There’s the problem. I speak English (I am English), but I don’t sound anything like Morgan Freeman. If you change the spelling of words to resemble his phonetics, the result will be further away from my phonetics than it is now.
The thing is, I don’t pronounce “spelled” as “spelt”, so I would never have “spelt” it that way-I would have spelled it the way I pronounce it, perhaps as “speld”.
I say tomayto, you say tomahto. How do we decide how to spell it?
Let’s call the whole thing off.
Languages that are spoken primarily in one country (Norwegian, Romanian, Turkish) can be respelled by national edict, or even written in a new alphabet. The Kyrgyz language has been officially written in three different alphabets in the past century. But what authority would have the power to respell English?
Furthermore, the minute you respell English words, the ongoing process of language evolution would begin to bear on those words, rendering them decreasingly phonetic with additional generations of speakers. There can never be a perfectly phonetic language, because the pronunciations of words change over time, leaving the spelling locked in place.
I believe that when Chaucer wrote, it was very phonetically faithful to the way the language was spoken at the time. How often do you think writers of a spoken language ought to have a respelling imposed on them?
English pronunciation uses more than five pure vowels. Would you expand the alphabet to allow for different vowels in “man” and “want” and “call”? For “good” and “food”? “Machine” and “saline”?
The proposal upthread about incrementally making changes over time would be like cutting off a dog’s tail an inch at a time.
Put knot yore trust inn spel chequers!
For more than 40 years the Chicago Tribune pushed “sane spelling” on the good people of the Midwest. The record will show that a few of the neologisms (neospellisms?) caught on: analog, dialog, canceled. Some didn’t make it to formal acceptance but people know the words mean (e.g., thru.)
But most of the “reforms” fell flat. Not even Chicagoland’s most devoted dairy farming Tribune readers ever called an unbred female bovine a “hefer,” nor did the City of the Big Shoulders ever unload its cargo from a “frater.”
We’ll spell like LOLCATS!
But Chicago Tribune was successful in changing a few words, so maybe a 10 words could be changed every year to be more logical. For example in the first year get rid of the extra consonants in the words: tomorrow, accommodate, embarrass, occurrence, possession, occasionally, difference, millennium, dissipate —which are all from a list of 100 words people most frequently spell wrong due to extra letters that don’t need to be there.
Another step in spelling reform could be to make all words ending in ‘ence’ and ‘ance’ have consistent spelling: choose one way or another for the words like:
existence
influence
absence
audience
existence
allowance
ambulance
annoyance
appearance
appliance
I was reading pretty well at six. Do Finns read at one year old?
Finns read at 8 (?), but it takes them only a few months to learn at that age. They start school at about 6 months, and speak 3 languages before they they learn to read.
As alluded to above, spelling simplification would be a good thing, but if you based phonetic spelling on the English spoken by millions in India, it would be uninteligable to many Americans. We don’t own English, we share it.
I think that there’s a strong financial and political advantage to being the lingua franca of Earth. Making the language easier to read and write would, most likely, help to make that state last longer.
Terrible, unworkable, and completely unnecessary idea. English is not Math, it is culture. You cannot define it by any absolute, purely ‘logical’ set of rules.
They tried this in the late 60s/early 70s (it was called ITA) and it failed miserably. Once kids learned the simplified version it merely made it much more difficult to teach them the actual one. My older brother was first taught this and to this day he cannot spell for shit. A century earlier they also tried Esperanto (an attempt to create a ‘universal’ language), didn’t work either. Its like people who still push the Dvorak keyboard. Although it *seems *so much more logical, study after study has proven that it is neither easier nor faster than Qwerty.
Biggest reason it will never happen is because electronic devices’ auto-correct and voice-to-text have made it nearly redundant.
There was once a Sci-Fi story called, approximately “Meihem in ce clasrum”.
As pointed out many times upthread, the problem with spelling English phonetically is whose phonetics? My wife has a British friend who said to her one day, “I can’t stand that Canadians say secretary' when the correct pronunciation is secretree’”. Note that our pronuncations is pretty close to the actual spelling in this case.
Somewhere I read that various dialects of English have between 22 and 24 distinct vowel sounds. It is not even constant. Even the consonants have variants (two different l sounds, for example), although it probably isn’t necessary to distinguish them.
My daughter was going to a local elementary school back in the 70’s, and it suddenly announced that it was going to teach reading using this ITA garbage. Within a day of finding out about this, and what it entailed, I had pulled her out of that school and put her into a private school. Cost about $1500 a year for the next several years, but it was worth it - she’s now a voracious reader.
Professional educators need their hands slapped every so often.
I’m sharing this clever poem here written by a Dutch person long ago to express their frustration with English spelling.
The Chaos
—written by Gerald Nolet Trinite’
Dutch, 1870-1946
Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation – think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough –
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!
I agree that teaching ITA to kids was a ridiculous idea but only because they then had to learn the existing English language afterwards, so they would have to unlearn the ITA to relearn how to spell English —so what was the point.
However, ITA might be a perfect system to replace the way less than perfect current spelling system for English. I haven’t studied it that carefully but if they really did switch the whole English language over to the ITA system first maybe the English language would be simpler to read, write, learn.
Auto-correct could just be switched over to the ITA system and automatically correct peoples old English spellings to the newer ITA system- so auto-correct could make it easier to switch to a new spelling system not harder.
I think even 10 words a year is a lot. More like one word every 10 years.
It’s like the metric system. Sure, it’s logical, sensible and really not that hard to change if we all wanted to. But how many of us really want to?
I’d gladly go to the trouble of switching to metric, but I guess I’m in the minority. I think this “simplified” spelling is hogwash though. What about homophones? Would “there” “their” and “they’re” all be spelled the same? Are we expected to derive the meaning from the context every time?
And like several other posters have noted, who’s phonetics will be the standard? Or will we end up with hundreds of regional spellings for most words? Yeah, simple.
It would be easier to just ditch English altogether and adopt a more phonetic language, like Spanish.
Good points. I’m American and now live in NZ have switched to metric. Its easy to switch, you just use a measuring device that has mms and cms instead of inches.
And your are right about the homophones ‘there’ ‘their’ 'they’re, ‘right’ ‘write’ ‘rite’ ‘sweet’ ‘suite’. But could the homophones be singled out as the exceptions while other words like ‘bait’ and ‘fate’ ‘break’ etc… changed to have phonetic consistent spelling?