Yes. I’ve seen a longer paragraph written like this and it is remarkably easy to read.
Princhester, I did think that “thot” was in the article, but you’re right, it was actually in one of the posts.
My main problem with the whole concept is that I think it is a lot easier to teach each new generation how to spell and read the current language, than teaching all currently living generations how to spell and read a new one. I don’t think spelling should be forced on anyone, but should be allowed to evolve naturally.
I have a copy of Shaw’s “Androcles and the Lion” with Shaw alphabet version and normal english on facing pages. The Shaw Alphabet version takes up 1/3 less space, but looks like Martian. I find that with only a little practice you can read it. But it’s not worth it.
Actually, it’s not quite as simple as that; it’s not just the presence of first and last letters, it’s the visual shape of the word as whole object - and this is affected by the position of tall characters like t and l and descenders like q and y - move these about and it becomes harder to recognise the word (lrteets in your text doesn’t immediately read as letters, whereas mdilde is easier).
There are more subtle aspects to this as well, such as the presence of double letters.
There’s actually a term that means ‘the visual shape of a word object on a page’ - I came across it the other day when I was researching my (mis)information on the term colophon, but I can’t remember what the term is.
I read something about changing spelling years and years ago. It started out simply enough, but by the time it was done the author was ranting in mock-German (like a cartoon Nazi). Does anyone remember it?
I’d like to know if the proponents of simplified spelling have any evidence that “children would learn faster and illiteracy rates would drop.” If this were true, they’d have a good point. But I suspect it isn’t. The language isn’t broke, and there’s no compelling reason to fix it.
I think you’re showing a bit of a misunderstanding of why languages change. Languages change over time regardless of any pressing need. As far as Esperanto goes, you’re also showing a misunderstanding of its inventor’s purpose of creating it.
You must’ve missed the post above about pronunciation.
You guys do know that lots of countries have implemented spelling reform? Like Germany? And the heavens did NOT fall, it was NOT to cater to illiterates, it was to rid the language of barbaric anachronisms.
I can’t understand why we use “ph” for the “f” sound when we have a perfectly good letter for the “f” sound, namely “f”. Who the fuck decided to translate greek words with a “phi” as “ph”? Why didn’t they use “f”? Why can’t we have telefones and fotografs? Who the fuck came up with this crap, and why can’t we punch them in the throat?
And all those gh’s cluttering up the language. Yeah, I know back in the day those were actually pronounced. Silly eeeenglish Kuh-nigh-its! But through the tough cough and hiccup plough him through. We simplified “plough” into “plow”, why not cough?
Why do we have a letter, “c”, which is totally useless? It can be replaced by either “k” or “s” in every case. Except the “ch” sound, but we’re not using “x”, why not bring back the old “chi” meaning of “x”? Then we could use “c” to mean “sh”. Why do we have the letter “q”? Why do we have TWO “th” sounds? Why couldn’t we have kept thorn and edh?
I don’t demand that we use the latin alphabet like the Romans did, but wouldn’t it make sense to have some sort of correspondence between a letter and the sounds it represents? I know for the vowels and such there’s so much regional variation that vowel simplification isn’t going to work, we’re gonna be stuck with silent e, fine. But the consonants? Come ON!
I generally prefer a pure phonetic rendering, and consider English to be a distressing hodge-podge of conventions. It’s very hard to mispronounce a Spanish or German word once you learn the standard phonemes and their symbolic representations. Moreover, what you see is pronounced, so there’s no confusion about, say, that “e” on the end of a word, as in English. I also think the loss of diacritics in English completely muddles some words, even worse because we still sometimes use them anyway, especially for words more recently aquired by English from foreign tongues* as part of the standard lexicon. I wuhd hav no problem with our cuntree chainjing.
*“foreign tongues” is a great example of the absurdity of English. I can think of probably four different ways a non-native speaker could legitimately conclude those two words should be pronounced, if they had never encountered them, but knew how to pronounce many other English words. And only total snobbery should preclude us from wondering if “forrén tungs” couldn’t be better.
I hav no idea but u no wat. I think u can figer it owt bi context. stil it is a stupid way of speling wurds.
Personally, even with my typos and occasional mistakes I prefer to spell in the good old fashioned (relatively old fashioned way) of spelling. For some reason the other way is harder for me to read.
I also looks stupid. I mean those sentences using simplified spelling look like thay are written by a stupid person. Biased of me I guess.
Thank you. Whenever I see the reactions to people to the idea of modernizing the English writing system, I’m incredibly puzzled; it’s tough for me to think of a language that’s been written for more than a few hundred years that hasn’t had systematic changes made to its writing system. Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and to at least a limited extent German have all had substantial changes to their writing system and in all cases they’ve been government-led. And yet their societies didn’t fall apart because of it! The idea that it’s somehow ridiculous to reconsider a language’s writing system is simply not borne out by history. English is unique in its speakers’ conservatism in that respect.
No damn kidding.
I don’t favor any simplification scheme for English spelling, myself, for a number of reasons - none of which are typically brought up by others in these sorts of discussions. But the idea that spelling systems ought to, by some moral principle, be allowed to “evolve” on their own is frankly a bit silly, since many, many writing systems have been successfully changed. And like it or not, a lot of otherwise very smart people have enormous difficulties with English spelling, and in fact never learn to spell well. The modern era of spell-checkers has helped some, but not everything is written on computer; to blithely ignore that seems unjustifiable to me.
The trouble is that paragraph is not very well scrambled; I don’t remember where I saw it, but I’ve seen a version where the letters were scrambled much more thoroughly, and it’s remarkably difficult to read.
This has become sort of common knowledge, but I’m not sure how true it is. I wish I had a cite to hand, but I don’t - you’ll have to take my word for it that many experts don’t believe this is an accurate depiction of how reading works, or at least that it’s incomplete. There’s some evidence that people do indeed focus on each letter and examine it separately, which is something that’s easy to imagine when you consider that a lot of words have nearly identical overall outlines but are still easy to distinguish in writing.
Hooked on foniks werked for me!
Didn’t a written y at one point represent a spoken th (hence quaint “Ye Olde Shoppe” signs, which I think appear in fiction far more than reality, anyway)? Or is that a pre-urban legend?