5 ms·

Linguistic purism in English is a different topic now than it use to be with English as an international language. I believe spelling reform to be the much more

by ludamad 10y ago

Linguistic purism in English is a different topic now than it use to be with English as an international language. I believe spelling reform to be the much more fruitful topic.

fighting 10y ago
It would be interesting if the common availability of spellcheck turned out to obviate such reform. Technology would be retarding progress and enabling ossification in this instance.
- kmicklas 10y ago
  Spellcheck more or less solves the needs of an educated native speaker who occasionally forgets weird spellings. But there's still a huge economic and educational burden to teaching spelling to kids and (especially) the millions of non-native learners.
- fenomas 10y ago
  It seems to me that issues like this are far more pressing for languages like Japanese and Chinese, where the rise of fonts and IMEs makes it technically unfeasible to create or change the fundamental building blocks of words (kanji). For Japanese, the current state is that most new words are loan words written with the non-kanji syllabaries. It makes you wonder if someday the loan words will overbalance the originals, causing kanji to die out from Japanese (as it has, to some extent, from Korean).
  - barry-cotter 10y ago
    >It seems to me that issues like this are far more pressing for languages like Japanese and Chinese, where the rise of fonts and IMEs makes it technically unfeasible to create or change the fundamental building blocks of words (kanji). This is not a technological issue, it's a social one. After the American conquest of Japan the American occupation forces were quite keen on the idea of language reform, whether using romaji or one of the native syllabaries. The idea died a death when they compared ease of decoding/reading speed. Japanese speakers, even not terribly well educated ones in terms of years of education were on a level with English speakers. Mao wanted to replace the hanzi with pinyin (the modern romanisation used in the PRC) but didn't feel it was worth the political cost. Replacing the hanzi/kanji would be a boon for foreigners but a massive and unnecessary disruption for Japanese and Chinese speakers. >For Japanese, the current state is that most new words are loan words written with the non-kanji syllabaries. It makes you wonder if someday the loan words will overbalance the originals, causing kanji to die out from Japanese (as it has, to some extent, from Korean). Korean is a very different case from Japanese or Chinese. If the Japanese hadn't conquered Korea they'd probably be using some combination of hanja (hanzi/kanji) and hangul (the syllabary used in modern Korea (North and South). To be fair that's the case nowadays but there are less than 300 hanja that every educated Korean would know. Any literate Japanese person knows over two thousand. The kanji aren't going anywhere in Japanese. They're the words that you use for educated, literate speech.
    - fenomas 10y ago
      > This is not a technological issue, it's a social one. I meant that fonts and IMEs make it technically unfeasible to change kanji or create new ones. > kanji .. are the words that you use for educated, literate speech. But not for neologisms. That's what my post was about.
  - gizmo686 10y ago
    I wonder how relevant technology has been to the reduction in kanji. It seems like the technical difficulties in adding kanji pale in comparison to the social difficulties of teaching the new kanji to the public; especially when you realize that this is the language that gave us emojis. Further, my lay understanding of Japanese history is that their have been many attempts to reduce or eliminate kanji usage.
    - rjsw 10y ago
      Maybe emoji should be considered to be new kanji.
    - getoj 10y ago
      >I wonder how relevant technology has been to the reduction in kanji. Actually IMEs have led to a resurgence in kanji usage. A lot of words that normal people could not (and were not expected to) write in kanji are now used online every day, to the extent that grade schools now teach them as kanji to appear on reading tests but not to be graded in handwritten essays. The most famous example of these "read only" kanji is 鬱 ('utsu', depression or melancholy), introduced to the school system in 2013 (iirc). Also words that can be written in either kanji or kana but with a preference for kana in modern edited text are often written in kanji online (like 或いは instead of あるいは).
- ludamad 10y ago
  People spelling things nonstandardly is not really a serious issue in the first place. It's the extra information that must be learned, raising the bar for non-native speakers and people with a learning disability.
getoj 10y ago
A major problem of English spelling reform is that pronunciation varies widely among native speakers. That problem is only made worse by an even greater number of non-native speakers having appeared, with an even greater variety of pronunciations. If you say t'meito and I say t'mahto, and a Spanish speaker says tomato and a Korean speaker says 토마토 and a Japanese speaker says トマト, none of which are phonetically the same, it seems like spelling it 'tomato' is as good a system as any.
- skissane 10y ago
  I was about to say the same thing. For example, I speak a non-rhotic dialect of English (Australian) in which the "r" is silent in many words (e.g. "hard"); whereas in many other dialects (e.g. most US dialects) that "r" is pronounced. So, dropping the "r" from the spelling of that word would make it more phonetic for me, but less phonetic for most Americans. To introduce phonetic spelling into English, you'd need to either privilege one dialect's pronunciation over all the others (which speakers of those other dialects would be unlikely to accept), or else you'd end up with far greater spelling variation between different dialects of English than exists at present (which would harm international communication.) The other problem with phonetic spelling is that phonology changes faster than orthography. If we adopted phonetic spelling tomorrow, then within a few generations many of those spellings likely wouldn't be phonetic any more. Keeping orthography reasonably fixed over time (even as pronunciation changes) makes it easier for us to understand the written texts of past generations.
  - eru 10y ago
    In German we went with the first option: elevate one dialect. I heard in Turkish they went with another option: everything is spelled phonetically, and there's a `standard' pronunciation / spelling. But I heard of a case where some people spell a word differently, because they pronounce it differently. (And that's seen not as a failing of these people's spelling.)
    - bigger_cheese 10y ago
      I had a friend from Austria who told me some words were spelt differently in 'Austrian German' than in Germany. So I think the same problem exists. I'm Australian we mostly use British English. The biggest complaint for me is in Programming language API's. "colour" vs "color" and "centre" vs "center" have cause me so many syntax errors.
chillacy 10y ago
It's one reason english got in this mess in the first place: > From the 16th century onward, English writers who were scholars of Greek and Latin literature tried to link English words to their Graeco-Latin counterparts. They did this by adding silent letters to make the real or imagined links more obvious. Thus det became debt (to link it to Latin debitum), dout became doubt (to link it to Latin dubitare), sissors became scissors and sithe became scythe (as they were wrongly thought to come from Latin scindere), iland became island (as it was wrongly thought to come from Latin insula), ake became ache (as it was wrongly thought to come from Greek akhos), and so forth.[6][7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo... That wiki also lists a number of proposed spelling reforms.
wnoise 10y ago
If spelling and pronunciation differ, why is it that spelling needs to change? Clearly the right solution is pronunciation reform. (And given that there are many pronunciations in common usage, we can't alter the spelling to fit them all. And there are essentially only two spelling systems, and they only differ in minor ways.)

by ludamad 10y ago

Linguistic purism in English is a different topic now than it use to be with English as an international language. I believe spelling reform to be the much more fruitful topic.

fighting 10y ago

It would be interesting if the common availability of spellcheck turned out to obviate such reform. Technology would be retarding progress and enabling ossification in this instance.

kmicklas 10y ago
Spellcheck more or less solves the needs of an educated native speaker who occasionally forgets weird spellings. But there's still a huge economic and educational burden to teaching spelling to kids and (especially) the millions of non-native learners.
fenomas 10y ago
It seems to me that issues like this are far more pressing for languages like Japanese and Chinese, where the rise of fonts and IMEs makes it technically unfeasible to create or change the fundamental building blocks of words (kanji). For Japanese, the current state is that most new words are loan words written with the non-kanji syllabaries. It makes you wonder if someday the loan words will overbalance the originals, causing kanji to die out from Japanese (as it has, to some extent, from Korean).
- barry-cotter 10y ago
  >It seems to me that issues like this are far more pressing for languages like Japanese and Chinese, where the rise of fonts and IMEs makes it technically unfeasible to create or change the fundamental building blocks of words (kanji). This is not a technological issue, it's a social one. After the American conquest of Japan the American occupation forces were quite keen on the idea of language reform, whether using romaji or one of the native syllabaries. The idea died a death when they compared ease of decoding/reading speed. Japanese speakers, even not terribly well educated ones in terms of years of education were on a level with English speakers. Mao wanted to replace the hanzi with pinyin (the modern romanisation used in the PRC) but didn't feel it was worth the political cost. Replacing the hanzi/kanji would be a boon for foreigners but a massive and unnecessary disruption for Japanese and Chinese speakers. >For Japanese, the current state is that most new words are loan words written with the non-kanji syllabaries. It makes you wonder if someday the loan words will overbalance the originals, causing kanji to die out from Japanese (as it has, to some extent, from Korean). Korean is a very different case from Japanese or Chinese. If the Japanese hadn't conquered Korea they'd probably be using some combination of hanja (hanzi/kanji) and hangul (the syllabary used in modern Korea (North and South). To be fair that's the case nowadays but there are less than 300 hanja that every educated Korean would know. Any literate Japanese person knows over two thousand. The kanji aren't going anywhere in Japanese. They're the words that you use for educated, literate speech.
  - fenomas 10y ago
    > This is not a technological issue, it's a social one. I meant that fonts and IMEs make it technically unfeasible to change kanji or create new ones. > kanji .. are the words that you use for educated, literate speech. But not for neologisms. That's what my post was about.
- gizmo686 10y ago
  I wonder how relevant technology has been to the reduction in kanji. It seems like the technical difficulties in adding kanji pale in comparison to the social difficulties of teaching the new kanji to the public; especially when you realize that this is the language that gave us emojis. Further, my lay understanding of Japanese history is that their have been many attempts to reduce or eliminate kanji usage.
  - rjsw 10y ago
    Maybe emoji should be considered to be new kanji.
  - getoj 10y ago
    >I wonder how relevant technology has been to the reduction in kanji. Actually IMEs have led to a resurgence in kanji usage. A lot of words that normal people could not (and were not expected to) write in kanji are now used online every day, to the extent that grade schools now teach them as kanji to appear on reading tests but not to be graded in handwritten essays. The most famous example of these "read only" kanji is 鬱 ('utsu', depression or melancholy), introduced to the school system in 2013 (iirc). Also words that can be written in either kanji or kana but with a preference for kana in modern edited text are often written in kanji online (like 或いは instead of あるいは).
ludamad 10y ago
People spelling things nonstandardly is not really a serious issue in the first place. It's the extra information that must be learned, raising the bar for non-native speakers and people with a learning disability.

getoj 10y ago

A major problem of English spelling reform is that pronunciation varies widely among native speakers. That problem is only made worse by an even greater number of non-native speakers having appeared, with an even greater variety of pronunciations. If you say t'meito and I say t'mahto, and a Spanish speaker says tomato and a Korean speaker says 토마토 and a Japanese speaker says トマト, none of which are phonetically the same, it seems like spelling it 'tomato' is as good a system as any.

skissane 10y ago
I was about to say the same thing. For example, I speak a non-rhotic dialect of English (Australian) in which the "r" is silent in many words (e.g. "hard"); whereas in many other dialects (e.g. most US dialects) that "r" is pronounced. So, dropping the "r" from the spelling of that word would make it more phonetic for me, but less phonetic for most Americans. To introduce phonetic spelling into English, you'd need to either privilege one dialect's pronunciation over all the others (which speakers of those other dialects would be unlikely to accept), or else you'd end up with far greater spelling variation between different dialects of English than exists at present (which would harm international communication.) The other problem with phonetic spelling is that phonology changes faster than orthography. If we adopted phonetic spelling tomorrow, then within a few generations many of those spellings likely wouldn't be phonetic any more. Keeping orthography reasonably fixed over time (even as pronunciation changes) makes it easier for us to understand the written texts of past generations.
- eru 10y ago
  In German we went with the first option: elevate one dialect. I heard in Turkish they went with another option: everything is spelled phonetically, and there's a `standard' pronunciation / spelling. But I heard of a case where some people spell a word differently, because they pronounce it differently. (And that's seen not as a failing of these people's spelling.)
  - bigger_cheese 10y ago
    I had a friend from Austria who told me some words were spelt differently in 'Austrian German' than in Germany. So I think the same problem exists. I'm Australian we mostly use British English. The biggest complaint for me is in Programming language API's. "colour" vs "color" and "centre" vs "center" have cause me so many syntax errors.

chillacy 10y ago

It's one reason english got in this mess in the first place: > From the 16th century onward, English writers who were scholars of Greek and Latin literature tried to link English words to their Graeco-Latin counterparts. They did this by adding silent letters to make the real or imagined links more obvious. Thus det became debt (to link it to Latin debitum), dout became doubt (to link it to Latin dubitare), sissors became scissors and sithe became scythe (as they were wrongly thought to come from Latin scindere), iland became island (as it was wrongly thought to come from Latin insula), ake became ache (as it was wrongly thought to come from Greek akhos), and so forth.[6][7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo... That wiki also lists a number of proposed spelling reforms.

wnoise 10y ago

If spelling and pronunciation differ, why is it that spelling needs to change? Clearly the right solution is pronunciation reform. (And given that there are many pronunciations in common usage, we can't alter the spelling to fit them all. And there are essentially only two spelling systems, and they only differ in minor ways.)