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The Great Failure of Andrew Carnegie's Simplified Spelling Lobby
- imglorp 11y agoThis audience might be interested in another spelling reformer, George Bernard Shaw, who funded a phonetic writing system with a non-latin character set called Shavian. A more practical revision of Shavian was Quikscript. A print book was published in Shavian (I have a copy :-) and there are fonts available for both systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript
- alricb 11y agoSome of Carnegie's reformed words were a bit silly in that they didn't account for the systematic assimilation of the voicing of the consonant preceding /d/ in words ending in -ed. So in the 30 words you get "askt", "fixt" and "shipt", but the phonology of English makes the d -> t transition automatic, since k, x and p are unvoiced; they are therefore followed by the unvoiced /t/, systematically. By using "t" there, they actually complicated spelling, since they break the "just add -ed" rule for the past participle. I think they might have done better by de-Frenchifying English, by removing supernumerary letters in words like "programme" (which they suggested, and which is actually common these days) and maybe get rid of vestigial greek spelling like they did in Spanish (like telefone, which they suggested): filip, filosofy, sycology...