Posted on 06/04/2010 8:50:41 PM PDT by James C. Bennett
The Scripps National Spelling Bee highlights what a mess the English spelling is – a hodgepodge of orthographies borrowed from German, French, Greek, and Latin. Is it time for a makeover?
The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw is said to have joked that the word "fish" could legitimately be spelled "ghoti," by using the "gh" sound from "enough," the "o" sound from "women," and the "ti" sound from "action."
Shaw was probably not the originator of this joke, but he was one of a long line of people who thought that the English language's anarchic spelling, a hodgepodge of Germanic, French, Greek, and Latin, was desperately in need of reform.
To this end, he willed a portion of his estate toward the development of a new phonetic script. The result was the Shavian alphabet, whose 47 letters have a one-to-one phonetic correspondence with sounds in the English language. Like just about every other attempt to rein in English spelling, Shaw's alphabet continues to be widely ignored to this day.
But spelling-reform advocates press on. The Associated Press reported that this year's Scripps National Spelling Bee was picketed by four protesters, some dressed in bee costumes, who distributed buttons reading "Enuf is enuf. Enough is too much."
The demonstrators were from the the American Literacy Council and the London-based Spelling Society, organizations that aim to do to English orthography what the metric system did for weights and measures. The American Literacy Council endorses SoundSpel, which seeks to "rationalize" the English language by spelling each of the English language's 42 (or so) phonemes one way and one way only. In SoundSpel, "business" becomes "bizness," "equation" becomes "ecwaezhun," "learned" becomes "lernd," "negotiate" becomes "negoesheaet," and so on.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
Nicely done.
heehee
Someone who got sent out in the second round?
Saving this poem (pome?)
In Russia, I'm given to understand that radio hosts will have contests on the grammatically correct pronunciation of very large numbers. Because of the gender and six different grammatical cases of the language, large numbers can be difficult to say correctly.
Perhaps a Russian speaker can comment on this.
The same thing with email letters, they are conversational. Those letters look/read nothing like my correspondence, business letters, etc.
(I must admit to the constant use of the comma splice in my posts, email -- I am typing what I hear in my head as though I'm speaking it, and I tend to use a hellalot of commas rather than the full stop period, begin another sentence style.)
I have known English teachers who were unable to punctuate that sentence, btw.
Not so. See post 54, wherein Xenalyte demonstrates the correct punctuation of the sentence as is.
Hey, what did I do to deserve this?
You used “has had” where the teacher was looking for “had had.” SNAP! ;p
That wasn’t me - the cat was on the keyboard again.
Ah, that explains it. Felines are notoriously bad with tenses.
The eternal present of the perfect solipsist. And Jake is only a year old.
It could cause an increase in taxes, but it would be worth it!
No replies until mine? Is FR insane? Great job!
In effect, you were just a bystander; I needed two names for the problem. No harm intended, I assure you.
;^)
What makes English the most “wealthy” of languages is that we have the largest, richest lexicon. We are, simply, not snobbish about adopting (and adapting) “outside” words as our own. I love this.
Even in an instructive profession, however, I’m just not possessive of particular word spellings. (Don’t worry: I still insist on proper spellings!) We’ve already changed the true ENGLISH spellings of a number of words—like color (colour) and center (centre)—to better suit us...AND Shakespeare spelled even his own NAME in numerous ways.
I see the need for consistency (litigation, and all); but I just don’t feel a moral connection to traditional, particular spellings.
I blame the Great Vowel Shift (and its minor brother) for most of the mess.
(Go ahead...shoot! I have thick skin.)
I was just confused, because I had been out all morning (children’s swim meet); I couldn’t remember any exchanges involving “has had,” “had had” or anything even close!
No, indeed, you weren’t involved or being absent-minded at all. You know threads on FR; they’re apt to go in any direction imaginable. That punc problem just popped into my head from I-don’t-know-where.
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