongue here) someone finally told me that you don't pronounce the "h" in "hour". I (and, I think, most french people speaking english) really do have to think of the spelling of a word before pronouncing it. And there I was being extra careful with that h at Hour. Now I have to be extra careful not to pronounce it…
But on a positive note, discovering all these small quirks are like "Achievement unlocked" kind of moments if you like learning languages.
I am French too and I am trying to understand how you pronounced "hour" before (my dog, cat and wife are already looking at me suspiciously).
You pronounced the "h" like in "hot"? (with the "h" making actually a sound?). I am quite surprised because we do not pronounce and "h" when it starts a word (usually at least), and I've been learning English in the 80's with Brian and Jenny (kudos to the ones who had the same manual) and it was not taught that way either.
In English you almost always pronounce an H at the start of the word. In fact I can't think of any examples other than Hour for when you don't pronounce it
As a native (American) English speaker I would never write or say "an hotel" and I don't think most people would. I confess I didn't realize this was even a debate. An hotel is apparently an older English grammar rule that it appears is considered largely obsolete.
ADDED: You do see a remnant of this with "an historical" but even that is generally not preferred in most dialects. https://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/drgw007.html Basically, it has to do with whether the initial "h" is pronounced in a given dialect of English.
It’s fun, after being taught about the H, to see that fellow French people don’t hear the presence or absence of H until they are taught; It’s like white noise, we assume the guy needs to breathe.
Were your kids pronouncing island like "iz-land" or "eye-land"? Just asking because other people in the thread seem to be focusing on the "H" sound rather than the fact that "Island" is the German word for Iceland. Another fun layer of confusion for multilingual kids :)
Heh. I was watching this TV series, in French, about some retired superheroes in
a village. In the first episodes they were talking about a supervillain, but I
couldn't quite catch his name, it was something like "zoolord", "zolord",
"zelord"...?
I looked it up on wikipedia and of course it was "The Lord" XD
I'm a native English speaker, and was thrilled by German's logical spelling when I first started learning the language. But then my German vocabulary began to include borrowed words from French and English, where spelling conventions go out the window.
For "Flannel" and "Flanell", it makes a surprising amount of sense when you then look at the pronounciation. The English word is stressed on the first syllable, like "FLANnel", which makes the N sound longer, whereas Germans say "flaNELL", which makes the final L sound longer.
Same spelling in Swedish, and until you mentioned it just now, I never even realised that the word is spelled differently in English.
It's not a common word for me to use, but if I had been put in the situation where I had to use it in English, it's likely I'd use the Swedish spelling.
Learning Spanish was the same for me. Learning character pronunciations and where to place emphasis is incredibly easy. Once you have that down you can pronounce or spell almost any word.
Germany seems to have gotten rid of sütterlin as well. None of my German friends can decipher it. I figure on using it for communicating with my U-Boot fleet, nobody will know what my commands are! HAHAHHAHHAHHAAAA
On suetterlin (or the overall topic of current) its not just a change about handwriting. At the beginning of the 20th century, most German books were published in blackletter (Fraktur) until it was abolished by the Nazi regime (internal reasoning "you cannot rule the world if the world cannot read what you type", what was communicated "Fraktur is jewish").
I think the scandinavian countries had similar changes, maybe sometimes a bit earlier.
For handwriting there had been going on a debate on whether to use Kurrent (Sütterlin is a Current) or Antiqua for centuries.
Hermann Hesse mandated for years that his German books still should be printed in Fraktur, until at one point someone convinced him that young people would not pick them up anymore.
Overall German orthography never quite recovered from the switch to Antiqua, because the sz ligature in Fraktur was not directly mapped to "sz" in Antiqua instead the letter ß was introduced, but the Swiss used French typewriters so they use "ss" instead.
Polish is quite similar, in a sense that if you hear a word you can write it down.
However we have some letters that - while phonetically the same - are used in different cases.
'u' and 'ó', or 'rz' and 'ż', or 'h' and 'ch'
Those are largely result of a Slavic country adapting Latin alphabet and over millennia trying to reconcile the two (clashing systems). The notations and pronunciations evolved slowly over the years and aforementioned are the remaining artifacts of the past.
In primary and secondary schools you'd get orthography test when teachers dictates some silly story riddled with unusual, rare trap words where you 'guess' those interchangeable letters.
(gżegżółka, or maybe: gżegrzółka, grzegżółka, grzegrzułka...)
There was a push for a similar reform to sort this out but went nowhere. Partially due to tradition and partially that there would be clashes like
'może' - maybe, 'morze' - sea
Both are pronounced the same, so if you drop 'rz' both words would have the same spelling.
In some countries there's no such thing as Spelling Bee as there is no such activity as spelling (or even a word for it). When I was a kid, if somebody didn't hear you well over the phone, you might repeat the name or word slower or louder. But if somebody heard you well, even if it's a brand new word or name, they can write it.
There was only one way to write down a heard word, and only one way to read a written word (minus possibly intonation/accents that cannot be captured either way). So while I disagree with some of the specific choices in the joke story (and they possibly inadvertently have some deal breaking inconsistencies, especially around the reformed i) dear gawd yes, we can simplify this nightmare that English calls spelling :O
I learned German before the reform and I grudgingly admit it’s probably easier to learn it now, but some of the lost bits had aesthetic value and some of the spelling is still maddening. Plus if you actually speak German in any German-speaking place other than (arguably) Hannover you will be using a lot of dialect. And Austria, Switzerland and Germany still have some pretty big differences in the official language, though they’re understandable if you’re fluent in any one, whereas the full-on dialects often are not mutually intelligible even for native speakers. And the there is the Denglish phenomenon especially in Berlin.
Hungarian spelling is super easy by comparison, but then the rest of Hungarian is not.
> Germany actually enacted an orthographical reform in 1996
That reform has since been reformed twice itself, and major newspapers have started to enforce their own orthography to fight the chaos that was caused by these "improvements". Most people my age (40-something) and socioculutal strata have ignored the reform altogether and keep using the old, "correct" forms. And the kids may learn the "easier" form at first, but once they get immersed with books and the news, switch to weird variants somewhere between old-school and new-school German orthography, with a heavy bias to old-school.
> switch to weird variants somewhere between old-school and new-school German orthography, with a heavy bias to old-school.
[Citation Needed]
It’s not that I don’t believe, so (mainly because I find most new forms uglier), but outside my own writing (which the spellchecker then complains about, and I change it) I don’t really encounter "Photographie."
I find "Photographie" all the time, most prominently in photography-related organisations and publications, so that might be carried over from old times before 1996... when "Fotografie" was already a valid variant spelling.
I never read about "Delfine" or "Spagetti", though.
I think "Photographie" is common when you want to sound stuck-up-your-ass artsy-fartsy. In regular use the word "Foto" is way more common than "Photo", unless you're the publisher of a black and white analog photography publication dating back to 1888.
My language teacher in high school told me he kept in with spelling tests in French but stopped in German because after a while nobody gets anything wrong. Have to agree, it's far far easier to spell stuff in German. I could do it after a short time living in Switzerland.
There was a fantastic interview with the author of a book on the history of the English language and how / why it’s so messed up. I bought the author’s book based on the ep, but haven’t got to it yet as I’ve acquired many more books throughout the pan.
The German spelling reform had mixed results though. The new reform was universally accepted only by governments and schools. Various publishers have house standards and the rules were amended and partly rolled back a few times. Many polls in Germany show widespread rejection by the wider population. At least we got rid of the long "s" (one of the complaints of Mark Twain) long ago.
Sorry, not Mark Twain. It was written in 1971 by M. J. Shields¹. It has since been frequently mis-attributed to Mark Twain, who only wrote about a similar topic in 1899².
Ah, another quote misattributed to Twain. Looks like it was submitted as a letter to The Economist in 1971 — I'll update the parent. Thanks for pointing this out!
It’s interesting to think about why the proposals for English failed while orthographic reforms in some other languages—Russian, German, Japanese, Chinese—succeeded, at least partially.
The late 1800s and early 1900s were also the peak of constructed-language movements like Esperanto and Volapük, which were riding on the assumption that there would be peace in our time if only we would all speak the same language and thereby see eye to eye.
Also somewhat related, in the same timeframe, Japan was opening itself up after nearly three centuries of isolation and catching up with technological development. While new loanwords flooded into the language from all kinds of European languages, some scholars argued for replacing the traditional Japanese writing system with the Latin alphabet.
The proposal never won any majority support, but the government did end up doing a smaller reform: After WW2, several character forms were simplified and an official list of characters in common use with standardized pronounciations was published by the government as a baseline for the school syllabus.
The last time English had a central language authority, i.e. l'Academie Francaise, was when words were first transcribed in Old English. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qT8ZYewYEY
>[George Bernard] Shaw placed in his will provisions instructing his executor to organize a world-wide competition to design an improved English alphabet. A British designer, Ronald Kingsley Read, who had corresponded extensively with Shaw for several years regarding just such an alphabet, was selected along with three other finalists as the winners of the competition. Read was chosen to design the final form of the alphabet. The "Shaw Alphabet" or "Shavian", as it is now generally known, was the result.
I think any attempt at replacing the latin alphabet is doomed to fail. However, a spelling reform could easily standardize on a few letter combinations and perhaps include a few diacritics and make it much easier to spell and read English. It's never going to be possible to have a phonetic writing system given the variety of accents, but a phonemic writing system may be achievable. English writing also has many constructs that are not phonetic in any accent, and never have been - such as the s in island.
I think a totally new alphabet would be more easily accepted by people than a Latin spelling reform, which would see a ton of backlash around the uncanny valley and social stigmas.
A new alphabet (like Hangul), could take a long time to adopt fully though, and there’s nothing wrong with that imo.
Adopting a new alphabet has enormous costs, and it's very hard to imagine they can be outweighed by the benefits (unless perhaps you're adopting a different existing popular alphabet - probably Russian cyrilic or some Indian script being the only options, though perhaps a syllabary such as Hiragana would also be an option).
The cost I'm talking about is losing the ability to read the vast amount of text that has been already written in the current alphabet. For the Latin alphabet in particular, which is by far the most used writing system in history, losing access to all text produced anywhere in Europe, the Americas and most of Africa for the last few hundred years or so would be very hard to make up for.
I wish we could get rid of accents. It is frustrating to head to the deep south and not understand anyone. I have no doubt that other people feel the same way about my accent.
What do you think about Quickscript vs Shavian? Someone wrote a unicode doc[1] comparing the two. But sadly, only Shavian exists in Unicode today. That makes Quickscript almost a non-starter for me.
One quick thought is that Quickscript merged together a couple of letters that are similar. It merged "err" and "array" and it also merged "ago" and "up". Merging err-array is probably fine, but in Shavian, "up" is stressed while "ago" is not. So a little something is lost in the up-ago merger.
> It’s interesting to think about why the proposals for English failed
I think one reason is that phonetic spellings wouldn't work with some regional dialects. Consider 'bath' - many southern English people pronounce it as if it had an 'r'.
It's not without precedent either; due to printing presses, the English alphabet lost the letters Eth (ð), Thorn (þ), Wynn (ƿ), Yogh (ȝ), Ash (æ) and Ethel (œ), to be replaced with phonetically similar letters (like th) or just sort-of-similar-looking replacements (ð replaced by y, as in "ye olde", which is pronounced "the old", or ȝ replaced by z like in "Cockenzie", pronounced "Cockennie" or "Dalziel" pronounced "Deeyel").
the Y in "Ye Olde" is actually thorn. If you look at thorn, you can see how it happened - the loop was unlooped.
Also - English was never consistent. The thorn/eth split was completely random and was down more to style than correctness. Modern spelling of Old English has standardised the spelling. But macrons and dots over g's and c's also never existed, but are common in modern spelling for OE.
The funny thing is that because of this English native speakers are incredibly good at understanding you even when you mispronounced words quite a bit.
This is very different to some other languages (e.g. Japanese is famous for it), where only a slight mispronounciation usually means nobody will understand what you're saying. I have encountered this many times, I pronounced a word just how I heard it and people were just giving me blank stares, only when I showed the spelled word did they get it. I never encountered this with English native speakers.
Are you sue that’s the reason? French has an equally wacky spelling system, but French people are notorious for refusing to understand tiny errors in pronunciation by foreigners (while North African French speakers will accept anything you say so long as you get a letter or two right).
Meanwhile, Spanish, with its perfect phonetic spelling is spoken by a people who will go out of their way to understand you no matter how bad you speak their language.
My experience is that it’s mostly cultural, and often comes down to whether the person you’re speaking to has themself had to try using a foreign language, thus gaining the empathy to help you out.
> My experience is that it’s mostly cultural, and often comes down to whether the person you’re speaking to has themself had to try using a foreign language, thus gaining the empathy to help you out.
I think another part is how much diversity there is in speakers of the language and the common dialects.
Because of all that linguistic variety, if you're an English or Spanish speaker you're generally more accustomed to hearing different pronunciations of your own language day to day than French speakers are (on average, YMMV, etc).
I lived in Romania at one point, where this was even more obvious. There are comparatively few distinct dialects of Romanian, and most Romanians have never heard non-native speakers speaking their language, so no matter how friendly they were, understanding unusual (OK, wrong) pronunciation was just not a common skill.
Eh, France also has a number of languages that are distinctly not French. But it also has a long history of being a heavily centralized state where everything revolves around Paris, and other languages/dialects were ruthlessly suppressed for a long time.
> French people are notorious for refusing to understand tiny errors in pronunciation by foreigners
Keyword: refuse. They can, but pretend they don’t. It’s racism disguising itself as cultural pride. (Source: I’m French and am certainly not proud of that part of my heritage)
It's elitism, France's hate of foreigners is not founded on skin colour or heritage (e.g. both your parents can be French and if your French is bad, you get treated poorly anyway).
It's not founded on skin color you're right, but you're wrong about heritage. Obviously Not All French People Are Like That (I should hope so, as a French person myself). But the ones concerned will be MUCH pickier about people's grammar, spelling and pronunciation if they perceive them as not French.
But yes, elitism is also present: If you're perceived as French and your french is bad, you will also be treated poorly. But it's a different kind of "poorly". In fact, Paul Taylor talks about that in his stand up "Franglais" (I HIGHLY recommend a watch, it's hilarious especially if you're familiar with both French and British/American culture, and it's available for free on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pae2AMnmUVA)
No. Chauvinism is when somebody declares that his/her language is superior to other languages, e.g. because it used by a broad audience. Russian and English speakers are often doing that from my own experience.
I had a similar experience when I tried to learn Polish; my friends, who knew I was trying to learn, simply couldn't understand what I was saying, and couldn't guess either (and my ear found it very difficult to hear the difference between the expected pronunciation and what I was saying).
My heart wasn't really in it, but I was also very discouraged by this.
> French people are notorious for refusing to understand tiny errors in pronunciation by foreigners (while North African French speakers will accept anything you say so long as you get a letter or two right).
I think it's a mix of multiple reasons.
First, French is a language which not only has no word stress but actively blends words together when speacking in a sentence. Correct word pronunciation is key to understanding and what foreigners view as small errors sometimes do actually make their sentence unintelligible to a French speaker from France.
Then, language proficiency is a strong social marker in France. So, if you speak broken French, people will subconsciously view you as lower class/uneducated.
Your mileage may vary, but my experience with Danish and Norwegian is similar. Norwegian which has very phonetic spelling is very forgiving on mispronunciation while Danish—a very similar language but spelled much differently and not very phonetically—is not nearly as forgiving on mispronunciation, and being Danish you do mispronounce a lot as you are learning the language.
>> The funny thing is that because of this English native speakers are incredibly good at understanding you even when you mispronounced words quite a bit.
Oh dear. This is really not my experience. In the first couple of years I lived in the UK it was a huge pain making myself understood by the natives, until I finally managed to approximate the local accent. I was even very frustrated that nobody seemed to make an effort to meet me half-way, in my efforts to be understood. I would often have this experience, where I'd be speaking to someone and they'd stare at me with a blank face, seemingly just waiting for me to repeat myself in case they could understand me this time around.
Among non-native English speakers I think this experience is common. Conversely, I've been able to communicate just fine with non-native English speakers who had very thick accents and spoke only broken English, exactly because both parties in the conversation were patient and attentive.
In my Master's I had a tutor from Indonesia. For me he was like the best teacher ever and I felt he made everything crystal clear and helped me really understand some hairy concepts. Then I spoke to a British friend who complained she couldn't understand a word he was saying and she hated every minute of his class.
Sometimes I think native and non-native speakers of English really speak two different languages.
Setting aside the question of utility (ease of use issues),
English spelling is also a "side channel" which persists information about the word which is lost (recoverable only via lookup) when spelling is normalized.
With things as they are, the etymology of words is often visible in their spelling; this has practical implications such as imparting shades of meaning through allusion, which are one reason English has retained lots of near-synonyms, but not discarded them. This means it allows for a particular kind of nuance.
As a native speaker of English I find the relative paucity of vocabulary confounding (or comical); it is now expected in my (bilingual) household that when where English draws distinctions, Spanish reuses. My German-speaking father in law is always entertaining us with cases where German constructs words through liberal compounding, where English doesn't.
Which is just to say, problems aside, English's maddening spelling almost always encodes useful information. For some uses. (Not tech docs, but more than poetry.)
Interesting footnote to this: English has many "backformations," cases where the spelling of some words has conformed over time to that of similar words from other languages, even when they etymologically unrelated. My favorite example of this is "strawberry" in which the "berry" is a backformation.
Another footnote: English vocabulary and etymology also encode history beyond provenance.
The words in English for meat and its sources are the go-to example.
The words for the animals, are from Anglo-Saxon. The words for the meat as you eat it, are from French.
Because England acquired its French from occupation c. 1066; the peasants knew the animals but it was the new French-speaking aristocracy were the ones that ate them.
English is not my native language, yet I didn't realize how peculiar it is until I saw this video below ("What if English Were Phoenetically Consistant"). All these years I thought my native languages were hard to learn for foreigners (French for the spelling, Serbo-Croatian for it's grammar, both of which have seemingly been designed by insane people) and English easy, didn't realize how hard it is prior to said video. I guess it is made easier by the fact it's the go-to Internet and international language so I get more exposure to it than I do to my native ones.
If you know German, there is an entire book written in this style, introducing a simplifying spelling and grammar each chapter [1]. It is called "fom winde ferfeelt", a pun on "Gone with the wind" turned into "Missed by the wind". Highly recommend.
Except unlike TFA, the orthographic reform suggested by Shields actually makes things easier in the mid-term (long term, pronunciation will drift from spelling again)
>The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.
Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.
Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.
(Note: Japanese uses a phonetic alphabet. For the most part, the characters you see (when kanji is written out in hiragana/katakana) are sounded exactly as they are in when written/spoken individually/independently. There are some dialects though that modify this, notably Tokyo's replacing "su" with "s" and other changes)
Isn’t there a ton of drift, though? Yes, spelling in Japanese is easier than English, but listening and speaking exercises seem just as important if not more important than they are for English. Otherwise you’ll sound like a cat got your tongue and the person you’re speaking to will reply with にゃんですか？
I'm not sure if there's grounds to say that the importance of speaking/listening exercises is different from any other language. Regardless of what language you're learning, you'll probably sound like a fool if you can even spit out any words at all if you don't practice speaking.
I just wanted to make a punny joke. “Nyan desu ka?” is a play on “Nani desu ka?” which basically means “what?”. And nyan is the Japanese word for a cat’s meow.
I like historical spellings because they tell the story of the development of the language; even though it can be pretty chaotic and tough to master, the chaos itself has a certain charm (for me) in demonstrating how how one of our oldest technologies lives and evolves in the minds of the human beings that use it.
Besides that, though, I don't like the Shields proposal because it's specific to his dialect. No "r" in "letez" and using an "a" in "jast" for instance makes this difficult for me to read.
Text artifacts in the Infocom text adventures Planetfall and Stationfall use this system. Play the games long enough and you get pretty good at reading them.
I don't think there is any language that actually adopts a 1:1 mapping of letters to sounds, but many come very close to adopting a 1:1 mapping between groups of letters and groups of sounds (for a particular accent).
For example, Romanian is a pretty phonetic langauge, and it adds 4 letters/diacritics to the latin alphabet to come closer - ă [uh], î (no equivalent in English), ș [sh], and ț (like [zz] in pizza).
Even so, it also has some letter combinations - ce sound like the [chai] in "chair", ci sounds like the [Chi] in "China"; but c in any other place represens a hard [k] sound. To mark a hard [k] before e or i, you then use che,chi (why they didnt do it the other way around is beyond me, since [ca],[cu],[co],[că],[cî] all spell the same [c] sound as [che], [chi]).
The same rules apply to g - ghi sounds like the [gea] in gear, while gi sounds like the [gi] in gin.
X of course represents [ks], but can also reprezent [gz] in certain words, such as examen (exam).
I is normally a particular vowel or semivowel sound, like [ee] in English. However, in word final positions after a consonant, it's usually a consonantic sound. For example, the word "mări" (seas) is pronounced as a single syllable, with just a short [ee] sound at the end. However, the word "{a} mări" ({to} enlarge) is pronounced in two syllables, [muh-ree], accenting the second syllable.
The personal pronouns I, he, and she (eu, el, ea) are all written with an e at the start, but always pronounced with an extra [ee] sound. The phonetic spelling would have been ieu, iel, iea but for whatever reason this was not done. No other words share this feature in the standard accent, though it happens to many/all words starting with the letter e- in other accents.
As with many other languages, borrowed words tend to preserve the original spelling, even after they settle on a Romanian pronunciation. For example, the word "weekend" is written exactly like this, not the Romanian phonetic spelling "uichend". Older borrows do get this treatment though. For example the French "chaise longue", a reclining chair, was borrowed into Romanian a long time ago and is now spelled "șezlong".
It sounds the same, that's the point. Languages like German and Italian for instance follow the same principle, everything is phonetic, nobody needs to spell anything (heck Italian doesn't even have a world for "spelling"), every letter always sounds the same all the time. Kids learn to read very fast, and you always know how to spell people surnames because they are pronounced "as you write it", with a 1:1 correspondence.
Old and Middle English were like that too, but then the Great Vowel Shift happened and now English still mostly retains the Middle English spelling with apparently random pronounciation rules.
Nobody devises a non-phonetic alphabet, when English adopted the Latin alphabet it was mostly phonetical. The issue is that the written language always moves slower than the spoken one, because written language lasts for longer.
It certainly makes assumptions about pronunciations that mean for a lot of people it will sound different. "Meik" vs "maik" for a replacement for make for example threw me off for a bit (like, meek? Meyek? What does that mean in context?) Also I instead of Y is radically changing how I read that paragraph: "Year" going to "Ier" indicates to me either a pronunciation of "eer" or "aiyer" or "eiyer" instead of starting with that defined "yuh" sound.
It is using the Romance (i.e the original Latin) vowels. English got its vowels all garbled and messed up by the great Vowel Shift, so now every Latin vowel in English does not sound how it is supposed to sound. Heck they don't even follow the same rules most of the time, because English spelling is fucked up beyond repair. That's ironic because that makes writing English much more complicated, even though the language is quite simple to learn at a basic level.
A is /ei/ and lots of other sounds.
E is /i/, sometimes it's an open e, ..
I is /ai/, sometimes not, ...
O is always a diphthong, plain /o/ does not exist anymore
U is /a/, /ju/, ??
Y is there for the show, often it's used for /j/
English like German has lots and lots of vowels, while Latin and Italian have like, 7? The letters were supposed to have only one sound at most, but history clearly shows us that it's easier to reuse or adapt an existing letter than invent a new one (look at [ng] for instance, or [th] which became used mostly because nobody had types to print thorn and eth).
"For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld."