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From Slashdot | Is Simplified Spelling Worth Reform?

Re:Expand the alphabet - don’t just change spellin Score:5, Insightful)
by Fortran IV (737299) on Thursday July 06, @09:01PM (#15672329)
Last Journal: Friday October 21, @09:21PM)

“Though coughing and hiccoughing, he fought through the tough boughs.” In ten words, seven distinct ways to pronounce ough.

That said, the problem with phonetic spelling is that not everybody uses the same phonemes. How do you pronounce route? Roof? Centimeter? Status? Aunt? Praline? Species? Tomato? Amen? Do you make Irish stoo or styoo? Should chamois be spelled differently when it refers to the leather instead of the animal?

And it’s not just the sounds. To me, protein is a three-syllable word, because I learned it in the late 60’s, but to most people today it’s two syllables. Listen to people talk around here: squirrel is a one-syllable word; chocolate, every, and syllable have two syllables; athlete has three. How do you say them?

Shall southern and midwestern children continue to find spelling difficult because the spellings are based on California or New England pronunciations? (Daddy, why does my spellin book keep puttin a “g” on the end of words? Why isn’t there an “r” in warsh or horspital?) Shall the British find American English even more incomprehensible because nothing is spelled the way they say it?

Re:Never going to happen Score:5, Interesting)
by Trifthen (40989) on Thursday July 06, @02:41PM (#15669134)
(http://www.kildosphere.com/)

Part of the problem is context. In English, since there are so many words which are homonyms, information is actually transmitted by the spelling of the word. It’s bad enough one word can have dozens of meanings, but then you have cases like: Weigh, way, and whey. If we compressed that to simply ‘way’, which way would you way the way? (In which manner would you determine the effect of gravity upon watery milk byproducts?) See the problem?

Simplified spelling destroys context and meaning in English. We would basically have to rewrite the language from scratch to avoid problems like the one outlined above. In not so simple terms: that will never happen.

Re:Never going to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
by arivanov (12034) on Thursday July 06, @03:18PM (#15669594)
(http://www.sigsegv.cx/)

Well… There are examples to that.

Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, a few others.

They have all undergone a reform around the turn of the last century which simplified spelling and grammar. As a result Russian grammar can be expressed in under 8 pages and the language has in total around 40 exemptions to these rules. Everything else is built out through some fairly simple grammar rules. Bulgarian and Serbian are quite similar to Russian to this extent, though their language reform did not go that far.

The results are quite interesting though most people prefer to “oversee” them, because expressing them is considered to be very politically incorrect.

First of all as a result of the reform, most English speaking humanity students find Russian staggeringly hard. Engineering students (the few that are interested in languages) cruise through it with ease. I am speaking from the experience of trying to teach students at an American University Russian and it was not fun. The humanity majors could not gear their brain into “rule operating mode” and that was it. Some of them knew 3-4 languages by that time, but Russian was beyond them.

Second, Russians and attention to detail do not mix. I am half Russian and I have lived there for 10+ years so I am speaking this out of experience. Their brain functions from the perspective that things are built according to rules and most of them are not good at memorising exemptions and minute details. At the same time they will swipe the ground with you on math, ability to draw general conclusions and cold cynical logic. Sometimes you think that their entire bloody nation got a Turette syndrome.

Third, they even learn to read in a completely different manner. They learn to assemble things in blocks to get a meaning. That is simply impossible with English. An average toddler will outright get lost trying to get through all the intricacies of bought vs buy and caught vs catch and so on, so they learn to recognise words a whole, not to try to assemble them. This once again changes the way people think.

So on so forth. And by the way we can continue along these lines looking at Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and especially Chinese. Each of these shapes the brain in a specific pattern and some thoughts which are OK for them will be immensely foreign to an English speaker. And vice versa of course.

Overall, “the language shapes the thought”. There are some very good observations by David Brin in the Uplift series to that regard that a language by design may prohibit certain type of thinking. So someone with a different language may come to a thought which will never otherwise occur.

A language reform will change the way English think. It is not just a problem of word meaning and context. It will fundamentally change education, culture, way of thinking, etc.

You are right, I do not believe it will happen.

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