From: adam g (adamg@bu.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 15 2002 - 20:18:55 MST
> 2. Rationalise the use of letters by fixing a unique (letter, sound) pair
> for each letter, thereby rendering existing spelling variations of letters
> into a combination of your rationalised letters: j is always spelled as in
> the French "je", and so the word 'judge' should be rewritten 'djudje' in
> your system.
You seem to have missed the fact that current orthography is already
rational. It is rational, and more importantly, expressive as an organic
outgrowth of our language's thousand year history. It has value for wordplay
(puns, anagrams, palindromes) and worth as a sentence-ornament. I'm not
saying English is an unqualified success, nor is it incredibly intuitive,
but I sincerely think the proposed reformation would perform worse than the
current situation.
To begin with, I haven't seen it clearly explained why such a change is
necessary. Is it an intellectual game? If so, it belongs in linguistics
journals not my morning newspaper. A last-ditch attempt to teach little
Johnny to read? That's rather like hacking up the couch to fit it through
the door. And besides, standardizing the accent on say the first syllable
would easily make the language far simpler to learn. Or maybe it seems your
dream-alphabet would be in principle a better device-- but for what? 99% of
Brits 97% of Americans are considered literate (over the age of 15 reading
and writing) and are doing more or less fine by the current alphabet.
Further I haven't seen anyone take into account or even acknowledge the
information that would be lost by changing the spelling. Supposing you even
could construct a more convincing argument, it would have to be so massively
convincing as to justify the major cost of rehauling what is an ubiquitous
alphabet: from the government down to the people, reteaching xxx million
people to read. I doubt you're that persuasive. It would fail for the same
reasons artificially constructed languages do.
Hermit offered a pretty biting parody of spelling reform a while back
(twice if you go back more). But instead of looking German, I suspect we'll
all look more like horny teenagers with computer priveleges and one hand
free writing: "NE h0t chix in da room??!!" Maybe because his point wasn't
spelled out explicitly, it was missed. In any case English offers some
pretty significant obstacles to reform. The unwieldy number of homonyms
http://www.cooper.com/alan/homonym_list.html ; yes we can understand the
meaning usually but it's the beauty of the words I'll miss: the flavorful
French faux spelled the same as foe, phial as file, gnawed as nod. For
exercise we'd go to the Jim. Would it be an insult anymore to have hoard? At
least our arm-bones would be a little humorous. But seriously folks-- you'd
kill off all the little idiosyncratic gems of our language and I suspect
some would dissapear from usage completely as more common words run away
with the associations of the spelling (e.g. burgher won't last long when
merchant becomes a popular ground-beef menu item). Language is the paint of
literature. Would you like less colors? We'd lose swathes of wordplay and I
suspect that converting extant literature to the new spelling would require
a bit of marginal glossing, particularly of James Joyce at his best.
The current alphabet (the name itself gives it away) is heir to a long
history and subject to fairly well understood rules falling under the
scepter of philology and linguistics. Even without understanding the precise
rules of language shift (but a few dead languages never hurt anyone), it is
clear that the end product, modern English spelling, is remarkably
expressive. Imagine if two sentences back I had written 'sceptre'. Our
spelling is only non-rational to those who believe blindly and
idealistically that alphabets do function, and ought to, as one-to-one
correspondences between symbol and sound. The 'numerical' approach to the
alphabet feels wrong: numbers are vehemently not letters, they are not
saddled with an emotive history nor are they subject to the call of
ambiguity, both forces vital to the operation of a living language. How
maddeningly superficial. Painting by number doesn't make the art museums.
The etymology of words plays out not just audibly but visually to the
sensitive reader with a little experience behind him/her. The weight of
feeling separating an elevated Latinate diction from a more organic German
word-choice would be deadened on paper as clues from the original spellings
drop out into newfound homogeneity. For example the Latin 'tio' suffix
indicating an abstract noun that enters English as 'tion' would look the
same as 'shun'. The ph, which people seem to always point their fingers at
first as if learning a second way to say 'f' were such an unbearable
handicap, in words like photograph and philosophy bespeaks of its Greek
origin when aspirated labials could be distinguished (as they are still in
Hindi I believe). The difference in style between an 'or' and an 'er' would
bleed together. Forget rhythm and as for rhyme, imagine the loss of novelty
as the end-rhymes of verses are all bludgeoned to similarity; all these
endings in a row would look the same: cliche, weigh, obey, toupee, bouquet,
*ahem* naivete.
Some practical problems involve the fidelity of your orthography. You'd
have to accept that rarely can letters cover every sound. Perhaps every long
vowel would be tediously marked with a macron.
> Why not strive to simplify the number of variations of symbolic
> representations of sounds? As an example, one could explore whether it is
> really necessary to have 'a' (as in 'park' and 'o' as in 'Dog'.
If I'm reading that correctly it seems to propose the simplification or
elimination of some vowels? Where I am in Boston the 'a' is a much more
frontal vowel then the 'o' in dog and they're clearly distinct sounds. But
as vowels start to get simplified English will go the way of Biblical Hebrew
or Egyptian, making sounds even harder to guess at while generations pass,
turning the alphabet into an even more fluid entity as it diverges from
strict sound-symbol correspondence. On the other hand if the alphabet
expressly corresponds to sound, will people simply write words hodge-podge
as they pronounce them? What of dialects? It will only enhance mutual
incomprehensibility as geographic and cultural distance grows. Yet if one
allows several phonemes to be pronounced from one symbol there is a crack in
the logical armor of the spelling oh-so-prized for being exceptionless. And
there are very real variant pronunciations to be taken into account just in
the US http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/NationalMap/NationalMap.html ,
not to mention England or Australia. This isn't just a matter of tomayto
tomahto.
Anyways just a few thoughts on an idea that desparately needs some
-Adam
-Apologies for leaving out other English-speaking countries
--Except Canada
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