Spelling is ruining the English language

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by DanaC

The name 'Liv' is in common currency. In a title like the one you just mentioned, 'Live' is spelt with a capital letter. In the title you suggest the article would read:

"Zendikar (codenamed Liv) is a Magic: The Gathering expansion set, set to be released on October 2, 2009."

Tell me again, why 'Liv' in that context couldn't refer to a female character called 'Liv'?

If the available context was good enough for Shawnee123 to avoid "eating a smilie", it is good enough for you.

Originally Posted by DanaC

In what way have I demonstrated that I don't know how to spell proper nouns? Because I used a nick-name? They are commonly used in fiction, so why not gaming? You offered an example of how spelling reform might disambiguate but in fact it offers alternative areas of confusion. It's no more a stretch than your original example.

Proper nouns always begin with capital letters, and can be easily disambiguated from similarly-spelt words by that alone. How can you tell the difference between bob and Bob? Do you confuse bob and Bob?

This name "Liv" is not as common as you suppose, and it is certainly less common than either pronunciation of the word "live". It would reduce confusion; and how much confusion can there be with two words pronounced the same? There would be no more confusion with liv and Liv than there currently is with bob and Bob, or rob and Rob: one is a verb, the other is a shortened version of a name. The rules for disambiguation would therefore be very similar as well.

Why do you consider it OK for two common words with different pronunciations to have the same spelling, but if we respell them and there's a slight chance one of the respellings can be confused with a relatively rare proper noun that always begins with a capital letter and that (presumably) shares the same pronunciation, somehow that's worse?

[DanaC]

Also...since when was reading an 'infobox elsewhere in the article' considered 'rigmarole'?

How bout people employ a little patience and make the assumption (which will usually be borne out in fact) that if they read the article the context will become clear.

Plus, just a minor point, but you'd also rob journalists and social commentators of what is a commonly used rhetorical device: word confusion *

(*wusion? :P)

[DanaC]

How can you possibly know that disadvantage would be great enough to make it greater than the potential advantages? How can you, without seeing any detail, form the opinion that spelling reform must create disadvantage no matter what the changes may be? How can you claim to speak for everyone when you are only going by your own experiences, and the experiences of a few people you know? That is an awfully small sample in comparison to the hundreds of millions that speak English as native speakers.

I can't. And neither can you. But the system we have is the system we have. We have no way to know that intorducing a new system wouldn't cause greater harm. And I can only really judge my own experience and those of a small group of people. But the hundreds of millions of English speakers are not an amorphous mass; they are made of of lots of small groups each with their own experience of the language and no more reducible to a formula for change than they are to a formula for stasis.

As to which of the spellings I find easier to read: the ones with the 'ough'. Because that's what I am comfortable with. The second set of words jar for me and were I to find them in a piece of writing they would startle me from the text.

'Who decides what is correct now' Well, currently it appears to be a combination of 'official' dictionaries, netwide calls for updated information on spelling trends (conducted by the OED amongst others) and the rather more democratic sweep of natural change over time. All conducted on an uneven and unequal playing field arrived at after many generations of evolution, control, downright dishonesty, political and ideological movements and the arbitrary timing of the codifying of spelling through the printing press.

What you are suggesting is as artificial and 'top down' as the drive to latinize our spellings and grammar ever was. It will also irritate as many people as it will please, and appears to take no account of the profoundly political and nationalist elements of 'spelling'.

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by DanaC

I can't. And neither can you. But the system we have is the system we have. We have no way to know that intorducing a new system wouldn't cause greater harm. And I can only really judge my own experience and those of a small group of people. But the hundreds of millions of English speakers are not an amorphous mass; they are made of of lots of small groups each with their own experience of the language and no more reducible to a formula for change than they are to a formula for stasis.

As to which of the spellings I find easier to read: the ones with the 'ough'. Because that's what I am comfortable with. The second set of words jar for me and were I to find them in a piece of writing they would startle me from the text.

I hope you don't use a "DRIVE THRU" very often, as you would be so startled by that spelling that you would probably rear-end the car in front.

The "tho" and "thru" spellings are both found in dictionaries, both listed as "informal". The "thru" spelling has a long pedigree; it was in widespread use before 1750 but was not preferred by Johnson when he published his Dictionary.

Originally Posted by DanaC

'Who decides what is correct now' Well, currently it appears to be a combination of 'official' dictionaries, netwide calls for updated information on spelling trends (conducted by the OED amongst others) and the rather more democratic sweep of natural change over time. All conducted on an uneven and unequal playing field arrived at after many generations of evolution, control, downright dishonesty, political and ideological movements and the arbitrary timing of the codifying of spelling through the printing press.

What you are suggesting is as artificial and 'top down' as the drive to latinize our spellings and grammar ever was. It will also irritate as many people as it will please, and appears to take no account of the profoundly political and nationalist elements of 'spelling'.

A top-down approach is used - and does work - for French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and most other major languages. There is no such standards body for the English language. It is the dictionary publishers that regulate the spelling in English, and they do a decent job but are not able to promulgate any needed changes.

There is one aspect of spelling reforms that you do not appreciate. They are not generally done in the same manner as metrication, where something new is introduced by fiat and the public are expected to change. Instead, they tend to be more democratic - new spellings are introduced by a government and the public is free to either use them or ignore them. Spellings like "program" and "catalog" were both introduced in this way in America about 100 years ago and gained sufficient acceptance to supplant the older spellings that are still current in British English. Other similar spellings introduced at the same time, like "leag", did not. However, the public were allowed to choose by usage.

Allowing spellings to change will cause some resentment, if your indignation at the mere idea of discussing the topic is anything to go by. However, current spellings also cause resentment, as many whose spelling is not as strong as they would like can tell you.

Some spellings are also indefensible - irregularity is allowed to accumulate for no good reason; spellings are not allowed to evolve to keep up with changes to the spoken language; and some words break so many rules that only a warped mind can find justification in their retention. If the spellings of some individual words that I have discussed were actually defensible, someone would have defended them by now.

[Sundae]

Originally Posted by Kingswood

I hope you don't use a "DRIVE THRU" very often, as you would be so startled by that spelling that you would probably rear-end the car in front.

In addition to Dani's very sensible response, I would like to add that DRIVE THRU is used in the UK seldom to never.

The "tho" and "thru" spellings are both found in dictionaries, both listed as "informal". The "thru" spelling has a long pedigree; it was in widespread use before 1750 but was not preferred by Johnson when he published his Dictionary.

Yay for antiquated spelling! Look, it didn't catch on then, so why should it now.

A top-down approach is used - and does work - for French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and most other major languages.

How many of those languages do Dwellars spell in? Through trade routes, imperialism and the doggedness of American culture, English is the most widespread of all these languages despite its faults.

I am interested in your argument. I like to see different sides to issues, even if I didn't even know they were issues to start with. But this is a non-starter. English - as has been eloqently explained - is an adaptive language. And it will continue to adapt.

[classicman]

The English language is ruining spelling.

kthxbai

[DanaC]

*shakes head*

I'm not 'indignant' at the mere idea of discussing it. I've been discussing it with you. I simply hold a different viewpoint. I am positing potential problems with your schema. I see more problems in it than I see solutions; primarily because I do not share your interpretation of what is or is not problematic in the English language.

As to the use of 'thru'. It's entirely contextual. If I see that online or in a phone text message it reads perfectly fine, and indeed, I use it on occasion myself. But it would jar if I saw it in a newspaper article or a novel. It would seem inappropriate.

I don't like the top-down approach to language reform. By which I mean, I don't like governments getting involved in what is or is not correct in language. Any more than I would appreciate a government agency telling me what i can and can't call my child. The European governments who impose language change also, on the whole, have rather more input into what I personally consider deeply private matters, than the British government does.

I have more trust in the people who compile dictionaries, frankly, than in the State, to decide what may or may not be a useful spelling change.



[eta] which government would decide on English changes btw? Or would there be some kind of joint decision-making, in which case, should disagreement arise, who would have the casting vote? There is already a slow burning resentment in the UK at the 'loss of our culture' and the 'Americanisation' of our language (including spelling). Should Britain try to impose her standard? Not really, given that American English is more widely spoken in the world. What about Australia? New Zealand? Canada? It's hard enough trying to reach agreement within a nation, let alone bringing together multiple nations united by a language they each feel ownership of.

[DanaC]

First off: yes I know that generally speaking, the context would show that Liv is a proper noun and liv a verb; however, you showed as your example to Shawnee a sentence in which the verb 'Live' is capitalized. Unless you are suggesting we also change the rules on capitalization in titles, then the example you found (and I think you probably had to reach quite hard to find one) would not give the context through capitalization. It is Live in your example; therefore, it would be Liv in my counter example.

In most contexts, even without the clue of capitalization, it would be obvious that Liv and liv are not the same thing; however, again, I must point out, that you chose as your example a game title. Games contain characters, and stories and in that context a subtitle of 'Liv' is just as likely to be a character name as a verb.

Liv is in common currency in the UK. Olivia was the most popular girls name in 2007 and is often shortened. This is about to get even more confusing of course, since the actress Liv Tyler has gone some way to popularising the shortened form Liv as a full name.

Kingswood. You managed to find a very shaky example of a single time that Shawnee's point didn't stand. I pointed out that this very example has room for confusion even if you change the spelling. Your response is to cast aspersions on my ability to spell or to correctly use the English language. Go away and find a less shaky example to support your claims and make our Shawnee eat a smilie.



[eta] oh and to pick up on Monnie's Bullshit call: there's variance between towns and regions of the UK in pronunciation of far more than 1% of the language. That's just region to region in our little island, let alone between British English and American English, and Australian English.

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Kingswood. You managed to find a very shaky example of a single time that Shawnee's point didn't stand. I pointed out that this very example has room for confusion even if you change the spelling. Your response is to cast aspersions on my ability to spell or to correctly use the English language.

Oh you poor baby!! You didn't have any problem when several posters did the same to me: they made personal remarks directed at me, my ability to spell, my intelligence and a few other libellious remarks about me. Now I allegedly did the same to you suddenly it's a bad thing?

Originally Posted by DanaC

Go away and find a less shaky example to support your claims and make our Shawnee eat a smilie.

Why don't you go away and answer several of my questions?

I can make up a few short sentences that illustrate the point quite nicely. Every one of those sentences would be gramatically complete. Every one would have a clearly obvious meaning when spoken (such that you can correctly answer a question about the sentence) but are ambiguous when written (such that you cannot answer the same question when written).

No doubt you or some other poster will say something about it being good enough. Really, it's not that hard to break English orthography in this way. If it's possible to write several complete sentences that can be understood clearly when spoken but not when written, that is proof enough that English orthography is flawed and cannot represent the spoken word with 100% accuracy.

[DanaC]

I notice you don't pick up on any of my actual points.

Kingswood. This is pointless. I am officially out of this conversation. I have engaged with you, as best I can. I give up.

[Shawnee123]

Originally Posted by Kingswood

I can make up a few short sentences that illustrate the point quite nicely.

Bullshit. Then do it. You can't even do it with a single word, I would love to see you write a sentence in which no context exists.

[Flint]

u got orly'd dawg

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Shawnee123

Bullshit. Then do it. You can't even do it with a single word, I would love to see you write a sentence in which no context exists.

*applauds* Lovely.

[DanaC]

I suspect he may be referring to a convention applied, when u and v looked very similar in print.

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by DanaC

I suspect he may be referring to a convention applied, when u and v looked very similar in print.

You're close but not quite right. Sorry about that, so I'll clarify this.

The letters u and v were once the same letter, which looked a bit like this: capital letter V, minuscule letter u. Around the time of Shakespeare, the letters began to be differentiated, but the modern usage of vowel=u, consonant=v was not settled until the middle of the 17th century. I posted some First Folio text in this thread. If you read it, you can see that the modern values for the letters was not yet standardized at the time of the publication of the First Folio in 1623.

Sometimes you can see examples of the letter V being used as a vowel even now. The façade of building 10 of the MASSACHVSETTS INSTIVTE OF TECHNOLOGY is one example. (Photo here).

Before the letters were differentiated, the way of disambiguating them was: if a consonant followed, it was a vowel; if a vowel followed, it was a consonant. See how it works with the sample MIT text above. Similar rules also existed for the letters I and J, and Classical Latin had these rules too.

The upshot of this is that the spelling of many English words with V in it still have a relic of the pre-split days. Many words with V in them (especially when V would be at the end of the word) are spelt with a silent E after the V. Those rare English words that do end in V are generally recent neologisms or foreign borrowings.

A related curio is that few English words have a double V in it, and those words that do are relatively recent neologisms such as bovver. In English, we generally double consonants that follow short vowels such as hammer, bubble and running. But we don't do it for V in older words because VV is an old digraph that eventually evolved into W. Early printers didn't always have boxes of W's available (it was a letter unknown in Europe), so they often made do with VV. The doubled V to mark a short vowel simply wasn't available.

If we put these together, it gives reasons behind some of the odder spellings in English when the letters o, u, v and w occur together. For example, we spell "woman" where "wuman" would be expected. Now try spelling it using the older conventions and we get: "uuuman". That's hard to read, so changing the vowel u into o was necessary to aid readability (uuoman), especially in handwritten mauscripts. There are not many words in English with the sequence "wu", but there are plenty of words that are pronounced as if spelt that way. Same goes for "uv"; few are spelt that way but many are pronounced that way.