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Very similar to A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by M. J. Shields (frequently misattributed to Mark Twain): "For example, in Year 1 that useless

• garfieldnate 5y ago
  I like historical spellings because they tell the story of the development of the language; even though it can be pretty chaotic and tough to master, the chaos itself has a certain charm (for me) in demonstrating how how one of our oldest technologies lives and evolves in the minds of the human beings that use it. Besides that, though, I don't like the Shields proposal because it's specific to his dialect. No "r" in "letez" and using an "a" in "jast" for instance makes this difficult for me to read.
• thematrixturtle 5y ago
  Except that Twain's spelling system would actually be a vast improvement on what we have today.
  • Semiapies 5y ago
    Right. It's basically because of the aggressively anti-phonetic nature of English orthography that phonetic spellings look "wrong" or "stupid" to us.
    • cycomanic 5y ago
      The funny thing is that because of this English native speakers are incredibly good at understanding you even when you mispronounced words quite a bit. This is very different to some other languages (e.g. Japanese is famous for it), where only a slight mispronounciation usually means nobody will understand what you're saying. I have encountered this many times, I pronounced a word just how I heard it and people were just giving me blank stares, only when I showed the spelled word did they get it. I never encountered this with English native speakers.
      • jasonkester 5y ago
        Are you sue that’s the reason? French has an equally wacky spelling system, but French people are notorious for refusing to understand tiny errors in pronunciation by foreigners (while North African French speakers will accept anything you say so long as you get a letter or two right). Meanwhile, Spanish, with its perfect phonetic spelling is spoken by a people who will go out of their way to understand you no matter how bad you speak their language. My experience is that it’s mostly cultural, and often comes down to whether the person you’re speaking to has themself had to try using a foreign language, thus gaining the empathy to help you out.
        • WastingMyTime89 5y ago
          > French people are notorious for refusing to understand tiny errors in pronunciation by foreigners (while North African French speakers will accept anything you say so long as you get a letter or two right). I think it's a mix of multiple reasons. First, French is a language which not only has no word stress but actively blends words together when speacking in a sentence. Correct word pronunciation is key to understanding and what foreigners view as small errors sometimes do actually make their sentence unintelligible to a French speaker from France. Then, language proficiency is a strong social marker in France. So, if you speak broken French, people will subconsciously view you as lower class/uneducated.
        • runarberg 5y ago
          Your mileage may vary, but my experience with Danish and Norwegian is similar. Norwegian which has very phonetic spelling is very forgiving on mispronunciation while Danish—a very similar language but spelled much differently and not very phonetically—is not nearly as forgiving on mispronunciation, and being Danish you do mispronounce a lot as you are learning the language.
  • rdiddly 5y ago
    It shows simultaneously how crazy it currently is, and why it'll never change (at least not on that time scale)!
    • BbzzbB 5y ago
      English is not my native language, yet I didn't realize how peculiar it is until I saw this video below ("What if English Were Phoenetically Consistant"). All these years I thought my native languages were hard to learn for foreigners (French for the spelling, Serbo-Croatian for it's grammar, both of which have seemingly been designed by insane people) and English easy, didn't realize how hard it is prior to said video. I guess it is made easier by the fact it's the go-to Internet and international language so I get more exposure to it than I do to my native ones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8zWWp0akUU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8zWWp0akUU
  • aaroninsf 5y ago
    Setting aside the question of utility (ease of use issues), English spelling is also a "side channel" which persists information about the word which is lost (recoverable only via lookup) when spelling is normalized. With things as they are, the etymology of words is often visible in their spelling; this has practical implications such as imparting shades of meaning through allusion, which are one reason English has retained lots of near-synonyms, but not discarded them. This means it allows for a particular kind of nuance. As a native speaker of English I find the relative paucity of vocabulary confounding (or comical); it is now expected in my (bilingual) household that when where English draws distinctions, Spanish reuses. My German-speaking father in law is always entertaining us with cases where German constructs words through liberal compounding, where English doesn't. Which is just to say, problems aside, English's maddening spelling almost always encodes useful information. For some uses. (Not tech docs, but more than poetry.) Interesting footnote to this: English has many "backformations," cases where the spelling of some words has conformed over time to that of similar words from other languages, even when they etymologically unrelated. My favorite example of this is "strawberry" in which the "berry" is a backformation.
    • aaroninsf 5y ago
      Another footnote: English vocabulary and etymology also encode history beyond provenance. The words in English for meat and its sources are the go-to example. The words for the animals, are from Anglo-Saxon. The words for the meat as you eat it, are from French. Because England acquired its French from occupation c. 1066; the peasants knew the animals but it was the new French-speaking aristocracy were the ones that ate them.
• shynrou 5y ago
  That's a cool text. It feels like the language switches to old dialect. It reads and probably sounds a lot more like old german or dutch.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • cylon13 5y ago
    It shouldn't sound any different, that's the point of the exercise. The sounds are held constant while the way of writing them down changes.
    • vikramkr 5y ago
      It certainly makes assumptions about pronunciations that mean for a lot of people it will sound different. "Meik" vs "maik" for a replacement for make for example threw me off for a bit (like, meek? Meyek? What does that mean in context?) Also I instead of Y is radically changing how I read that paragraph: "Year" going to "Ier" indicates to me either a pronunciation of "eer" or "aiyer" or "eiyer" instead of starting with that defined "yuh" sound.
      • qalmakka 5y ago
        It is using the Romance (i.e the original Latin) vowels. English got its vowels all garbled and messed up by the great Vowel Shift, so now every Latin vowel in English does not sound how it is supposed to sound. Heck they don't even follow the same rules most of the time, because English spelling is fucked up beyond repair. That's ironic because that makes writing English much more complicated, even though the language is quite simple to learn at a basic level. A is /ei/ and lots of other sounds. E is /i/, sometimes it's an open e, .. I is /ai/, sometimes not, ... O is always a diphthong, plain /o/ does not exist anymore U is /a/, /ju/, ?? Y is there for the show, often it's used for /j/ English like German has lots and lots of vowels, while Latin and Italian have like, 7? The letters were supposed to have only one sound at most, but history clearly shows us that it's easier to reuse or adapt an existing letter than invent a new one (look at [ng] for instance, or [th] which became used mostly because nobody had types to print thorn and eth).
• Sebastian_09 5y ago
  Sounds like dutch to me
• austinl 5y ago
  Which reminds me — I was fascinated to learn that the Spelling Bee [1] is mostly an English-speaking thing, since many English words are derived from a variety of languages [2]. There is no such thing as a spelling bee in Germany, for example. Germany actually enacted an orthographical reform in 1996, where they modified the spelling of certain words to make the language easier to learn. This was remarkable in and of itself, since it involved an international agreement between multiple German-speaking countries. As I've been learning German, it's been a strange and pleasant feeling to hear a long word and then be able to spell it correctly 99% of the time. Ironically, because of my parent comment above, Mark Twain also has an essay on how much he hated learning German [4] (more due to grammar than spelling, although he was learning it before the reform). [1] https://spellingbee.com https://spellingbee.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1996 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1... [4] https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html
  • raverbashing 5y ago
    > since it involved an international agreement between multiple German-speaking countries You mean Austria and Switzerland. Their neighbours? I might argue it was not so hard. Especially since Switzerland doesn't use ß
    • bmn__ 5y ago
      Liechtenstein, too, in that agreement. More German speaking countries (language with official status) who were not involved: Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, Namibia.
  • samus 5y ago
    The German spelling reform had mixed results though. The new reform was universally accepted only by governments and schools. Various publishers have house standards and the rules were amended and partly rolled back a few times. Many polls in Germany show widespread rejection by the wider population. At least we got rid of the long "s" (one of the complaints of Mark Twain) long ago.
• dddddaviddddd 5y ago
  At that point we may as well just write in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
  • HKH2 5y ago
    And have everyone write in their own accent?
• teddyh 5y ago
  Sorry, not Mark Twain. It was written in 1971 by M. J. Shields¹. It has since been frequently mis-attributed to Mark Twain, who only wrote about a similar topic in 1899². 1. http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/iorz-feixfuli-m-j-yilz.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/iorz-feixfuli-m-j-yilz.... 2. 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...
  • austinl 5y ago
    Ah, another quote misattributed to Twain. Looks like it was submitted as a letter to The Economist in 1971 — I'll update the parent. Thanks for pointing this out!
  • gadiyar 5y ago
    Looks like both of these are dead links (at least for me).
    • teddyh 5y ago
      Link rot. Archived: 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20200807181810/https://lettersofnote.com/2012/05/03/iorz-feixfuli-m-j-yilz/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200807181810/https://lettersof... 2. https://web.archive.org/web/20170829174508/https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/twain/mark/what_is_man/chapter11.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170829174508/https://ebooks.ad...
• tkgally 5y ago
  Serious proposals for the reform of English spelling were all the rage more than a century ago. Examples at the Internet Archive: Comstock's phonetic magazine (1846) https://archive.org/details/comstocksphoneti00unse https://archive.org/details/comstocksphoneti00unse Biografiz ov de prezidents ov de Yunited Stats, kompild bi F.G. Adamz (1856) https://archive.org/details/biografizovdepre00adam https://archive.org/details/biografizovdepre00adam A system of phonetic spelling, adapted to English (1889) https://archive.org/details/systemofphonetic00call https://archive.org/details/systemofphonetic00call The fonetic primer, offering the universal alfabet and the science of spelling (c1907) https://archive.org/details/foneticprimeroff00storrich https://archive.org/details/foneticprimeroff00storrich More here: https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Spelling+reform%22 https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Spelling+r... It’s interesting to think about why the proposals for English failed while orthographic reforms in some other languages—Russian, German, Japanese, Chinese—succeeded, at least partially.
  • potiuper 5y ago
    The last time English had a central language authority, i.e. l'Academie Francaise, was when words were first transcribed in Old English. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qT8ZYewYEY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qT8ZYewYEY Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board
  • andai 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing these. I am a fan of Quikscript, which was specifically designed to be written by hand. Here is the original Quikscript Manual: https://www.quikscript.net/quikscript-manual.pdf https://www.quikscript.net/quikscript-manual.pdf Quikscript evolved from Shavian: >[George Bernard] Shaw placed in his will provisions instructing his executor to organize a world-wide competition to design an improved English alphabet. A British designer, Ronald Kingsley Read, who had corresponded extensively with Shaw for several years regarding just such an alphabet, was selected along with three other finalists as the winners of the competition. Read was chosen to design the final form of the alphabet. The "Shaw Alphabet" or "Shavian", as it is now generally known, was the result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript
• justnotworthit 5y ago
  Why would you change y to i, and keep i for 3 different sounds? (consonant y; ipa i; and short i).
  • memsom 5y ago
    The consonant sound is just i really. You think it is different because you tend to run the sounds together, but it is really just a clipped i.
• dripton 5y ago
  Text artifacts in the Infocom text adventures Planetfall and Stationfall use this system. Play the games long enough and you get pretty good at reading them.
• JuettnerDistrib 5y ago
  If you know German, there is an entire book written in this style, introducing a simplifying spelling and grammar each chapter [1]. It is called "fom winde ferfeelt", a pun on "Gone with the wind" turned into "Missed by the wind". Highly recommend. [1] http://www.zedorock.net/winde.html http://www.zedorock.net/winde.html
• eezurr 5y ago
  Ahh. I see you have learned Japanese. Well done! (Note: Japanese uses a phonetic alphabet. For the most part, the characters you see (when kanji is written out in hiragana/katakana) are sounded exactly as they are in when written/spoken individually/independently. There are some dialects though that modify this, notably Tokyo's replacing "su" with "s" and other changes)
  • Dylan16807 5y ago
    Not until japan learns how to put consonants next to each other.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • jquery 5y ago
    Isn’t there a ton of drift, though? Yes, spelling in Japanese is easier than English, but listening and speaking exercises seem just as important if not more important than they are for English. Otherwise you’ll sound like a cat got your tongue and the person you’re speaking to will reply with にゃんですか？
    • resonious 5y ago
      I'm not sure if there's grounds to say that the importance of speaking/listening exercises is different from any other language. Regardless of what language you're learning, you'll probably sound like a fool if you can even spit out any words at all if you don't practice speaking.
      • jquery 5y ago
        I just wanted to make a punny joke. “Nyan desu ka?” is a play on “Nani desu ka?” which basically means “what?”. And nyan is the Japanese word for a cat’s meow.
• dilawar 5y ago
  In India, we call it Hinglish.
• aidenn0 5y ago
  Except unlike TFA, the orthographic reform suggested by Shields actually makes things easier in the mid-term (long term, pronunciation will drift from spelling again)
• otabdeveloper4 5y ago
  • runarberg 5y ago
    English doesn’t need reform, just bring back the Þ. As a bonus we’d get a fun new stuck out tongue emoji with the tongue in the middle but not the side :þ
• vander_elst 5y ago
  I actually don't mind the last form, it's much more unambiguous than the first one. Many languages already adopt 1 letter 1 sound. It's English that is highly irregular (https://books.google.com/books/about/Highly_Irregular.html?id=HOEsEAAAQBAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/Highly_Irregular.html?i...).
  • tsimionescu 5y ago
    I don't think there is any language that actually adopts a 1:1 mapping of letters to sounds, but many come very close to adopting a 1:1 mapping between groups of letters and groups of sounds (for a particular accent). For example, Romanian is a pretty phonetic langauge, and it adds 4 letters/diacritics to the latin alphabet to come closer - ă [uh], î (no equivalent in English), ș [sh], and ț (like [zz] in pizza). Even so, it also has some letter combinations - ce sound like the [chai] in "chair", ci sounds like the [Chi] in "China"; but c in any other place represens a hard [k] sound. To mark a hard [k] before e or i, you then use che,chi (why they didnt do it the other way around is beyond me, since [ca],[cu],[co],[că],[cî] all spell the same [c] sound as [che], [chi]). The same rules apply to g - ghi sounds like the [gea] in gear, while gi sounds like the [gi] in gin. X of course represents [ks], but can also reprezent [gz] in certain words, such as examen (exam). I is normally a particular vowel or semivowel sound, like [ee] in English. However, in word final positions after a consonant, it's usually a consonantic sound. For example, the word "mări" (seas) is pronounced as a single syllable, with just a short [ee] sound at the end. However, the word "{a} mări" ({to} enlarge) is pronounced in two syllables, [muh-ree], accenting the second syllable. The personal pronouns I, he, and she (eu, el, ea) are all written with an e at the start, but always pronounced with an extra [ee] sound. The phonetic spelling would have been ieu, iel, iea but for whatever reason this was not done. No other words share this feature in the standard accent, though it happens to many/all words starting with the letter e- in other accents. As with many other languages, borrowed words tend to preserve the original spelling, even after they settle on a Romanian pronunciation. For example, the word "weekend" is written exactly like this, not the Romanian phonetic spelling "uichend". Older borrows do get this treatment though. For example the French "chaise longue", a reclining chair, was borrowed into Romanian a long time ago and is now spelled "șezlong".
• protontorpedo 5y ago
  Curiously, this last sentence matches almost exactly how a Portuguese speaker would write English phonetically.
• Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  It's not without precedent either; due to printing presses, the English alphabet lost the letters Eth (ð), Thorn (þ), Wynn (ƿ), Yogh (ȝ), Ash (æ) and Ethel (œ), to be replaced with phonetically similar letters (like th) or just sort-of-similar-looking replacements (ð replaced by y, as in "ye olde", which is pronounced "the old", or ȝ replaced by z like in "Cockenzie", pronounced "Cockennie" or "Dalziel" pronounced "Deeyel").
  • memsom 5y ago
    the Y in "Ye Olde" is actually thorn. If you look at thorn, you can see how it happened - the loop was unlooped. Also - English was never consistent. The thorn/eth split was completely random and was down more to style than correctness. Modern spelling of Old English has standardised the spelling. But macrons and dots over g's and c's also never existed, but are common in modern spelling for OE.
• singularity2001 5y ago
  It's not kohirnt when kohirnt rhymes with burned. You need the e in kohirent. You can't resolve the vowel distribution by remapping it, so keep some vouwels in the woerld… Otherwise look good / ok'ish to me. (no /s) I really like the gud trend by streamers to overpronounce words so they match their spelling again, e.g. say of-ten for often etc.
• soco 5y ago
  Heeey year 1 got rid of "x" already, why's it all over the place in the final line???
• avgcorrection 5y ago
  The second paragraph is just as legible as normal English.
• abandonliberty 5y ago
  >The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English". In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter. In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away. By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru. Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.