One word:
Ebonics.
I’m not getting that either. Ebonics is more of a dialect than anything.
Eh. While we argue about it, I get e-mails from my students and friends’ kids with “3” for “E,” etc. Just as, while the nobility and well-to-do quickly learned French around 1066, the peasants chopped off all the case and declension markers in English. Ho Chi Minh hated the Romanized Vietnamese alphabet and was always writing it with his own simplifications. Modern Hebrew is pretty much a constructed creole. Language changes in a variety of ways; what it doesn’t do is remain constant, even if you have an Academy to ban “le weekend” and whatnot.
My personal favourite under-le-radar neologism is cederom.
One of the arguments at the time was that black students should be allowed to both use the dialect and the spellings that went with them in deference to their cultural sensitivities. More to the point though was that it was – at least to me – simply an attempt to forgive dialectical and grammatical errors (as they would be seen in the English language) instead of teaching proper English. A bit of a “dumbing down” as I saw it. There are numerous parallels to be drawn between the Ebonics movement and this whole language simplification issues, though the major issue for me again is the issue of dumbing things down and dressing it in the guise of easier education for the younguns. While there are numerous discrepancies and redundancies in the English language, not to mention rule exceptions out the noompah, I really don’t see anything wrong with it that it needs to be simplified. Frankly, English is easy compared to many other languages, with the only notable exception being that it’s got more words in it than pretty much any other language. (As long as you ignore agglutinative languages anyway) Even with that exception, consider learning to write an iconic language like Kanji. By comparison the English language’s paltry 26 characters is a breeze. How about learning Latin? 7 noun cases really makes things fun.
Okay, I’m branching a bit far afield since this is mainly about spelling, but the point is that there is absolutely no reason the language needs to be simplified. Why on Earth would anyone think it would be a good thing if children have to spend less time learning in an effort to make things easier for them? That’s hardly a good way to prepare them for the real world.
Except we wouldn’t be simplifying the LANGUAGE, we’d be rationalizing the SPELLING. Two different things.
Explain to me why having gh’s strewn about at random makes English spelling better. Or why it toughens up kids. Why does deliberately making things harder, deliberately making them more confusing, help kids learn? Oh, they’ll encounter difficult and confusing things in adulthood, so we should make learning as difficult and confusing as possible. How does that make sense?
Of course phonetic spelling is an impossibility because pronounciation varies, in some dialects “fire” and “far” sound the same. But spelling it “phighre” wouldn’t make much sense, would it? We haven’t pronounced those gh’s for 500 years. We have a letter f.
Yeah, it looks “wrong” because you’re used to the archaic spelling. Yeah, the simplifed spelling is harder to read because you’re used to the archaic spelling. Yeah, I know that fixing anachronistic spellings is never going to happen…but that doesn’t make the concept of spelling reform stupid, or dumbing down the language. Spelling fotograf instead of photograph isn’t the same as declaring 4+4=9.
I’ve never heard of that about him. Could you provide a cite?
All natural languages have “numerous discrepancies and redundancies.” It’s a matter of opinion (actually a matter of a non-linguist’s opinion) that those so-called discrepancies don’t serve a purpose. English does use redundancy and reduplication to convey information from one person to another.
Frankly, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
This shows even more that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Kanji isn’t a language. It’s a writing system, that of Chinese, adapted for use to write Japanese. English and Dutch share the same alphabet and the matter of the number of characters in it doesn’t say all that much for the ease of learning how to decipher those characters to correctly pronounce the word written. The number of cases a word has, of course, has exactly zero to do with the writing system of the language.
Perhaps because some people think that the proposed simplified systems don’t do what they are supposed to do? Here’s an example: as I said above, I’m kind of partial to the Deseret Alphabet; however, the only thing I have in it is a Triple Combination in PDF. That Triple was constructed by computer using the “brute force” method another poster mentioned above. So that means that not only does idiolect play an important part in the spellings used, but some of the spellings are haphazard guesses.
I’ll see if I can dig it up. IIRC, it was in Truong Nhu Tang, A Viet Cong Memoir.
Thanks, Shoshana. The language I studied Vietnamese at DLI and am still incredibly interested in anything to do with that language. Its spelling system is, IMHO, a major compromise between the two major dialects: Hanoi and Saigon. The consonants represent the sounds of the Saigon dialect while the tone marks on the vowels represent the tonal system of the Hanoi dialect. The same word, although pronounced differently in the two dialects, is spelled the same way.
I have to agree with him, though. English is an easy language to speak badly (i.e. just knowing the raw basics, one can spit out a pidgin sentence and still get one’s meaning across). It’s an extremely difficult language to speak perfectly, whence some of the respect for Alistair Cooke and Edwin Newman.
“Lamp break, I fix him.” violates any number of arbitrary grammar and syntax rules, but the basic concept is clear enough. Granted, the tense is ambiguous (it’s unclear if the speaker is talking about a repair has has done or one he intends to do) but the necessary information can be derived from context. Are there other western languages that can be comparably compressed?
Okay, wrong source. It’s from Susan Brownmiller, Seeing Vietnam:
"Ho Chi Minh was among those language reformers who advocated quoc ngu [romanized Vietnamese writing] even though he railed against aspects of the romanization: the words looked fussy on the page, the letters required special type fonts, they were useless for telegrams. But *quoc ngu * worked for patriotism as it had worked for the catechism. It was easier to read than Chinese characters [previously used for Vietnamese writing]…
“Up to his death, Ho favored a streamlined alphabet, leaving a will that deliberately used f for ph, and *z * for d.”
Brownmiller’s book is a travelogue, so there are no internal citations. I’m guessing that a good bio of Uncle Ho would address this issue, though.
Let me check what forum we’re in. Ahh, the pit. So I don’t have to be nice.
The fact that you would characterize the proposal you’re discussing and the nature of African-American Vernacular English this way indicates your total unfamiliarity with the subject matter. In fact, your use of the term “Ebonics” in the first place suggests a general acquaintance with the overwhelming blitz of newspaper articles and talk radio rants that surrounded the issue, but a complete ignorance of any of the academic work in the area.
Funny how no parallels leap to my mind at all. It’s hard for me to imagine a less apropos analogy than this one.
Irrelevant. No changes to the English language are being discussed; making large-scale changes to a language is a rather difficult task for any government body anyway.
Easy? Cite? Because one of those pesky facts you learn in an intro to linguistics class is that all the evidence suggests that natural languages are all equally easy to learn, as the only data from which to draw a meaningful comparison - the age at which children achieve mastery of their native language and the rate at which they progress in learning it - demonstrate that all natural languages are equal in difficulty.
Kanji is a set of characters, not a language. “Kanji” specifically refers to the set of Chinese characters used in writing Japanese; only the barest minority of them could possibly be described as “iconic”, and your mistake is compounded when you use the term to refer to a language (whichever one you may have meant) rather than writing systems.
What an odd comparison. Because the Roman alphabet, during Classical times, had fewer letters than that used to write English! By your standards, doesn’t that mean that Latin is an easier language to learn? Why do you attempt to draw a comparison between the number of characters in the Roman alphabet (with which both languages are written) and the number of cases on Latin nouns? (Incidentally, except for a few marginal cases, there are only five Latin noun cases, and I can’t think of a single noun that under any circumstances has seven case forms.)
This is only about spelling and you’ve been discussing matters that are almost completely unrelated.
What about the substantial number of highly educated, literate adults who find spelling extremely difficult? What about the hours that we spend teaching children spelling when we could be teaching them something more relevant?
I hate to think that the way to prepare children for the real world is to force them to waste their time in a useless activity. I try not to spend any of my adult life on useless activities (except, arguably, the time I spend on the SDMB :))
It’s a disappointment to me that people tend to approach this subject with such visceral reactions; reasonable people certainly will disagree on a matter like this, but it would be more interesting if their disagreement could be on more substantive grounds.
I’m not certain what you’re even trying to say here. Do you believe that if you speak other languages badly, you’ll be completely incomprehensible? Are you under some sort of misapprehension that what makes for articulateness is perfection of grammar? I don’t understand why you mention English at all in this discussion, unless you mean to draw some comparison between it and other languages. But if that’s the case, the comparison you’re trying to make seems like nonsense to me.
You including writing systems? Chinese/Japanese require many more years to master than, say, Spanish. Native speakers of those languages certainly consider them fundamentally more difficult than, say, Spanish for that reason.
Why? He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, as evidenced by his very wrong assertions.
The same can be said for any language, although Pidgins are a bit more difficult than you make out.
Again, the same can be said for any language. (Excepting of course, that one would have to change the names of the literary giants for the language concerned.)
Portuguese, Dutch, French, and Spanish, to name a few. Feel free to read the rest of the linked site.
It doesn’t matter that the native speakers (or anyone else, for that matter) considers the writing system of a particular language to be more difficult than that of another language. The issue addressed by Excalibre was that learning the language (i.e, to speak the language) is no more difficult than any other language.
This may come as a shock to you, but the writing system isn’t really a linguistic issue. It’s a anthropological issue.
And my misspelling of the indefinite article above is a typo issue. :slap:
Obviously I’m not. If I believed that all writing systems were comparable in difficulty - and I can tell you just based on my own limited ability to read and write Chinese that they’re not - then it would obviously not be worth considering simplifying English spelling. Since, after all, if all writing systems are equally difficult, then what could spelling reform possibly accomplish?
But again, you’re attempting to conflate radically different things - language and writing system. That’s a mistake, and it’s part of the reason these discussions tend to be so silly. There’s no shortage of opinions, and no one seems to have the urge to attempt to learn something about the subject and thus render an opinion on the basis of knowledge of the subject.