so what? reforming spelling every few hundred years to reflect actual speaking would seem like a sensible thing to do. Why should we continue to use an archaic system for ever?
Yeah OK, no need for all the exclamations. The point is this: you were implying a value judgement that different words (with word being defined by etymology) should be spelled differently even if they are pronounced the same.
Well…I don’t agree. I don’t care about etymology. Spelling everything phonetically would be beneficial, that’s all I’m saying. (And note, I’m not advocating we change english now; the cat is way out of the bag now).
The other point is the words their/they’re/there helps my point. Verbally, there is ambiguity, but people seem to understand just fine anyway. In writing, many people regularly confuse the spellings, showing that the mapping of multiple spellings comes less naturally to us.
Okay, I understand your preference, and sorry about the exclamation points. But, as others have pointed out, “redundance” in its many guises is (to a point) a GOOD thing comunicatation – be it “unnecessary” grammatical encrustations, “silent” letters, or all the sonic and visual nuances we give to speech (almost none of which are reflected in the “spelling” you are so fond of). Many people well versed in mathematics, artificial intelligence, linguistics, psychology, and other fields can attest to this* – how any communication is going to be imperfect and “noisy”, so all these sorts of redundancies are worth the “costs” you care so much about.
Would you really want to eliminate the word “they” from the contraction “they’re”, and so lose the connection (in this case, yes, just a visual connection) to the 3rd person plural personal pronoun?
*Brian Christian’s recent book “The Most Human Human” is a wonderfully entertaining and enlightening example which has a chapter or two on this subject.
Whose pronunciation do you suggest should be used if English were rewritten to be more phonetic today?
I see you’re British…
Re: the thread, we certainly could choose to have writing track pronunciation much more closely, such that there is hardly any ambiguity in going from the one to the other. Yes, there are difficulties with this, but not insurmountable ones; it’s just a matter of what one is willing to accept to achieve this goal. We could abandon globally standardized spelling, for example, and have people write in different manners depending on their local pronunciations; “accented” writing, same as accented speech. Indeed, as I understand it, something like this was historically the norm; we just happen to have switched over to the idea of invariant standardized orthography over the last several centuries. This has benefits in terms of ability to read past or foreign texts, but also real disadvantages in terms of the effort involved in learning to read and write. Things don’t have to be this way, though; it’s a trade-off.
No, just a person who is simply interested in learning the origin of a letter and some of the reasons for English language rules thank you very much
True dat! 
Good point. The redundancy is useful for adults, but may be essential for children learning their first language.
As another example, the silent ‘n’ in ‘solemn’ is useful since it helps you remember the pronunciation of ‘solemnity.’
The Thai alphabet has many “unnecessary” consonants, for example six different letters for aspirated ‘t.’ (There are three consonant tone classes, but among the six aspirated 't’s, only two classes are represented.)
(Replying to my own quote.) Sorry, my bad. Ignore that. I just read your post a little more closely.
Yeah “to a point”. Sometimes silent letters are useful in disambiguation or whatever, but very often they are not.
If they’re so essential, how on earth do more phonetic languages manage to get by? And why do children seem to learn to read and write more easily in such languages?
American english has simplified spellings for many words. Was this wrong, should they should return to spellings like “colour”? (obviously neither spelling is phonetic but clearly there are superfluous letters)
Well, it wouldn’t get rid of “they are” completely, just in some informal writing.
But sure, if you just write it phonetically, people will understand what you mean because they have to resolve the same ambiguity regularly in speech.
Another common mistake in English is incorrectly adding the possessive: taxi’s pizza’s etc. I used to wonder why it is so common and why putting an S on a word ending with a vowel looks odd, and basically I think it is to do with phonetics.
The pronunciation of “tacos” is ambiguous in english, but without knowing it’s a plural, the most likely pronunciations would end with an S sound. It’s possible to misread a plural in this way and, momentarily at least, not understand what is meant.
The apostrophe makes you parse the noun separately then add a zee sound to the end, like with a plural. It’s grammatically wrong, but you’re basically guaranteed to read it right, and understand what is meant.
I’m not saying we should all do the incorrect spelling, I’m highlighting some of the issues with non-phonetic languages and that people are comfortable resolving ambiguity as long as the vocalization of a sentence is clear.
Agreed, mostly. The irony, from your perspective, is that some languages actually have artificially introduced spelling differences among homonyms, so they can be distinguished when reading – e.g., French notre (our) vs. nôtre (ours), or Spanish si (if) vs. sí (yes).
They can speak to the advantages of this, and would, it seems, advise us to leave well enough alone with “there”, “their”, and “they’re”.
What does that (bolded) mean?
When I read, I hear the words in my head; I have a very hard time reading things I cannot easily hear, such as “sec.B(1)(b)” - “sec B.1.b” is much easier to read, even if I do not ‘say’ “bee dot one dot bee” (this is all in my head, you understand, I am not reading aloud).
When I was younger I did have two vocabularies, a written and a spoken. I knew and understood written words that I had never heard and did not use in speech and did not have a pronunciation for, but I’ve lost that ability. I HAVE to hear the word in my head now. (I remember this from my teens, twenties … I don’t know when I lost the ability. If it weren’t for internet dictionaries, I do not know how I would learn now.)
You can just say, “When I was younger, I had diglossia.” People will ask if you had to miss school
[QUOTE=coremelt]
so what? reforming spelling every few hundred years to reflect actual speaking would seem like a sensible thing to do. Why should we continue to use an archaic system for ever?
[/QUOTE]
I’d agree that we shouldn’t, and in fact we don’t: for one things, new words come in, and old ones cease to be intelligible. It’s the same reason Italians no longer write in Latin (though obviously they did long past the time when the two had diverged considerably: see the diglossia comment above).
The trouble is, who decides? The English? The Scots? The Americans? The Australians? South Africans? Indians? The Scots have already done it to some degree (Dictionary of the Scots Leid), but good luck getting the rest of the world to agree on your reforms. We’ll probably do what all the other languages do, cling to what we’ve got a few hundred years longer than necessary until the current system becomes untenable.
Right here is the problem, I think. You don’t even need to go out of one country to find differences in pronunciation. Californians and Bostonians pronounce “car” differently. In most (all?) of the south as I understand it, “pen” and “pin” are pronounced the same. There is no such thing as “standard” English, so whose pronunciation are you going to use?
No, that’s not what I’m talking about at all. This was within a given language variant (and with only one person).
It would be like seeing the ‘psychotic’, understanding what it meant (from context probably), but not knowing, and using in one’s head, the sounds ‘si-kot-ic’. In fact, in a case like this, I might have known the written “psychotic” and the spoken “si-kot-ic” and not realized they were the same word.
When I was younger I could see and understand “psychotic” without knowing how it was pronounced; now, somehow, I just can’t learn a new work without attaching a pronunciation to it.
(Why are the roots of ‘pronounce’ and ‘pronunciation’ spelled differently? It is annoying)
This is actually VERY common in English – distinctive stress (and vowel “length”) for related words that are different parts of speech.
It might annoy you less than you think. It’s helpful to have most “nouns formed from verbs” to have something in common, wouldn’t you say?
Historically American English has had a few spelling reforms- Noah Webster was an early proponent of them. He’s the reason that we have colour/color, honour/honor and so forth.
Some very powerful people attempted spelling reform, including Teddy Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, and Andrew Carnegie. Minor changes have happened to the language because of their effort, but with little overall effect. Heck, Ben Franklin developed a phonetic alphabet.
There’s a lot of problems with spelling reform. One of the big things is that there are so many dialects of English that there would be no way to pick a standard dialect. People would also lose the ability to read pre-reform texts, historical contexts would be lost, and you’d lose information contained within the word, like Greek/Latin roots.
For example, when I read someone’s chart at work, I may not know exactly what pyelonephritis is, but I know that ‘nephro’ means kidney.
I don’t realistically see it ever happening. There’s no English Language governing board like some languages have, and English is spoken by so many people around the world, especially as a non-primary language, that any efforts at reform would be non-systemic and therefore useless.
Okay, please re-read the section in bold.
Respectfully, I submit that I can gauge my annoyance levels quite well. For example, at this moment I am more amused than annoyed.
Edit: “pyelonephritis” is the kind of word I was taking about.
I don’t know if JKellyMap was referring to the accomodation of the different vowel spelling, or the vowel reduction itself, that occurs in English with change in syllable stress for different word forms. But while it’s obviously a common pattern in English, the vowel reduction is usually not reflected in the spelling, (as I pointed out in post #28 above, with the case of photograph / photographer):
*academy academic academician
realize reality realistic
climate climatic
ecology ecological *
etc.
So, if you really want English spelling to attempt to reflect English speech better, then you might appreciate pronounce / pronunciation as one of the few situations where this happens, in contrast to the usual pattern.
Didn’t mean to imply you don’t know your own feelings…sorry I expressed that poorly. I only meant that “if the language were as you say it should be – and so we lost the part-of-speech pronunciation change patterns – you might find yourself at least as annoyed as you are now, just for different reasons.”