4 ms·

The Pioneer Ov Simplified Speling (1912)

12 points by tintinnabula 10y ago

baldfat 10y ago
I run a STEM Lab for 240 3-5 year old child who are 100% below the poverty line. We use a computer program for teaching literacy. (Our Literacy Program is horrible but all the other programs out there are just as bad or worse) I continually am frustrated at the lies we tell about phonetics and the sounds of letters. Sound out the letters. C and K are the same. X has a word end sound of KS. Z and C have a S sound that they both use. There has to be a logical way to teach sounds to pre-readers that doesn't fumble all over the place. P.S. If anyone is creating a new Literacy Program for Pre-Schoolers and Kindergarten students I would love to be a part of it. Have worked one on one with hundreds every week.
news_to_me 10y ago
An interesting perspective by Mark Twain (1899): https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/twain/mark/what_is_man/chapter11.html https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/twain/mark/what_is_man/chap...
jcranmer 10y ago
Why did English spelling reform never take off? First off, English has a rather complex phonemic reservoir for the Latin alphabet. We have about 20 vowels and 25 consonant phonemes (exact numbers depend on dialect and how you count them), yet our script allows only 26 one-character targets. 28 if you want to bring back þ and ð. Adding diacritics or new characters runs into the major problem of support, as anyone who's had to take a foreign language like France or Spanish while using en-US keyboards are all too aware. Indeed, þ was dropped from the language in part because of the lack of support in printing type. A second problem is that phonetic spelling is somewhat vague as to what the goal is. Should you try to give only one spelling to each phoneme, so that you can perfectly spell given pronunciation? Or should you be able to predict the pronunciation given the phoneme? It's also worth pointing out that pluralization and verb inflection rely heavily on simple morphological rules (add -(e)s/-(e)d to the end of the word) which would be complicated by insisting on phonetic purity (note the 'z' sound in words like dogs or says). Demanding only one spelling of phonemes seems a bit harsh, especially if you're going to admit digraphs. I like being able to distinguish words like meet and meat. Another problem is that there are some phonemes without clear representation. The 'th' digraph (retained in all spelling reforms I've been aware of) actually represents two distinct phonemes (say "Thy thigh" to hear the difference clearly). Of course, there is a very natural pair of letters to represent it, courtesy of Icelandic (þ and ð), but see above (also, people are liable to assume ð is approximately a "d" sound, which isn't right). The "sh" is natural to many people, but its voiced counterpart (ʒ in IPA) has no natural counterpart. The soft g or a j is a dʒ sound; "zh" crops up in some Romanizations of Chinese, but it's not attested in English; and the places where it does come up (e.g., vision) don't lend themselves to a natural borrowing. Which brings us to the biggest problem of spelling reforms: they target the wrong thing. When showing off these reforms, there's often big hoopla about things like "-tion is pronounced /shun/ and that makes no sense!" whereas the s/tion/ʃun/ pronunciation rule is one of the most productive and least exceptional in the English language (cation is the only word that comes to mind as an exception, and even then it's not really an exception because the word is derived from cat·ion, so the -tion isn't really a group). The real travesty of English spelling is that we borrow words from foreign languages and reuse the same spelling and pronunciation. Words like gyros ("yee-rohs") or quinoa ("keen-wah") are absolute travesties and really should be changed in either spelling or pronunciation. But insisting that we must change "advise" to "advaiz" and "advice" to "advais" seems overly pedantic when they're perfectly predictable with standard phonetic English rules. That's one final thing to bring up: English is already quite phonetic. http://www.zompist.com/spell.html http://www.zompist.com/spell.html gives a list of ~60 substitution rules to convert English spelling to pronunciation that covers ~80-90% of words. The main real travesties (in non-imported words) are a few vowel digraphs like -ea-, which has several pronunciations with no real rule to pick which one applies.
- gizmo686 10y ago
  Nitpick, the pluralization phoneme in English is /z/, not /s/. To see this, note that we can have an [s] sound following a voiced sound at the end of a word, (eg. floss vs flaws), but never have a [z] sound following an unvoiced sound at the end of a word. More relevantly, the difference between phonemic and phonetic representations can normally be derived from the phonetic context. For example, in the -s example mentioned above, English has a general rule that a /z/ sound following an unvoiced sound at the end of a word becomes [s]. Further, these rules come naturally to (native) speakers, so it is likely that we would not need to teach them much when we teach reading. >meet and meat. While this is a nice property, it seems like we only have it for some homophones by chance, not anything productive. Further, there is no productive way of knowing which writing is which meaning. > The 'th' digraph (retained in all spelling reforms I've been aware of) actually represents two distinct phonemes. This is a valid critism of existing attempts, but is probably a reflection of their pragmatic nature. If the ambiguity doesn't end up being a problem, then it is not worth introducing a new digraph to fix it. Most of the fixes in spelling reforms have been focused on removing oddities from the spelling system, instead of adding them to better accommodate the spoken system. Incidently, if we were to fix this, I would recomand adding the "dh" digraph for ð (as d is the voiced counterpart of t). > dʒ sound is not attested in English Judge >the places where it does come up (e.g., vision) How do you pronounce "vision". I only recal hearing it with the "ʒ" fricative, the "dʒ" affricative sounds weird. The bigger problem with spelling reform is is simple momentum. Adults already know the current spelling at a fairly deep level, so retraining them would be a massive effort for a payoff that they themselves would likely never see. Additionally, spelling reform would not be a one-time thing. As the language continues to drift, we will likely need a new set of reforms every few generations.
DonaldFisk 10y ago
I don't think a big bang approach will work, but gradual small changes which don't conflict with local Standard English pronunciations will, and is already happening. I pronounce "herd", "bird" and "word" with different vowels, which can be reliably predicted from the spelling. I pronounce "good" and "food" with the same vowel. Most spelling reformers merge the first three and distinguish the second two, because their accent does that. A better approach would be to distinguish them all. A few words with silent letters could be simplified, e.g. "knight" and "night" could both be spelt "nite" and disambiguated in context, as all accents agree they're homophones. Webster did get a few limited spelling reforms adopted in the USA, however. Other Americanisms are gradually being adopted. Hardly anyone in the USA writes "theatre" nowadays (as in "Firesign Theatre"), and in the UK we no longer write "computer programme". I still hold out with "connexion" (from Latin "connexio") but it's becoming a lost cause. There's been a regression with "-ize" (the spelling favoured by Fowler and the OED), now increasingly spelt "-ise" in the UK, largely I suspect due to Microsoft's spelling checker.

12 points by tintinnabula 10y ago

I run a STEM Lab for 240 3-5 year old child who are 100% below the poverty line. We use a computer program for teaching literacy. (Our Literacy Program is horrible but all the other programs out there are just as bad or worse) I continually am frustrated at the lies we tell about phonetics and the sounds of letters. Sound out the letters. C and K are the same. X has a word end sound of KS. Z and C have a S sound that they both use. There has to be a logical way to teach sounds to pre-readers that doesn't fumble all over the place. P.S. If anyone is creating a new Literacy Program for Pre-Schoolers and Kindergarten students I would love to be a part of it. Have worked one on one with hundreds every week.

news_to_me 10y ago

An interesting perspective by Mark Twain (1899): https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/twain/mark/what_is_man/chapter11.html https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/twain/mark/what_is_man/chap...

jcranmer 10y ago

Why did English spelling reform never take off? First off, English has a rather complex phonemic reservoir for the Latin alphabet. We have about 20 vowels and 25 consonant phonemes (exact numbers depend on dialect and how you count them), yet our script allows only 26 one-character targets. 28 if you want to bring back þ and ð. Adding diacritics or new characters runs into the major problem of support, as anyone who's had to take a foreign language like France or Spanish while using en-US keyboards are all too aware. Indeed, þ was dropped from the language in part because of the lack of support in printing type. A second problem is that phonetic spelling is somewhat vague as to what the goal is. Should you try to give only one spelling to each phoneme, so that you can perfectly spell given pronunciation? Or should you be able to predict the pronunciation given the phoneme? It's also worth pointing out that pluralization and verb inflection rely heavily on simple morphological rules (add -(e)s/-(e)d to the end of the word) which would be complicated by insisting on phonetic purity (note the 'z' sound in words like dogs or says). Demanding only one spelling of phonemes seems a bit harsh, especially if you're going to admit digraphs. I like being able to distinguish words like meet and meat. Another problem is that there are some phonemes without clear representation. The 'th' digraph (retained in all spelling reforms I've been aware of) actually represents two distinct phonemes (say "Thy thigh" to hear the difference clearly). Of course, there is a very natural pair of letters to represent it, courtesy of Icelandic (þ and ð), but see above (also, people are liable to assume ð is approximately a "d" sound, which isn't right). The "sh" is natural to many people, but its voiced counterpart (ʒ in IPA) has no natural counterpart. The soft g or a j is a dʒ sound; "zh" crops up in some Romanizations of Chinese, but it's not attested in English; and the places where it does come up (e.g., vision) don't lend themselves to a natural borrowing. Which brings us to the biggest problem of spelling reforms: they target the wrong thing. When showing off these reforms, there's often big hoopla about things like "-tion is pronounced /shun/ and that makes no sense!" whereas the s/tion/ʃun/ pronunciation rule is one of the most productive and least exceptional in the English language (cation is the only word that comes to mind as an exception, and even then it's not really an exception because the word is derived from cat·ion, so the -tion isn't really a group). The real travesty of English spelling is that we borrow words from foreign languages and reuse the same spelling and pronunciation. Words like gyros ("yee-rohs") or quinoa ("keen-wah") are absolute travesties and really should be changed in either spelling or pronunciation. But insisting that we must change "advise" to "advaiz" and "advice" to "advais" seems overly pedantic when they're perfectly predictable with standard phonetic English rules. That's one final thing to bring up: English is already quite phonetic. http://www.zompist.com/spell.html http://www.zompist.com/spell.html gives a list of ~60 substitution rules to convert English spelling to pronunciation that covers ~80-90% of words. The main real travesties (in non-imported words) are a few vowel digraphs like -ea-, which has several pronunciations with no real rule to pick which one applies.

gizmo686 10y ago
Nitpick, the pluralization phoneme in English is /z/, not /s/. To see this, note that we can have an [s] sound following a voiced sound at the end of a word, (eg. floss vs flaws), but never have a [z] sound following an unvoiced sound at the end of a word. More relevantly, the difference between phonemic and phonetic representations can normally be derived from the phonetic context. For example, in the -s example mentioned above, English has a general rule that a /z/ sound following an unvoiced sound at the end of a word becomes [s]. Further, these rules come naturally to (native) speakers, so it is likely that we would not need to teach them much when we teach reading. >meet and meat. While this is a nice property, it seems like we only have it for some homophones by chance, not anything productive. Further, there is no productive way of knowing which writing is which meaning. > The 'th' digraph (retained in all spelling reforms I've been aware of) actually represents two distinct phonemes. This is a valid critism of existing attempts, but is probably a reflection of their pragmatic nature. If the ambiguity doesn't end up being a problem, then it is not worth introducing a new digraph to fix it. Most of the fixes in spelling reforms have been focused on removing oddities from the spelling system, instead of adding them to better accommodate the spoken system. Incidently, if we were to fix this, I would recomand adding the "dh" digraph for ð (as d is the voiced counterpart of t). > dʒ sound is not attested in English Judge >the places where it does come up (e.g., vision) How do you pronounce "vision". I only recal hearing it with the "ʒ" fricative, the "dʒ" affricative sounds weird. The bigger problem with spelling reform is is simple momentum. Adults already know the current spelling at a fairly deep level, so retraining them would be a massive effort for a payoff that they themselves would likely never see. Additionally, spelling reform would not be a one-time thing. As the language continues to drift, we will likely need a new set of reforms every few generations.

DonaldFisk 10y ago

I don't think a big bang approach will work, but gradual small changes which don't conflict with local Standard English pronunciations will, and is already happening. I pronounce "herd", "bird" and "word" with different vowels, which can be reliably predicted from the spelling. I pronounce "good" and "food" with the same vowel. Most spelling reformers merge the first three and distinguish the second two, because their accent does that. A better approach would be to distinguish them all. A few words with silent letters could be simplified, e.g. "knight" and "night" could both be spelt "nite" and disambiguated in context, as all accents agree they're homophones. Webster did get a few limited spelling reforms adopted in the USA, however. Other Americanisms are gradually being adopted. Hardly anyone in the USA writes "theatre" nowadays (as in "Firesign Theatre"), and in the UK we no longer write "computer programme". I still hold out with "connexion" (from Latin "connexio") but it's becoming a lost cause. There's been a regression with "-ize" (the spelling favoured by Fowler and the OED), now increasingly spelt "-ise" in the UK, largely I suspect due to Microsoft's spelling checker.