Posted on 07/06/2006 7:02:08 AM PDT by Millee
When "say," "they" and "weigh" rhyme, but "bomb," "comb" and "tomb" don't, wuudn't it maek mor sens to spel wurdz the wae thae sound?
Those in favor of simplified spelling say children would learn faster and illiteracy rates would drop. Opponents say a new system would make spelling even more confusing.
Eether wae, the consept has yet to capcher th publix imajinaeshun.
It's been 100 years since Andrew Carnegie helped create the Simplified Spelling Board to promote a retooling of written English and President Theodore Roosevelt tried to force the government to use simplified spelling in its publications. But advocates aren't giving up.
They even picket the national spelling bee finals, held every year in Washington, costumed as bumble bees and hoisting signs that say "Enuf is enuf but enough is too much" or "I'm thru with through."
Thae sae th bee selebraets th ability of a fue stoodents to master a dificult sistem that stumps meny utherz hoo cuud do just as wel if speling were simpler.
"It's a very difficult thing to get something accepted like this," says Alan Mole, president of the American Literacy Council, which favors an end to "illogical spelling." The group says English has 42 sounds spelled in a bewildering 400 ways.
Americans doen't aulwaez go for whut's eezy — witnes th faeluer of th metric sistem to cach on. But propoenents of simpler speling noet that a smatering of aulterd spelingz hav maed th leep into evrydae ues.
Doughnut also is donut; colour, honour and labour long ago lost the British "u" and the similarly derived theatre and centre have been replaced by the easier-to-sound-out theater and center.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
Wot aboot in Caenada a?
Some words can be changed, such as those cited, but a huge change can never occur because of regional differences in pronunciation especially involving vowel sounds in many words, e.g., ice, check, cash.
Will this make it any easier for the typical high school graduate of today to read his/her diploma?
Math would be alot easier if everything equaled seven.
Publik ejakashun ping.
Take off, u hozr.
The whole corporate world
gets some blame, too. Remember
before point-and-click
when people wanted
to do things with computers
people needed words
to tell the machine
what to do. Correctly spelled!
But corporations
want to employ folks
who are stupid (they cost less)
and corporations
want to sell to folks
who are stupid (they buy crap)
so before blaming
only our bad schools,
remember our corporate world
profits from stooopids.
A crackers form of Ebonics?
I read a sample of this new spelling on Yahoo and it made both my eyes and head hurt.
The dumbing down and brainwashing of America's youth continues.....
What a stupid idea. Aside from the fact that this has been proposed (and failed) dozens of times in history, the "simple spellers" are missing the big picture here. The way a word is spelled is the key to unlocking it's meaning. It's how we can decode a new word in many cases.
Spelling itself is no particular help in reading since readers see the material in chunks. Good readers don't read every letter.
You rang?
"The dumbing down continues".
They've been trying to do this for a long time...many, many spelling reformers have popped up...too much inertia, too much used to seeing a word spelled such and such away, and it won't happen. Spelling's very conservative
Of course, expect to see some text messaging spelling get adopted, because that is something that really gets used and comes from the ground up.
Click the pic and you're off to The Hoser.
Actually the move to point-and-click was about capturing the home market. Corporations didn't mind the difficult computer interfaces because at that point very little of their business had moved to computers and there was no problem with their computer using employees having to be smart. But the home market didn't like the blank screen and the blinking cursor, the big question the home market had for computers was "what do I do with it" and the c-prompt was incapable of answering that question, but a GUI with all your programs arranged nicely by category could answer it. Also the home market didn't want to have to spend hours learning wierd stuff, they wanted a simple appliance no more difficult than their TV or microwave (actually they still want that, the industry is getting closer).
Directors at Daimler-Benz and Chrysler have announced an agreement to adopt English as the preferred language for communications, rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, Directors at Chrysler conceded that English spelling has some room for improvement and has accepted a 5 year phase in plan. In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c."
Also the hard "c" will be replaced with "k." Not only will this klear up konfusion, but komputers kan have 1 less letter. There will be a growing kompany enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced by "f." This will make words like "fotograf" 20 persent shorter.
In the third year, Daimler-Khrysler akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated shanges are possible.
Daimler-Khrysler will enkourage the removal of double letters, which have always been a determent to akkurate spelling. Also, all will agree that the horrible mess of silent "e's" in the language is disgrakeful, and they would go.
By the fourth year, people will be resepetive to steps such as replaking "th" with "z" and "w" by "v".
During ze fifz year, ze unekessary "o" kan be dropped from vords kontaining "ou", and similiar khanges vuld of kors be applied to all ozer kombinations of letters.
After zis fifz year, ve vill hav a really sensible vriten style. Zere vill be no more trubls or diffikultis and employee's vill find it easy to komunikat viz each ozer.
Ov kourse all suppliers vill be expekted to svitsh to zis for all business kommuniktion via Daimler-Khrysler.
Ze dream vill finally kome true.
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