Tha simp’l fakt ov tha matter iz, inglish pronunsiashun iz a relik ov tha past. Bayst on tha fifteenth sentury rather than twenty-furst, inglish pronunsiashun confuzez nyu lernerz. Jermanz and italyanz hav a literal spelling sistem. In fakt, italyan kidz lern too spell and read in only a frakshun ov tha time with tha Montessori sistem.
(Well, I think the time has come for English spelling reform. What do the rest of you think?)
:):)
Yes pls. (And lets include y’all.) I’m not from the South but not differentiating between third person singular and third person plural is a pain.
It would be nice if English spelling followed consistent phonetic rules. But I don’t think reform is feasible. English is too widespread; you’d never get any agreement on anything.
Trying to implement spelling reforms would make the situation worse as you’d just have more words with alternate spellings for different territories.
How exactly do you propose to institute such a “reform”? It’s not as though the government can compel the dictionary industry to change spellings or fine newspapers for using “through” instead of “throo”.
Maybe we could fit all the phonemes on dice.
More seriously, I think the Cherokee syllabary is the way to go, if we could start over.
Governments can indeed implement such reforms; they’ve done so in a number of countries. It’s not dictionaries or publications that are the issue per se, but in America I’m sure it would be quickly made into a civil liberties issue and would never catch on.
And the US would have no authority to mandate spelling to other english-speaking countries.
Yet the US managed spelling reform in the past, something that (as far as I am aware) hasn’t been done in other English-speaking countries.
At the time the US became a nation, English spelling wasn’t nearly as standardized as it is today.
prich it broder!
Yep, I was aware of the whole Webster thing; I meant that spelling reform would not be feasible going forwards.
I think the culture of the US is different enough now that any effort to reform spelling would be seen as the man telling you what you can’t say. Or spitting on spelling bee children.
I think it’s a great idea. Please start after I’m dead.
So we should all start spelling like LOLcats?
Why not leave spelling alone and “reform” pronunciation?
Are you talking about standardising spelling, pronunciation, or both, because there’s no way to standardise spelling alone (case in point - “new” isn’t ‘nyu’ to all English speakers)
Exactly. Whose pronunciation would be the basis for the spelling?
That it won’t make sense in any case, given the diversity of pronunciations y’all have, and that’s without adding us foreigners to the mess. Either any given word ends up with a dozen different spellings, or there will always be someone who looks at the spelling and says “but that’s not how I pronounce it!”.
But what about the spelling police who get all superior on your ass? At least there would be fewer muscle strains from self back patting. (I’m always looking to improve the US healthcare system too btw).
I think you’re rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Online communication, particularly chat- and textspeak, has already destroyed standardized spelling as we know it. Generations of kids are learning to communicate only in their own personalized phonetic alphabet, and there’s no sanction for doing so. Far from converging on standardization, watch for “inventive spelling” to infiltrate even formal communications within our lifetime. The pedant’s apocalypse is on the horizon. Get your affairs in order.
I’m reminded of the anecdote I encountered in a lingistics text I used that noted the difficulty one visitor had when they kept asking for the koht hahss and getting confused looks until one local finally recognized their dialect and pointed them to the korrt haous. And that was between two people who lived only about 500 miles apart, (South Carolina to Pennsylvania). If we start including all the pronunciations of all the dialects of North America, the UK, Ireland, Australia, South Africa, various Caribbean locales, India, and assorted other regions, the language will have already completely changed by the time that any agreement is reached on the topic.
Spelling will change the way it always has: we are already seeing “lite” and “thru” and numerous other words simplified in popular media. An official effort will just muddy the water.
On the “A Way With Words” public radio show, Grant Barrett has reported studies that show this is not true. Text-speak is a contextualized jargon like any other in-group jargon or slang.
In, say, American English there is at least an informal standard or “average” pronunciation that is clear to everyone.
And even in phonetic languages, there is some variation in pronunciation, but people are used to thinking of “newsreader” pronunciation in terms of how words are spelled – a similar thing would happen if English became phonetically spelled.
Again, I don’t think reform is feasible for english, but that particular objection isn’t the reason why IMO.