Actually, it is. There is no single standard pronunciation in English. Even if you argue that there is a standard American pronunciation (which is fairly loose standard), it’s not the only standard. Even in England, Received Pronunciation is no longer the mandatory newsreader pronunciation.
I find reformed spelling like the OP harder to read. I don’t read by pronouncing the letters, I read by visually recognizing the words. As text-based language displaces spoken language as the primary form of communication for many people, pronunciation is increasingly irrelevant.
Use whatever regional accent you want to use, but at least make it coherent, I can read and write in English with some success, but I’m still reeling from the fact that you pronounce “read” differently depending on the verb tense, even when its written the same way…
and that at least has some rule that you can learn to help you, but it seems to me that there is no way to know how a word is pronounced without first hearing someone say it, and that’s just WRONG.
Who needs agreement? That’s why America has the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines.
America – Fuck Yeah!
The point was about people seeing a word spelled phonetically and not understanding or not agreeing with the spelling. But basically everyone is aware of a standard way of pronouncing most words.
If you were to ask someone from Glasgow, Liverpool, Somerset, how would a newsreader on the national news pronounce <this word>, they will agree on the same pronunciation (minor emphasis and accent differences aside) because, for one thing, they will have all seen the national news.
As for standardizing English internationally, it’s not going to happen for practical / political reasons (just like nationally). But I don’t think differences in US and UK pronunciation are that great that you couldn’t in principle standardize spellings for most words. In most cases, there’s just differences in emphasis, and many phonetic languages give limited information on emphasis in their written form anyway.
We’re even seeing the rise of words, like “pwn”, that have a clear, agreed-upon spelling, but no unambiguous pronunciation.
Just to make clear, the “reformed spelling” of the OP was a joke and pretty much nothing like what real spelling reform would look like. In every case of implemented spelling reform that I’m aware of, 95% of words are untouched.
It’s less ambiguous than most people give it credit: it is nearly universally pronounced as if it were spelled “pone” in actual usage. Trying to pronounce it the same as “own” makes it impossible to distinguish from the word spelled “own.”
Anyways, my problem with spelling reform is that there’s no clear target that needs reform. There’s no one change that would make things significantly more phonetic. Or, at least, I’ve never seen one offered.
You can usually have a pretty fair guess though, -ough words excepted. The thing is, it’s a false assumption that the written and spoken forms of a language having such a direct mapping is desirable and necessary. Gaelic and Welsh have pretty direct linkage but look a mess when written down despite sounding lovely.
Once you get past the madness of some short/common words (and the pronunciation of the name of the language not matching its spelling), the spelling/pronunciation mapping is actually pretty regularised if quirky. Even on the short rule breakers and irregular verbs, you probably wouldn’t like the changes as phonetic normalisation would rub up against words that we already have and would possibly confuse in many contexts that are fixed by social magic when speaking.
English has a lot of homophones caused by its varied roots in Saxon, Celtic, Norse and Norman French and, as such, the written form needs a method of distinguishing between them. With a phonetic spelling reform it would be a lot harder to discern that the middle word in “I’ve red eyes” and “I’ve read minds” has a different meaning. The written form isn’t just a pronunciation guide, it’s a visual etymological and root meaning store with a built-in homophonic ambiguity fixer. It would be a shame to lose those features for the sake of marginally speeding up some kids’ reading and writing.
For all the complications of our orthography, at least we don’t suffer the madness of noun gender or the German counting system - 1 hundred, 1 and 20 thousand, 4 hundred, 2 and 30 (speaking 1 1 2 , 4 2 3 for 121,432).
ˈaɪ prəˈpoʊz ˈðæt ˈevrɪˌbədiː ʃʊd ˈlərn ənd ˈmæstər ˌaɪpiːˈeɪ, ˈðæt ˈweɪ ˈɔl ˈækˌsent ˌveriːˈeɪʃən kən ˈbiː əˈkæʊntɪd fər, ənd ˈlərnɪŋ ˈəðər ˈlæŋgwɪdʒɪz wəd ˈbiː ˈsoʊ ˈmətʃ iːziːje.
Also, the biggest problem I see with the OP is that the orthography of phonetics using the alphabet isn’t universally agreed upon. Plus there’s the issue of having two written Englishes, one that everyone else follows, and one that just America follows. Doesn’t seem like a good idea.
I think that saying that there are “two written Englishes” is significantly overstating the situation.
The etymological aspect it’s certainly fascinating, but I’m not sure it justifies making the language so damn hard to learn to pronounce correctly.
It’s exasperating, when compared to Spanish, that is (to my Spanish as first language eyes at least) pretty much a phonetic language where A always sounds the same way, independently from the letters around it, B always sound the same way, etc (there are a couple of exceptions like (L, LL) and (R, RR) or the G and U thing (as in GUERRA) but the rules are simple and consistent)
Now Spanish has noun genders and a lot of verb conjugations (is conjugation the right English word?) so no language is perfect, but I think that if it was possible in practice (which I doubt) English would benefit from making it more phonetic.
Modern English pronunciation is a relic of the past? What does that even mean?
Perhaps he meant to say English spelling?
Putting it mildly. I never realized you weren’t a native English speaker, and now I’m wondering how many other regular posters on these boards are non-native Anglophones and I never suspected it. Huh. Learn something new every day.
Oh well, Chinese is worse [/feeble evasion]. Yup, I’m afraid there’s no way around the fact that written English is not reliably phonetic.
Read it and weep. But don’t read it aloud, because you won’t be able to pronounce it. Some of those can trip me up, and I’m a fairly hyper-literate native English speaker.
Nah, it’s horribly confusing. In the Netherlands people are obsessed with either changing the spelling or protesting the latest changes, with the result that nobody can spell to save their lives.
They left the spelling alone from the '50s until 1996, when I was at school. Suddenly there were huge changes and I had to relearn all the spelling. Ruggegraat (spine) was changed to ruggengraat; pannekoek was changed to pannenkoek. The same rule for all similar words, except all plants and except some random words. The rules were changed for other things too: zeeëend (sea duck, is that even a real animal?) became zee-eend and all similar words, except some of them which didn’t change.
Of course many people disagreed with certain changes and kept using the old spelling, even newspapers and the like, so you didn’t see it consistently to even get used it.
Only ten years later, my poor brain still hurting, they changed it all again. Some things were changed back, peoples were to be capitalised (*Joden *for the people, joden for the religious), paardebloem (dandelion) became paardenbloem.
Only this time, the people weren’t going to stand for nonsensical new spelling. The “Green Book” (the book of new spelling) was declared the enemy and to solve the problem of having confusing spelling, the “White Book” was published, with completely different rules.
Now trying to write anything goes like this:
[shout to colleague] “Does paardebloem have an n in it?”
- “Well, let’s see, is the rule that because it’s not really a horse you don’t add an n?”
“No, that’s old spelling, now it has an n, because you just go with the actual plural form, right?” - No, then they changed it again, because they changed all the plants."
“Yeah, but they changed it having an n, right?” - “Oh wait, do you use the Green Book or the White Book?”
“I’ll just say “flower” instead…”
Just a word of warning…
I’m not sure if I understand what you’re getting at. My point was that it wouldn’t be a good idea, hypothetically, to have two highly distinctive versions of English in written form. I wouldn’t be able to communicate with you on this message board for starters.
If your point is this crap is readible, it is, but only at about 10% of my normal reading speed.
I don’t know if that’s true. I can clearly understand all of the anchors on all the TV news shows. If I heard Anderson Cooper say hour, dawn, crayon, or any number of other words I’d understand him, but if you asked me ahead of time how he pronounced them, I could only guess.