[QUOTE=John Mace]
Well, some languages have modernized their spelling and some have not. Which is better? Depends.
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=Princhester]
But nonetheless I can’t help but feel that the issue hits a wall of illogical, half-baked reactionary pooh-poohing whenever raised that is out of step with rationality.
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=1920s Style “Death Ray”]
Yes. I’ve seen a longer paragraph written like this and it is remarkably easy to read.
[/quote]
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.
[QUOTE=Mangetout]
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.
[/QUOTE]
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.