I always did well in English and in spelling -- any topic, really, where the primary means of instruction was reading written material. I have excellent spellchecking wetware.

I owe it all to phonics courses in second and third grade. Yes, there's memory involved, but it's better directed than trying aimlessly to memorize wordlists. What a phonics course does is rehearse the various ways English writes its forty-odd sounds with but twenty-six letters, some of them used redundantly. C and QU come immediately to mind, don't they? Where memory comes in is phonics sets out to teach you which words use which ways. This really unlocks the mysteries of English spelling and makes sense of the whole unofficially arranged (if that's the word) schemozzle. English has no equivalent of the Académie Française, which has regularized French spelling and vocabulary into something fairly systematic. We Englishers allow no such authority.

What Kingswood is crying out for is to have been trained in phonics -- clearly he never got it and he knows this is a misfortune. He's right to think so.

****

Until early modern English, we did have singular and plural forms of "you," with all its cases. AFAIK we didn't have a separate form for familiar-plural-you such as the Castilian Spanish vosotros forms, but:

Sing.: thou, (to/with/from/obj of verb or preposition) thee. Thy, thine (used after the fashion of a, an; also with thine as a terminal use)

Plu.: you (all cases), sometimes ye (remained plural long after the thou forms fell out of use)

To expand on Dr. Seuss a little: The tough coughs as he ploughs through the dough.:cool:

I before E is better gotten if you have the whole rule. I before E except after C, and when sounded like A, as in "neighbor" and "weigh." Of course, you still have to seize onto the weird to grapple with those exceptions.

A coda, and the sort of thing you find in Strunk & White but too commonly misunderstood, is "Possessive nouns, common and proper, always take an apostrophe before their S; possessive pronouns never do." Thus the somewhat curious formation of "its." In most contexts, this is possessive. This rule eliminates ambiguity in written English between the possessive pronouns and their soundalike contractions, condensing conjugations of "to be" into suffixes of pronouns.

Wiki on Strunk & White

I don't think spelling belongs in English class. Similarly, most of what is taught in math class doesn't belong there either.

I am looking at two scholarship applications. Both are well written as to content, the students are worthy candidates due to GPA, service, and well-roundedness. One student, however, has a couple misspellings. Who is going to get the scholarship? The one who took the time to check their i's and t's. Spellcheck? Probably, but it shows an effort that is important to academia.

Having to learn to spell correctly is just as important, to me, as learning to not say "I seen you yesterday." Boohoo if it gives some people pause. They will still probably be OK in the world, but it smacks of laziness and bad attitude to me: I don't like it so I won't learn it.

Also, what is the "memorizing word lists" thing? I don't remember thinking I was memorizing anything. Each word has a context somewhere, and once I know it in that context the spelling is as clear to me as if it were in neon lights in front of me. Being an avid reader helps.

Holy shit, man, you should try Danish sometime. The letter 'd' can sound like a "hard" 'd', a "soft" 'th' or be silent. Different vowels even sound the same as each other with no apparent rhyme (there's a good word!) or reason.

Jeg elsker dig.

Does the first word rhyme with the last? If you said no, you were wrong.

Pronunciation: Yie (as in pie) elsker die.

(FTR, that means, 'I love you', though clearly I am not referring to you, personally.)

My Danish husband says, "He has no idea how good he has it. Tell him that from the guy who was forced to learn German." Dude, that's not even an English word. :p

not yet... :eyebrow:

What is it with Cellarites and personal remarks, especially false ones? Can't you make your point without making personal remarks?

I learnt to read before I started school. Phonics was the method that was taught when I went to school, and I agree it is a good method. But it has its limits because it doesn't help when words have redundant silent letters.

Here is a word for you to consider.

violist
It can mean two things. When pronounced vee-OL-ist, it means someone who plays a viola. When pronounced VIE-ol-ist, it means someone who plays a viol.

In spoken conversation, it is possible to know what instrument the person plays just by hearing the word. In a written transcript of that conversation, this isn't possible unless the instrument is mentioned explicitly. If the instrument s not mentioned, one must either add some clarifying text or be compelled to lose something in the transcription.

English has 500 or so words with different pronunciations and meanings represented by the same spelling. While the majority of these words can generally be disambiguated by context, such words that are in the same part of speech (usually nouns) cannot be disambiguated easily.

Seriously? I mean really. When was the last time you read a book or an article where a violist was mentioned and a) there was no context, or b) the story was compromised by the omission of same?

What do you propose calling one who plays the viola that would be different from the word used to describe one who plays the viol? A change that involves spelling one differently from the other, not a whole separate, new word.

Just going along with your complaint here, let's try the words 'read' and 'read'. Let's distinguish them by spelling the first one 'reed' and the second one 'red'. Oops, those are already other words with completely different meanings. Ok, how about 'rede' and 'rehd'. Hmmm, now there are unnecessary silent letters that I'm pretty sure you'd be complaining about. And again, one of them is already a word with a different meaning.

Seems like you're going to have to create a whole new language if you want it to be spelled the way you think it should, based on how it sounds.

I was trying to point out that spelling can be and often is as poorly taught as American history. I got phonics, my three-years-younger brothers didn't, and they had an awful time trying to get spelling right, where I can if necessary just visualize my word as if on a projection screen on the inside of my forehead -- memory is definitely visual here -- and am something close to a spellchecker on legs in consequence. My brothers are also nowhere near the readers that I am.

Yes, it does, though nowadays you have to make some effort to read material that has been competently edited, and the general standard of editing in American writing has visibly declined. A shame.

Hmm -- that never limited me, though introduction to silent letters, begging any question of their redundancy, was all through my early reading learning. A silent E modifying a preceding vowel sound was easy enough to master, even such variations as the long-vowel/single phoneme/silent-E as in ache. In my experience, it had no limits at all.

I'm sorry to have offended, but not getting phonics courses is so very much the usual root of spelling troubles as to be the way to bet, and that was the way I did. What do you see around you, should you inquire into this?

The two most phonetically written languages I have any experience of are Turkish, whose Roman alphabet was designed a mere century ago with regularity in mind -- and was a lot easier to learn and use for Turkish than Arabic script had been -- and Russian, which is almost purely phonetic. Spanish is right up there with them, even unto diacriticals to cue the reader if the stress on a word is for some reason in a funny place -- as well as keeping "the" separate from "he." French's system is looser, with so many silent letters around you have to really stay alert. Welsh spelling, rather like French, is described as less phonetic than phonemic -- you get a small number of variations in writing a sound down, viz., /f/ gets written Ff or Ph, depending.

The word "viola" (the musical instrument) has two consecutive vowels, ee and oh (long E and long O). In some other words the same sequence of sounds is spelt with eo: Leo, geode, geopolitics, etc. If we spelt to this pattern, the musical instrument would be spelt "veola". There is nothing wrong with this spelling except for tradition dictating that it must be spelt as "viola" exactly as it was spelt in Italian, even though this spelling causes confusion with another English word "viola" (the plant) with different roots (pardon the unintended pun).

If viola (the instrument) was respelt as veola, a player of this instrument could then be a veolist. Of course that would probably be unsatisfactory to those who favor traditional spelling.

The read-read example you cited above is an interesting example that is discussed from time to time among those who favour spelling reform. Despite your assertion to the contrary that this word must be spelt differently from the colour red, spelling the past tense as "red" will not cause issues. The words occupy different part of speech, so context is quite sufficient to convey meaning.

This is nothing new in English. The dictionary has many words with identical spellings and pronunciations but different meanings, derivations and etymologies. These words do not cause problems because they are classified in different parts of speech and cannot be confused. Examples of such words: cuff, list, might, pink, pound, soil, stalk. We also have such words that do occupy the same part of speech but again we can work out the meaning. Examples: graze, light, hard, sole. These words do not cause problems either. Thus, a respelling of the past tense and past participle of the verb "to read" as "red" should not cause comprehension problems and a separate spelling is not necessary to convey meaning.

My copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, tenth edition, includes that word. Is it in your dictionary?

On phonics, the Australian Government recently announced that phonics would be re-introduced into Australian schools. I think this is a good thing, as phonics does work for many of the words that children will encounter in the first year or two of education.

The magic-E spellings (eg: bale, cane) are sound. The only problem I see with these spellings is in those occasional words that have a magic-E spelling but not a magic-E pronunciation. Examples: are* (the verb), give, have, live (as a verb). In these words the silent e is redundant.

Indeed, the e is redundant in many of the words that end in -ve (words like active, passive, captive, native where the vowel before the v is short, but not in cave, behave, concave where the e is a regular marker of a preceding long vowel). This spelling convention is an old one, dating from before the introduction of u and v as separate letters. Before this split, u (the miniscule of V) did double duty as vowel and consonant. If it preceded a vowel, it was a consonant, and vice versa. So in those words that ended in a /v/ sound, the letter had to be written as -ue to mark it as a consonant. The convention is still with us today, but now the only apparent use the final -e has in these words ending in a short vowel followed by -ve is to stop the v from falling over. :)

* The are (pronounced like "air") is also a metric unit of measurement equal to 100 square metres.

We didn't have phonics in my early schooling. We had charts with the alphabet on and letter cards and letter combination cards...and books.

The trouble is that for some children, the non-phonics method is confusing and prevents them learning; likewise, for some children the phonics system is confusing and prevents them learning. All we're doing is swapping about between the two.

why is phonics spelled p h o n i c s and not fonix?

and 'onanism' doesn't mean what you think it means, either.

All my life I've spelt viola with a io. Now I have to learn a new way?

What's harder, learning or re-learning? And that's one problem with this modest proposal; having learned English during the period when the brain is in its formative years, re-learning will be harder for everyone.

And the re-learning won't stop either. Wanna bet there was a time when viola was pronounced vy-oh-law? The language changes, finds new words, finds new pronunciations, and that's a pretty powerful force of humanity.

Uranus was pronounced differently when I was a kid.

i pronounce it Vy ola.

Kingswood, if this is your hobby, perhaps you need a new one.

For someone so pedantic about the English language, its origins and its spelling constructs and "broken" rules, you really, seriously put up 'hacienda' as an English word that doesn't follow the "'i' before 'e' rule, just because your dictionary has it in there? That's like a bunch of Danes debating the ridiculous letter 'd' rule and someone trotting out the word 'sandwich' as an example of something, because it's in the Danish dictionary.

Hacienda is not an English word any more than Sandwich is a Danish word. The fact that each language has taken words from other languages and used them without change, and therefore added them to their dictionaries because they've fallen into common use, does not qualify them as those languages' words. Most especially when whining about how they don't follow the rules of the language they've been adopted into.

Wouldn't it just be simpler to keep the current spellings as the offical and accept any spelling which is logical?
Aside from place names, would that really be a problem?

Their vs. Thier
 

I agree that spelling was visited upon the world by some evil entity. I have 3 Bachelor's degrees. I just recently realized that the word THEIR isn't spelled THIER. I was floored. Spellcheck had been righting my wrongs for so long that I didn't realize it until a friend pointed my mistake out to me when I had written a note by hand a work. I still haven't recovered from the shock and shame.

I am also one of those lucky folks who learned to read before starting school. My mom always said that I was taught by Sesame Street. :)

When I did start school, I didn't pay much attention during reading lessons. Usually the teachers just let me huddle in the corner with a book while everyone else worked. I remember something about this phonics thing, but I figured I didn't need it so who cares?

I learned the whole-language method and I guess I read so much that all the spelling rules became intuitive. Seemed like I just had to see the word once and I had it in my data bank. Oddly enough this didn't help me in spelling bees, I think because I didn't study for them. I remember that in a 4th grade spelling bee I was done in by the word "tassel." I spelled it with an "le." Boy did I feel stupid.

Teaching phonics/whole language methods should be chosen on an individual basis. Some kids learn one better, some the other. My kids are also whole-language and learned to read pretty easily, but the school insisted on teaching phonics and I think that really screwed them up as far as spelling.

Another gripe I have with the school is this--when kids are very young and just starting to write, we are prohibited from correcting their spelling. They write phonetically, and we're just supposed to be so happy that they're writing anything that we fear correcting might stifle their little authorial voices. Therefore it takes at least 4 years of actual spelling grades to break them of this habit of just writing anything and never bothering to check its spelling or even think for a few seconds first. I remember when my daughter was absolutely astonished in 4th grade when the teacher took off points on a paper she'd written for spelling errors. It had never happened before.

It is my personal opinion that schools today place way too much emphasis on developing kids' self esteem and way too little on doing things properly from the very beginning. Whatever happened to penmanship, for example? I remember getting graded on how closely my writing resembled the "ideal." Now all they care about is if it's readable. Which is OK, I guess, but "readable" is rather subjective, isn't it?

You raise a good point here. Once one gets to be a certain age, the ability to learn diminishes. For this reason, it is usual for spelling reforms in other languages to be optional for those who have mastered the current orthography. In some languages that have regular maintenance of their spellings, one can guess the approximate age of a writer by the spellings they use in certain words.

The ability to read any new spellings is not likely to be compromised much. Anyone who reads much fiction will encounter intentional nonstandard spellings in works by contemporary authors from time to time, whether it is eye dialect to convey the exact manner of speech of a particular character, or Terry Pratchett's use of nonstandard spellings in the Discworld series in a medieval or semi-educated style. In Discworld, we have such spellings as Granny Weatherwax's instructions on a bottle of medicine: "Onne Spoon Onlie and that Smalle", or the "cagèd whale" in Guards! Guards!. Authors would not use such spellings if they received too many complaints, their editors told them to revise the spellings, or the books didn't sell.

Welcome to the Cellar. I especially recommend the Image of the Day.

As for the point you raise, for spelling reforms in English it is an approach that can work quite well.

It would make the most sense for those words where a particular misspelling of a word is already in widespread usage, with some of these particular misspellings being almost as common as the standard spelling itself. Minuscule is the standard spelling, but miniscule is seen so commonly that it is often found in edited text and a few dictionaries even include it as a variant. If a reform was introduced that gave the miniscule spelling the status of an acceptable variant spelling, it would find ready acceptance because many people already use this spelling.

Well hello Teapot. That's an interesting monika :)

Welcome to the Cellar.

I kind of agree with this. Except, I don't see it as a matter of spelling reform per se...more that certain spellings shift across time and eventually the mispell becomes the standard. This does happen anyway. It happens all the time. Words fall in and out of use, spellings become outdated. The use of hyphens for example in many words have fallen out of favour and are no longer included in the dictionary listings of those words. I'm quietly confident in the people who compose and monitor the dictionaries. I think they do a fairly good job of maintaining relevance to the living language.

[eta] this process seems to be speeding up in the age of the internet with its online dictionaries.

We can't even seem to manage switching to the metric system in the US - for the reasons UT mentions above. I don't foresee any wholesale spelling changes.

I don't know how you pronounce "Minuscule", but the way I pronounce it would make "Miniscule" phonetically incorrect, compounding the problem you're complaining about.

How do you propose to phoneticize the spellings of words that are pronounced differently in different parts of the country? Will you go by majority rule, and add an "R" to "Wash"? How will you spell "Warm"; "Warm", "Werm", or "Wuorm"?

The other day, on my board, I mentioned that I was building a pullet brooder, and my friend from Michigan asked me what a pullet is, and whether it rhymes with "Mullet" or "Bullet".

As far as I know, pullet, mullet, and bullet all rhyme. But in her region, apparently they don't.

How do you spell to solve for regional variations, if you're spelling phonetically?

:3eye: Good one. Why do we spell anything phonemically? Well, the sober answer is etymological reasons, and etymology itself is at least as fascinating a hobby as entomology. :cool: :eek:<--"Eek! A big bug!"
Inasmuch as usually when we do it we're not spooging on the ground after coitus interruptus, no. Nobody knows why, but it seems Onan really didn't like his sister-in-law. Well, soon enough, she didn't have to deal with him.

There are two accepted pronunciations of Uranus -- and you can make a shitty or a pissy pun with either. Unhappy planet! (Probably not as depressed as downwardly mobile Pluto, though.)

It was probably some English professor whose name is unfortunately lost to history who woke up a freshman-English class with, "English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them on the head, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar."

Memorable if not fully descriptive; we've been cross-pollinating other languages for decades if not centuries. For about a millennium English was half French; now French borrows Englishisms right and left. Russian had been tentatively sipping at English words -- often for Communist Party doings, of all things -- and with Communism's fall the floodgates are open -- kompakt disk isn't even Russified with prefixes and suffixes in a manner hitherto quite typical. A foreign root-word might be accepted into general Russian use after being buffered, bracketed fore and aft, with a Russian prefix and a suffix. The suffix is at least understandable as a linguistic adapter to fit an alien word into Russian grammar easily; the frequent use of a prefix is less easily explained. A vivid example: Russian has the word park as a city park, right enough. Russian émigrés in America, getting around to owning cars after leaving Soviet privation, coined zaPARKovat' as the verb for to park their car. Verb prefix za (which can mean a bunch of things depending entirely on the verb -- long story) plus the foreign root-word, plus the addition of one of the less usual verb endings and its associated conjugation! What's more, I think that's the imperfective aspect of the verb. :rolleyes: Oy. Gev. Alt. Because I'm not sure of the perfective form. Zaparkat'? Some other verb prefix?! Mustn't tear my hear... not that much left.

I love that. That's brilliant.

And dreadfully characteristic of a language that doesn't much esteem some abstract ideal of linguistic order. ;)

Phonetic spelling runs into trouble with regional variations, as you correctly point out. It is easy to find spellings that would be one word for a particular regional accent and a different word for another.

Some examples:
* The British English pronunciation of "heart" is very close to the American English pronunciation of "hot".
* The Scottish English pronunciation of "stir" sounds like the American English pronunciation of "steer" (if it wasn't for the rolled Scottish R, the pronunciations would be very similar).

There are many regional variations, and England has even more regional variation than the USA. In some parts of England, words like toe and tow are pronounced differently, and in other parts of England bail and bale are pronounced differently.

A reasonable approach is not to worry about how individual groups pronounce a word, but instead look to the body of speakers as a whole and identify where the consensus among the different accents shows a spelling to be flawed. Everyone would agree that from an orthographical point of view the i in friend is redundant. (Whether they would choose to do something about it is another matter.) On the other hand, hoarse must remain distinctly spelt from horse because some people pronounce these differently.

Is this the quotation you're after?

Brilliant! I'm gonna remember that one.

Make no mistake -- the origin of the word is itself, or the fact that it was borrowed or stolen, is of no general concern to me. I was just pointing out the ridiculousness of using a wholly foreign word as evidence of how annoying the spelling rules are in the English language.

English did not create the construct of the 'cie' in the word 'hacienda'. It's therefore absurd to complain that it doesn't follow English spelling rules!

I personally find one of the most pleasing aspect of English the way it evolves so rapidly, both as spoken and as written. It is an exceedingly flexible language.

All natural language evolves similarly. It's quite beautiful.

Spelling and grammar prescriptivism are efforts to propagate what is most widely understood. It's a good idea to master the rules for those that want their ideas to be understood by the largest possible number of people.

If you want your children to have the most possible power over their destiny they should be taught these things to a high level of mastery.

The most beautiful thing about language is that efforts to codify the mainstream do not much hamper the natural evolution of the language. I'd say those efforts might even encourage it. Constraints fuel artfulness.

Except French. They have a Language Purity Committee to keep those awful cross-overs from destroying their language.

Why they need to say more than "Je me rends," I have no idea.

Spoken language does evolve. However, in English the spellings are not allowed to evolve to keep pace with changes to the spoken word. The result is a gradual divergence of spelling from pronunciation which in the case of the English language has diverged to the point where it is considered perfectly normal to consult a dictionary to find out how some words are pronounced.

The only difference between a foreign word and a perfectly acceptable English word is about a century of use and its inclusion in a few editions of the major dictionaries. I could post some examples, but the quotations that Urbane Guerrilla and I posted about the purity of the English language should be enough to make my point.

Furthermore, your beef about the particular word "hacienda" being used as a counterexample does not in any way prove that the I before E except after C rule is actually useful enough to remember. Five root words, plus a couple of dozen words derived from these. That's all the rule is good for. FFS, it takes less time to remember these five root words than it takes to remember the full wording of I before E except after C rule.

The French are quite parochial about their language and culture. It is not just their need to defend their language against invasion by foreign words. In France, all radio stations that play music are required by law to play a high percentage of songs by French artists.

Geez, it's up to 103 posts just because Kingswood refuses to learn how to spell. :haha:

Why the ad hominem attack? :eyebrow: The thread has a lot of posts because other people have posted in it too.

It's not wrong to question tradition. If a tradition is truly sound, it will stand up to scrutiny. However, the tradition of English spelling may not be one of these, and the pedants who believe that spellings are immutable don't like being told that.

I would like to revisit this point because Tiki has made a good point that I would like to expand upon.

Some people do pronounce "minuscule" as if it was spelt "miniscule". For such people, a "miniscule" spelling makes more sense which is why that spelling is seen so often. We have a similar situation already with the two spellings aluminium and aluminum: the two spellings correspond to different pronunciations. What generally happens with this word is that one would assign one's own pronunciation to both spellings. The extra or missing i doesn't cause trouble.

Tiki's point about "compounding the problem" may be reasonable or in error, depending on the exact approach to spelling reform that would be chosen. Tiki appears to have made an implicit assumption that words with really bizarre spellings would not be remedied, such as colonel (the l is pronounced like "r") and lieutenant (with the British pronunciation of "leftenant" where the "u" is pronounced "f"). If such words were not remedied, the problem is indeed increased. However, it is possible that such words would be scrutinized and new alternative spellings proposed. This would be more likely to lead to a net reduction of words with spellings that do not correspond to a plausible pronunciation of the word.

The two words colonel and lieutenant have an interesting history which explains their unusual pronunciation in relation to their spellings.

Colonel is a 16th-century borrowing of an obsolete French word coronel (note the spelling). This in turn was borrowed from an Italian word colonnello (note the spelling) meaning a column of soldiers. If the word was spelt as it was borrowed from the French, it would be spelt coronel: it would still be a little tricky to spell the vowels but at least the consonants would all be correct. The word appears to have been hypercorrected to have an l rather than an r to correspond to the Italian origins. While this is where the word does come from, it is not from the Italian that the word was borrowed but from the French, where the pronunciation of the word appears to have changed between the borrowing from Italian and the reborrowing into English. I feel that if the spelling of a word is to reflect its origins, it should reflect the spelling in the language from where the word was borrowed, and not attempt to trace the word all the way back as far as we can because such efforts to trace a word are sometimes speculative and subject to error.

So far as I can tell, lieutenant intentionally had its pronunciation changed by the English so as to put some distance between the word and its French origins. While the word has been in the English language, the English have fought a few wars with the French and my understanding is that it is during one of these wars (possibly the Napoleonic wars) that the pronunciation was changed. Before the 17th century, u did double duty as vowel and consonant, so the word was pronounced as if spelt "levtenant" (with the i being silent). The following voiceless consonant t appears to have devoiced the v, giving the "leftenant" pronunciation that the British use today. I do not know the origins of the more logical American pronunciation, but it appears that the Americans have retained the older pronunciation (if the word did change during the Napoleonic war). The pronunciation of this word in Australian English is altogether more bizarre: the pronunciation follows British English or American English depending on which branch of the armed forces that the officer is serving in.

Are you serious? Do you really expect to be spoon-fed context every time something is written down just because some words have ambiguous pronunciations?

Suppose you read the following in a book:

The page happens to end here. Quick, before you turn the page, tell us how "putting" is pronounced?

Did you assume the verb is "put"? Wrong. This person is playing golf:
Sure, there's usually context. However, sometimes the context hasn't come up yet, is not sufficient, is missing altogether, or page breaks happen to be placed in inconvenient locations. Context is not the best method of conveying meaning. If the needed context is two lines down, or five pages later, or not supplied at all, what then?

Why is it better to rely on context rather than having words stand on their own?

Thanks, Kingswood -- looks like what I'd seen, unattributed, was one of those "improved" versions that epigrammatic quotes are so vulnerable to. [ending a sentence a preposition with] Let me see if I can find an old favorite from history: "All is lost, save honor."

Let us hope this one doesn't, even if it is one of the ones that can sneak up and snap you on the ass with a rubber band. Mis + Spell...

Brings up the question of whether hyphens should be considered part of spelling. I've always thought of them as purely punctuation, even in assembling words at the right edge of a page, back in '63 when dinosaurs ruled before word-wrap evolved. And may be evolving into wordwrap as we speak.

Something you can particularly tell us, Dana: is not "favour" is said rather like "fave-oor" in some parts of the UK? The American is distinctly short-o "fave-or," or indistinctly a schwa -- "fav'r."

Not just drygulching foreign tongues for loose grammar or vocab
 

Hee hee hoo hoo ho -- this is entertaining. Seems James D. Nicoll is quite the raconteur.

I can hardly wait for the story of James D. And The Giant Peach. Should be lots of :3eye:.

Don't know really UG. Different parts of the country say it differently. Mostly I think the last syllable is shortened and pronounced with the schwa. What vowel sounds lives inside that shwa is very different town to town. *smiles* For me it's more of an uh sound Fav-uh (which is how it's said in Bolton) but if I was a full on Manc, I might say it as more of an short 'o' sound. Fav-o'. The 'r' is not pronounced. In Liverpool, it ends with more of an 'eh' sound (quite slight). Fav'eh. Again, the 'r' isn't pronounced.

OH NO!!! I might have to TURN A PAGE before I get the context in a book? Whatever will I do? Good grief, man, you are really reaching here. Again, I have to know if you're serious. Have you seen a dictionary? Ever?

Tell me something; does the word 'run' "stand on its own"? Do you know what I mean when I yell the following sentence?

"RUN!"

No, you say? How can that be? It's an entire sentence. It's a single word, "standing on its own." It's a pretty straight-forward spelling.

What words would you suggest for the 200+ meanings of 'run', so that they're entirely different, not reliant on different spellings (how many fucking ways could there be to spell 'run' anyway?), without needing context?

This is what you would do if you were reading it out loud: you would sound a bit stupid if you had to correct your pronunciation.

Answer this: Why do the authorities that look after the other major languages of Europe all choose to avoid heterophonic homographs in their orthographies?

And answer this: If you think context is not a problem, can you state the context rules for disambiguating the 500 or so heterophonic homographs in English in such a way that one can use these rules to program a computer to read text out loud flawlessly? If you think this isn't important, ask any blind person about the inadequacies of screen reader software. Good screen readers do get it right most of the time, but some words always cause problems.

Now look who's reaching. You're making personal attacks (the fallacy of argumentum ad hominem), and the straw man fallacy.

Why do you make up this shit about my suggesting that the word "run" must have 200 plus different spellings to go with 200 plus different meanings when every one of those meanings has essentially the same pronunciation? I have not said that we need different spellings in this case; in fact I have explicitly said the opposite in an earlier post in this thread.

You have chosen not to answer any of my other questions regarding spellings. I'm not surprised: some of the spellings we must put up with due to the forces of tradition and social conformity are truly indefensible when scrutinized objectively.

Ultimately, the spellings we have in English are nothing more than a tradition. Some traditions don't always stand up to scrutiny. If we always stuck with bad traditions, in the USA only men with land would have the vote.

That is the first point you've made which has given me pause on this issue. There has been technological development which has provided a context and potential need for a less problematic spelling system.

I still don't advocate top-down spelling reform; however, I can well see that technological shift driving a bottom-up change.

My guess is that the tech shift will lead to a 'computer english' being developed. A reformed spelling system into which standard texts are translated prior to being accessed through synthesised speech. That may or may not then feed into the language proper.

Right now, though, for all the people you'd help by simplifying spelling, there are a bunch of people who'd be disadvantaged by that change. The ideosyncracies of English spelling helped me to learn how to read. I don't know if I'd have loved it so much without them.

This is actually true of any language that accepts its dictionaries as authoritative -- which I think is all of them that actually have them. Writing preserves the transcription of older pronunciations.

Should we call for a new character for, say, the southern English exhalatory pronunciation of the letter R? This seems to have developed since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while the American dialect retains the harder R of earlier times.

Shall we call for a set of vowels to represent A E I O U as spoken by Australians in full yowly-vowel Strine?

A phonetic forty-character system systematically representing today's English really only delays the pronunciation problem for a few centuries, which rather seems to make the exercise bootless.

Please expand on this point. You claim that people would be disadvantaged by changes to spelling. Who would be disadvantaged and how?

The different accents differ in the realization of individual phonemes, but this is done systematically. The vowel assignments of Australian English are almost the same as British English; the pronunciations vary somewhat but when one groups words by pronunciations of the vowels the two accents would by and large group the words the same. There is absolutely no need to use different letters for these accents. American English differs quite a bit from British and Australian English but again no separate treatment is required for the most part.

We do not need 40 letters for the 40 or so phonemes. We make do with digraphs instead, some of which arose out of pronunciation changes to which you alluded to in your first paragraph quoted above. It is unlikely in the extreme that the whole orthography is to be thrown out and a whole new alphabet introduced. If any repair of English orthography was to be done, the only approach that has any hope of succeeding would use the existing rules but simply apply them more consistently.

Your point about the older pronunciations being preserved in orthography is most accurate for those languages that have complex orthographies. Finnish has a pure phonemic orthography, and to a lesser extent so does Italian. The orthographies for these languages do not preserve the older pronunciations if they have changed. Modern Greek has an orthography that evolved from Ancient Greek and hence it is somewhat complex but they manage just fine. French used to have a silent s in words like hôpital and être (which used to be spelt hospital and estre) before an 18th-century spelling reform elided the s and marked where it used to be with a circumflex. German uses sch for the consonant in the word shoe. Old English used to use sc for the same consonant because it was once an allophone of the consonant cluster "sc" (pronounced as in "disc"). The name of the English Language in c.1000 was "Englisc", pronounced as spelt (but not as you think: E-N-G-L-I-S-C; all letters were pronounced separately and the consonant we now represent by "ng" in sing did not yet exist). Finally, a lot of the irregularity in older words in English orthography derive from words that changed their pronunciations in different ways: food, good and blood once all had the same vowel, as did break, meat and leather.

how do you feel about the spelling of "one-trick pony"?

It seems K's point is that correct spelling is prohibitive to communication.

Have you tried reading K's posts? I can't understand a freaking word. :lol:

We're not worthy, obviously.

But at least I can spell!