Push for easier spelling persists despite lack of public interest

http://www.lubbockonline.com/stories/070606/nat_070606038.shtml ^ | Thursday, July 6, 2006 | AP

[Hexenhammer]

Isn't illiteracy like 1% of the adult population? It seems a bit overkill to change the way all of us spell just to make it easier for the 1 percent who won't bother to learn.

[MineralMan]

"Isn't illiteracy like 1% of the adult population? It seems a bit overkill to change the way all of us spell just to make it easier for the 1 percent who won't bother to learn."

Hmm...that depends on your definition of illiteracy, I think. The percentage of folks who are not even marginally proficient at reading and writing is much higher.

And don't even get me started on spelling. A browse through the pages of Free Republic is quite shocking...quite shocking, indeed.

[WIladyconservative]

Far -- A conflagration

Is that the firewall or the far wall?

[MineralMan]

"Is that the firewall or the far wall?
"

You really have to look at the context, I guess.

[KarlInOhio]

Far -- A conflagration

I've seen many version of this same joke. This isn't the best or the most detailed, but it's the one I found the quickest:

In a small Southern town there was a nativity scene that indicated great skill and talent in its creation. One small feature bothered me though. The three wise men were wearing firemen's helmets.

Totally unable to come up with a reason or explanation, I left. At a "Quik Stop" on the edge of town, I asked the lady behind the counter about the helmets. She exploded into a rage, yelling at me, "You darn Yankees never do read the Bible!"

I assured her that I did, but simply couldn't recall anything about firemen in the Bible. She jerked her Bible from behind the counter and ruffled through some pages, and finally jabbed her finger at a particular passage.

Sticking it in my face she said, "See, it says right here, 'The three wise men came from afar.'"

[MineralMan]

Very nice!

[Lazamataz]

Good L-rd.

How far a throw is this from, say, NewSpeak?

'1984' was not a novel. It was a modern training manual.

[SoothingDave]

Why is it stupid?

As several have pointed out already, and as I pointer out on the other thread, it is impossible to overlay a universal pronucuation-based spelling system on a language which does not have a univeral pronuciation.

I guarantee this Yinzer doesn't pronounce his vowels and consonants the same way that someone in Louisiana or London does. For instance in a such a system based on my speech patterns, the words "towel" and "tile" would be spelled the same.

Some people say "are," "our" and "hour" differently. Some say them all the same. How do you account for that?

SD

[Verginius Rufus]

I was thinking more of the letter that looks like the small "i" in English, which had the same sound as the letter that looks like a backwards N (by origin from the Greek letters iota and eta respectively). There was also a vowel with the same sound that looked like an English small "v" (from the Greek upsilon, I would guess). The letter that looked like a Greek theta had the same sound as the letter that looks like a Greek phi, so it was dropped. There was also a vowel which sounded the same as the Russian "e" which looked sort of like the "myakii znak" symbol but the upright part looked like a cross.

This is from Romanov's Russian-English/English-Russian Dictionary Washington Square Press, 1964), from a note attached to the table showing the alphabet.

[MineralMan]

Yeah. Those letters were rightly removed from the cyrillic alphabet, I think. I've had occasion to read some pre-revolutionary writing in Russian. It really wasn't a problem for me, once I learned those few new letters.

Church Slavonic, as used in Russian Orthodox churches, however, retains the full alphabet.

Languages are fascinating, aren't they?

[Famishus]

ending sentences with prepositions

This is the sort of English up with which I will not put. ;)

[cydcharisse]

As Churchill once said, (or maybe not) "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put"!

[cydcharisse]

You beat me Famishus!

[jiggyboy]

I guarantee you their are people out there that genuinely think this is a GREAT IDEA because they did poorly in spelling.

I do, and I'm a great speller. Do it gradually though, letter by letter. One letter, one sound. I'd start with G; there's no excuse whatsoever for it sounding like F or J.

[elcid1970]

i suport da publik skool sistim

[Famishus]

The group says English has 42 sounds spelled in a bewildering 400 ways.

Jed Hartman posted a column on the logophilia web site about this subject.

"But I'm less enamored of switching over to a phonetic spelling system than I once was, largely due to Steven Pinker's book The Language Instinct. Pinker (an MIT linguist) provides several reasons that phonetic spelling might not be such a great idea:

• Phonetic spelling removes some connections between words, connections that are obvious given current spellings. "Sign" and "signature" are spelled similarly, so a reader can identify the two words as having the same root; but in IPA there's no indication that they're remotely related.

• Different speakers would spell differently. Pinker points out that some people pronounce "career" as /k@ 'ri R/ and "Korea" as /k@ 'ri @/, while others switch those pronunciations.

• Straightforward rules govern the spelling of about 84% of English words, so learning about the exceptions to the rules is not quite as daunting a task as spelling reformers suggest."

http://www.kith.org/logos/words/lower/k.html

I say ghoti.

[SoothingDave]

Go ghoti.

SD

[nmh]

Thankfully you are not teaching in our private school.

Kids there learn how to spell phonetically along with rules for exceptions.

[Polyxene]

My biggest gripe is when folks don't know the difference between "then" and "than".

Mine is using apostrophe s ("'s") to make a word plural instead of just "s".