English spelling reform

[Asta Kask]

If there was a major english spelling reform, what three items would be at the top of your list?

[Eldan]

Kick out some of those "h"s in words. Honestly, things like "thorough" or "through" or "strength" are a pain to learn to spell as a non-native speaker. I still get "strenght" wrong every second time.

And perhaps you could agree on how you want to pronounce your vowels. "e" and "u", especially.

[Kobold-Bard]

There will be no changes to the glorious English language. NONE I SAY!!! :smallfurious:

Nah I'm kidding. But I wouldn't change anything; I know how to spell stuff & don't want to have to learn new ones. It's why I'm glad Britain never joined the Euro, new currency (even one so similar) would just be a pain.

[Yuki Akuma]

And perhaps you could agree on how you want to pronounce your vowels. "e" and "u", especially.

It doesn't work like that. It's a symptom of the language having over fifty phonemes despite having only twenty-six graphemes (twenty-eight if you count 'th' and 'ch' as separate graphemes). This is about spelling reform.

Do you want us to add another twenty-five letters?

[Mercenary Pen]

Well, looking at this semi-logically:

The letter 'c' is redundant, since everything it does could be done equally well using 'k' or 's'.

The need for the letter 'u' after every 'q' is bad design- if a letter cannot function on its own, it needs repair until it can.

Based on the comments of Eldan and Yuki Akuma, perhaps we need more written vowels to make the system less ambiguous.

[Lix Lorn]

Q is a silly letter. The Q in Queen could be replaced with kw, and the Q in Queue could be replaced by ky.

[Istari]

Well, looking at this semi-logically:

The letter 'c' is redundant, since everything it does could be done equally well using 'k' or 's'.

The need for the letter 'u' after every 'q' is bad design- if a letter cannot function on its own, it needs repair until it can.

Based on the comments of Eldan and Yuki Akuma, perhaps we need more written vowels to make the system less ambiguous.

Just throwing this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_containing_Q_not_followed_by _U) out there

[Eldan]

It doesn't work like that. It's a symptom of the language having over fifty phonemes despite having only twenty-six graphemes (twenty-eight if you count 'th' and 'ch' as separate graphemes). This is about spelling reform.

Do you want us to add another twenty-five letters?

I mean it the other way, really. When the same or a very similar phoneme has different graphemes associated with it. It seems unnecessarily complicated.

I mean, compared "dog" to "water". Both use the English phoneme ɔː/ɔ, but are written with different letters. A lot of that depends on what the word originated from and how it is pronounced in other languages.

[Nameless]

Kick out some of those "h"s in words. Honestly, things like "thorough" or "through" or "strength" are a pain to learn to spell as a non-native speaker. I still get "strenght" wrong every second time.

And perhaps you could agree on how you want to pronounce your vowels. "e" and "u", especially.

Don't you mean the "g" in "strength"? :smalltongue:

[Phishfood]

The only one I really agree with is remove some QU words.

Quinn works just fine as Qinn.

Quill -> Qill

Quote -> Qote

That is all fine.

Same with CK I guess.
Kick -> Kik works.

[Mercenary Pen]

Just throwing this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_containing_Q_not_followed_by _U) out there

However, that list ends up putting 'q' in the same quandary as 'c' in that a 'k' could fill in for everything it does (notice how many of the words in the table you linked to have alternate spellings that use a 'k' instead)...

I have no problem with a decent number of letters in the alphabet, but to my mind you don't need the degree of redundancy we have between 'c' 'q' and 'k'...

[Fri]

Reminds me on this (http://www.angelfire.com/va3/timshenk/codes/meihem.html) :smallamused:

[Eldan]

However, that list ends up putting 'q' in the same quandary as 'c' in that a 'k' could fill in for everything it does (notice how many of the words in the table you linked to have alternate spellings that use a 'k' instead)...
.

Interestingly, almost all of those seem to be of Arabic origin. Is there any reason (historical or otherwise) why Arabic words were transliterated with qs instead of cs or ks?

[lesser_minion]

Well, the Welsh would be quite happy to oblige if you want more vowels. Alternatively, we could adopt pseudo-Irish spellings for everything, which would free up some consonants.

While I don't think there's much change needed in the UK, there is plenty of room for improvement elsewhere:

Standardise internationally on 'centre' for consistency with 'central'.
Standardise internationally on '-ise', since this leads to fewer special cases than the '-ize' spelling.
Standardise internationally on 'colour', 'flavour', and so on, because it's fun watching people complain about them, and even more fun excoriating people for screwing them up.

[Dacia Brabant]

Standardise internationally on 'centre' for consistency with 'central'.
Standardise internationally on '-ise', since this leads to fewer special cases than the '-ize' spelling.
Standardise internationally on 'colour', 'flavour', and so on, because it's fun watching people complain about them, and even more fun excoriating people for screwing them up.


Hey, don't take away our Zees! If they were Zeds then yes you'd have a point in your favour, but that letter has evolved after crossing the pond.

But you know what, you may have all of that, so long as you British English types will agree to drop your silly use of "c" in words derived from Latin perfect passive participles. The word is defense (defensus, -a, -um), not "defence."

[Yuki Akuma]

I mean it the other way, really. When the same or a very similar phoneme has different graphemes associated with it. It seems unnecessarily complicated.

I mean, compared "dog" to "water". Both use the English phoneme ɔː/ɔ, but are written with different letters. A lot of that depends on what the word originated from and how it is pronounced in other languages.

Well, in that case, switching out vowels might be useful.

But we'd probably need some more letters, anyway. Can we borrow some, Welsh?

[Asta Kask]

We have å, ä, and ö in Swedish. You can have them as long as you treat them well.

[Worira]

Schwa is a cool guy who we all dig. Why you hatin'?

[lesser_minion]

But you know what, you may have all of that, so long as you British English types will agree to drop your silly use of "c" in words derived from Latin perfect passive participles. The word is defense (defensus, -a, -um), not "defence."

While etymological correctness isn't actually a very good argument, that's pretty reasonable -- it turns into an 's' whenever you want to add a suffix anyway.


But we'd probably need some more letters, anyway. Can we borrow some, Welsh?

Well, the Welsh only have more vowels -- the letters are the same, it's just that some of them are vowels now.

I still think Irish would be a better choice if we went that route, mainly because I'm evil.

[Eldan]

You can have ä and ö. You wouldn't need ü, you always turn that into u or ey anyway.

[Elder Tsofu]

We have å, ä, and ö in Swedish. You can have them as long as you treat them well.

You can have ä and ö. You wouldn't need ü, you always turn that into u or ey anyway.

They turn ä into ae, ö into oe and å into ao though so some would probably argue that they would be redundant. Lets save them for those who appreciate them. :smallsmile:

[KerfuffleMach2]

Well, looking at this semi-logically:

The letter 'c' is redundant, since everything it does could be done equally well using 'k' or 's'.

The need for the letter 'u' after every 'q' is bad design- if a letter cannot function on its own, it needs repair until it can.

Based on the comments of Eldan and Yuki Akuma, perhaps we need more written vowels to make the system less ambiguous.

I have to disagree with completely removing 'c' for one reason.

'ch'

I do not see 'kh' working the same, and 'sh' is already used.

[Tirian]

What people seem to be suggesting is that our alphabet should become the pronunciation guide in dictionaries, and I'm sure we'll get around to realizing that we need not just the twenty-one vowels (if I counted correctly) but also the two stress marks so we know which emphasis to place on which syllables. I suppose the good news is that the work is already done and cataloged in the dictionary for your convenience.

[ForzaFiori]

The only real problem I have with American English is that phonetic isn't.

If we branch out to all forms of English, then the Brits need to learn to spell maneuver. I cannot put my hatred of the spelling "Manoeuvre" into words, I really can't.

And jail. I have no idea where the thought that gaol is pronounced "jeyl" came from, but it needs to be stomped out.

Other than those three, I'm fine with english. toss in all the extra u's you want, switch r's and e's, throw in a's and o's before e's, doesn't bother me.

[Yuki Akuma]

It comes from "gayole", which is Middle English.

As for "manoeuvre", it comes from the Latin "manuoperare", by way of the French "manœuvre".

All of these weird spellings have roots, you know.

[Lord Seth]

The letter 'c' is redundant, since everything it does could be done equally well using 'k' or 's'.Well, except for differentiating words like "cell" and "sell". A better way would be to eliminate the letter C in all cases other than such differentiations.


Standardise internationally on 'centre' for consistency with 'central'.That makes little sense. It is not pronounced "cen-TRE" it is pronounced "cen-TER". That makes spelling even more confusing.


Standardise internationally on 'colour', 'flavour', and so on, because it's fun watching people complain about them, and even more fun excoriating people for screwing them up.Are we talking about standardizing it so they all end in -or rather than -our? Because that's honestly much simpler due to the fact it takes one fewer letter.

Not to say that the American spellings are always preferable to the British ones, but if we're going to try to do a standardization (or standardisation) there are some cases where the American ones would be preferable either to being phonetically superior or simply being faster to write. I'm sure there are some British words that would be superior in this fashion also, so any international standardization would be best done with a combination of British/American spellings, rather than just one of them.

As for my thoughts, it's tricky. People bring out "don't require a U after a Q" but the thing is, that's consistent. Unnecessary perhaps, but it's consistent rather than various other spellings. It doesn't have a zillion exceptions like "I before E except after a C or in sounding like "ay" as in neighbor or weigh." I guess holding to that rule might make things easier, but then "science" becomes less phonetic due to it being spelled "sceince".

Ideally, the way to fix up English spellings is to render everything phonetic; that is, everything is pronounced the way it looks and have things be pronounced that way. However, that isn't fixing English spelling so much as it is changing pronunciation, and it would also suddenly make single-syllable words having multiple ones, or vice versa (e.g. "note" becomes "no-te"). That could certainly mess up poetry!

I don't think there is any real way to fix English spelling outside of altering the language so radically that it borders on the unrecognizable. You might as well try to fix up Chinese or Japanese's reliance on having thousands of different characters.

[Eldan]

Reminds me on this (http://www.angelfire.com/va3/timshenk/codes/meihem.html) :smallamused:

Iu nou, wic ce egseptyen of ce iuse of "y" for "sh" and ce sometaimes sligtly streiny "c" for "th", cat is almoust hau iu wud wreit cous words in Tyerman.


Is it bad that I think this article has a lot of good ideas?

[Mercenary Pen]

I have to disagree with completely removing 'c' for one reason.

'ch'

I do not see 'kh' working the same, and 'sh' is already used.

My recommended solution to this would be creating 'ch' character in place of the otherwise redundant 'c'- there are similar individual characters in languages such as greek- both ancient and modern- to provide inspiration for such a change.


My overall aims in any reformation of english spelling would be as follows:

1- Removal of ambiguity and unnecessary redundancy in the language (there are places where redundancy is an asset, but I would not say that the spelling of individual words is one of those places)

2- Providing characters to cover sounds (particularly vowel sounds) which do not already have their own- I think we would be better off with a strict ratio of one pronunciation per character, rather than- in the case of place names- trying to work out which pronunciation of 'ough' is being used this time (there are local suburbs that use three different pronunciations of that combination of letters).

[Lord Seth]

In regards to C, I think the best way to handle it would be this:
1) Keep it in all cases where it's needed to differentiate two words. For example, cell and sell. Sac and sack (which would be rendered as sak, see #3) are another such example.
2) Keep it for the uses of "ch." I do not see the need for a separate letter for this sound. As I noted before, if Q is pretty much always followed by a U, it's not hard to remember that outside of homonym differentiation, that the c is only followed by an h.
3) In all other cases, it can be replaced with a K or an S (or in some cases just removed when used with one of those, such as tack or science).

This would seem to cover all of the C problems. C would still be around, but its usage would be significantly simplified, with the only time there would be confusion about using it would be in the case of homonyms, and there's inherently spelling confusion with homonyms.

[Orzel]

No more words ending in "C", use "K"

"G" makes one sound. "J" makes another sound.

[lesser_minion]

That makes little sense. It is not pronounced "cen-TRE" it is pronounced "cen-TER". That makes spelling even more confusing.

Spelling it as 'centre' is more consistent with the ways you might change it ('central' for example), and the pronunciation isn't appreciably harder.


Are we talking about standardizing it so they all end in -or rather than -our? Because that's honestly much simpler due to the fact it takes one fewer letter.

You do realise that that was a joke, right? All it really does is look pretty and impose headaches on anyone trying to spell the language correctly. However, I'd question how exactly omitting one letter is "much simpler". It's basically insignificant.

[Heliomance]

You do realise that that was a joke, right? All it really does is look pretty and impose headaches on anyone trying to spell the language correctly. However, I'd question how exactly omitting one letter is "much simpler". It's basically insignificant.

Much as I protest, I probably wouldn't mind TOO much if we dropped the u in such words. After all, when adding suffixes, I think we do it already. I'm pretty sure that glamour becomes glamorous, not glamourous.

[WalkingTarget]

2- Providing characters to cover sounds (particularly vowel sounds) which do not already have their own- I think we would be better off with a strict ratio of one pronunciation per character, rather than- in the case of place names- trying to work out which pronunciation of 'ough' is being used this time (there are local suburbs that use three different pronunciations of that combination of letters).

Part of the problem with assigning one-to-one ratios of sounds to letters is that one would have to also standardize pronunciation across all speakers of the language at the same time. Hell, just among the people I know there are three different "correct" pronunciations of "Chicago" (the differences are in which sound the "a" makes - [ɑ] [æ] or [ɔ] - and how much the "o" is dipthongized) dependent largely on where in the state the speaker is from.

Consonants are a bit easier, although regional differences in things like the liquid consonants (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_consonant) can still be problematic.

[Castaras]

I like the british english language. It's eccentric in its spellings. When you look at english words with two spellings, you can tell which one's the british one by the more eccentric spelling. The -our, the re instead of er... All these bits of the british english language are a reflection on us Brits. :smallsmile: It's good to have some interesting language in, it makes talking to people all the more fun - just like its interesting to talk to people who have a mother tongue different to your own. Differences in languages start conversations, and push you to learn more about the world.

So no, I wouldn't want a reform. Nor would I want everyone to speak just english. Other languages add flavour to the world. :smallsmile:

[Mercenary Pen]

I like the british english language. It's eccentric in its spellings. When you look at english words with two spellings, you can tell which one's the british one by the more eccentric spelling. The -our, the re instead of er... All these bits of the british english language are a reflection on the French, who we stole them from.

Fixed that for you- now with greater accuracy.

[H Birchgrove]

I like the british english language. It's eccentric in its spellings. When you look at english words with two spellings, you can tell which one's the british one by the more eccentric spelling. The -our, the re instead of er... All these bits of the british english language are a reflection on us Brits. :smallsmile: It's good to have some interesting language in, it makes talking to people all the more fun - just like its interesting to talk to people who have a mother tongue different to your own. Differences in languages start conversations, and push you to learn more about the world.

So no, I wouldn't want a reform. Nor would I want everyone to speak just english. Other languages add flavour to the world. :smallsmile:

American English can get affably eccentric and archaic as well; at least that's the impression I've got from reading Science Fiction from the 1940's. No, it's not techno-babble I'm referring to. How often do we use words like "plebiscite" (= referendum) today? Yes, I know it's originally a Greek word, but you get my point, I hope.

[Eldan]

So? Referendum is Latin. Not much better, really. You just know it through regular use.

[H Birchgrove]

So? Referendum is Latin. Not much better, really. You just know it through regular use.

D'oh! :smallsigh: I should have said "popular vote", that's what I usually think in Swedish ("folkomröstning").

But really, when I read Robert Heinlein and A.E. van Vogt in English I need to make lists of words I don't get, because I wouldn't get to finish a chapter if I checked the dictionary every time I found a difficult word. Quite often these are words that could have been replaced with simpler ones - though that could make the language boring, I suppose. Not that I (usually) have trouble with understanding the stories...

[Eldan]

Funny thing about "Popular vote", guess where those words come from :smalltongue:

(Popularis, votum)

That said, I can't think of a Germanic word for the same used in English.

[H Birchgrove]

Funny thing about "Popular vote", guess where those words come from :smalltongue:

(Popularis, votum)

That said, I can't think of a Germanic word for the same used in English.
Ha! :smallbiggrin: There ya go.

Sure you must have a word for "vote", "elect", "choose" etc, right? I know people is "volk" in German (which I realise must be from where the Swedish word "folk" comes from, it's even pronounced the same).

[Eldan]

Ha! :smallbiggrin: There ya go.

Sure you must have a word for "vote", "elect", "choose" etc, right? I know people is "volk" in German (which I realise must be from where the Swedish word "folk" comes from, it's even pronounced the same).

Well, I'm not English myself, actually. Swiss German speaker, so I'm familiar with the German terms, just not any used in English.
Folk would probably be a good source. Looking at other terms, "poll" seems to have Germanic roots. "Survey" is from French and therefore Latin. "Choice" is actually Germanic, but that's also pretty remote and doesn't quite have the same meaning.

[H Birchgrove]

Well, I'm not English myself, actually. Swiss German speaker, so I'm familiar with the German terms, just not any used in English.
Folk would probably be a good source. Looking at other terms, "poll" seems to have Germanic roots. "Survey" is from French and therefore Latin. "Choice" is actually Germanic, but that's also pretty remote and doesn't quite have the same meaning.

Sorry, I meant "you" as in "[you] German-speaking peoples"; I got sloppy there. My bad. :smallfrown: And I misunderstood you when you said:


That said, I can't think of a Germanic word for the same used in English.

... as meaning that the German language didn't have own words for "popular vote"; that you (again with my sloppy language skills, sorry!) only had Latin and/or Greek loan words for it.

But thanks for telling the origins of these words; I didn't know that. Especially that "choice" came from German/Germanic languages; I thought it was from French. :smallsmile:

[Eldan]

Got those etymologies from the dictionary, actually. Choice is a bit weird:


Middle English chois from Old French chois (“choice”) from choisir (“to choose, perceive”), of Germanic origin (possibly via assumed Vulgar Latin *causīre (“to choose”)), from Gothic *𐌺𐌰𐌿𐍃𐌾𐌰𐌽 (kausjan, “to make a choice, taste, test, choose”) from Proto-Germanic *kaus-, *keus- (“choice”) from Proto-Germanic *keusanan (“to choose”) from Proto-Indo-European *ǵews- (“to choose”). Akin to Old High German kiosan (“to choose”), Old English ċēosan (“to choose”), Old Norse kjósa (“to choose”). More at choose.


So, both? But yeah, it's probably more French than German.

[H Birchgrove]

That's fascinating. :smallsmile: