Spelling is ruining the English language

[Jill]

Originally Posted by Kingswood

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?

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.

Originally Posted by Kingswood

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

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?

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by Jill

OH NO!!! I might have to TURN A PAGE before I get the context in a book? Whatever will I do?

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.

Originally Posted by Jill

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?

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.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

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.

[DanaC]

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.

[Trilby]

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.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Brianna

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

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. <--"Eek! A big bug!"

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

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.)

Dude, that's [hacienda] not even an English word.

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. 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.

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

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."

Is this the quotation you're after?

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
James Nicoll, 1990

[Jill]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

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. 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.

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!

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by Jill

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!

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.

[Undertoad]

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.

[glatt]

Uranus was pronounced differently when I was a kid.

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

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.

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.

[dar512]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

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.

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.

[DanaC]

i pronounce it Vy ola.

[wolf]

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