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This is why I'm a huge supporter of a radical English spelling reform. With the computational tools and linguistic libraries available, we could truly create an

This is why I'm a huge supporter of a radical English spelling reform. With the computational tools and linguistic libraries available, we could truly create an extremely shallow orthographic English language. Learning Spanish and Russian really illuminated how poor English spelling is. Spelling in English is so hard we even have a contest for it, the spelling bee! There's no spelling bees in Russia or Finland.

tetromino_ 3y ago
> There's no spelling bees in Russia ... but there are constant dictation exercises (диктанты) in school to force children to memorize the thousands of exceptions in the orthographic rules of literary Russian. A written Russian sentence is (usually) easy to read - but the reverse task, writing down a spoken sentence, can be rather complicated for a child. Especially when the distinction between words and phonemes can seem rather arbitrary in a language full of clitics.
- sveolon 3y ago
  In reality in Russia there has been planned a very ambitious reform aiming to radically simplify the orthography in the Khruschev time, but as he fell out of power, everything Khruschev was condemned and undone :( https://sergeytsvetkov-livejournal-com.translate.goog/1056256.html?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://sergeytsvetkov-livejournal-com.translate.goog/105625...
- cyberax 3y ago
  Back when I was at school in Russia, one spelling mistake in the final examination essay meant minus one mark ("A" to "B", "B" to "C" and so on). From today's point of view, this seems somewhat egregious. > Especially when the distinction between words and phonemes can seem rather arbitrary in a language full of clitics. Uhh... Russian doesn't have a lot of clitics. There are compound words like in German, but they are still understandable if you read them phonetically. And most children learn to read first by sounding aloud individual letters, and then just training to do it faster. It's called "reading by syllables". But Ukrainian is still even better. It's almost completely phonetic both ways and you usually can write down any word you hear without problems, even if you hear it for the first time. There are still some double consonants and a small amount of reduced vowels, but even they are still somewhat reflected phonetically.
bane 3y ago
One of the challenges with this is that the phonology of English as spoken varies quite a bit -- even among nearby regions -- particularly with vowels, but sometimes with consonants especially medial ones. https://youtu.be/sa3Tl3t88Mc https://youtu.be/sa3Tl3t88Mc https://www.youtube.com/shorts/82GgaT0Sx1o https://www.youtube.com/shorts/82GgaT0Sx1o
- mostlylurks 3y ago
  A challenge, yes, but an insurmountable one? No. There is no fundamental need to keep the written form of a language across various dialects unified. If people can understand each other's accents and dialects when speaking, they can also understand those same differences when expressed through writing (assuming that the writing system is capable of expressing those differences accurately enough, which the current English orthographies are not). In fact, writing in your own dialect and accent in informal contexts (e.g. on social media) is quite common in some language communities, and it doesn't particularly hinder communication. Thus, you could theoretically let the spelling vary by dialect and everything would work out just fine for the most part.
  - guidoism 3y ago
    I’ve read phonetic English and it’s really hard at first but you eventually get the hang of it. Are you proposing that people just write out whatever they say in IPA and force the interpretation on the reader like we do with spoken language? I wonder how this would affect communities that speak AAVE for example.
- limitedfrom 3y ago
  Swiss German[1] is a related example for this. Even though Swiss German varieties are mostly unintelligible with Standard German (Hochdeutsch/Standard High German), German writing in Switzerland is mostly done with a variety of Standard German[2]. One of the main causes being, different varieties of Swiss German are so different that it would be difficult choosing a "standard" Swiss German orthography, so a very far variety closer to Standard German is used instead of Swiss German. There are other reasons for this, but this is one of them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_German https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_German [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Standard_German https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Standard_German
com2kid 3y ago
> This is why I'm a huge supporter of a radical English spelling reform. That has already happened, which is part of how we got into this mess. See isle vs island. IMHO The only real solution is to invent a time machine and keep England from getting conquered again and again and again. If you keep mashing languages together you are bound to get a mess.
- pythonguython 3y ago
  Every language has had spelling reforms. Orthographies would certainly be worse if we never had spelling reforms. Some have just worked out better than others
- esafak 3y ago
  This also reflects Britain's hands-off approach to language. If desired, the government could establish a council to police the language like the French: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise This is how Turkey ended up with its shallow orthography: the government designed a new alphabet. Before that they used Arabic.
crazygringo 3y ago
Although many here have surely seen this before, for those who haven't -- the famous "Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling" by (supposedly) Mark Twain. It made me wonder if I really would want reform after all! Here you go: ---- For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
- feoren 3y ago
  Just because something looks weird to us does not mean it's bad. I can read the last sentence at about 70% speed, and I suspect you can too; that means within the 20-year time frame (facetiously) proposed, we could both easily adapt to this. And that's with bad choices intentionally cherry-picked by Twain to ridicule the idea. If the reductio ad absurditem is not really all that absurdum, that's a point in favor of the idea.
  - kelseyfrog 3y ago
    It should be possible to do orthographic replacement using an LLM-based browser plugin and a trivial prompt to subjectively test the hypothesis.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  Why is this replacing "y" with "i"? I naturally read "iear" as "ear", not "year". And I read "awai" as something similar to "uh-why" (I'm having trouble translating the exact sound to text). Other than that, I see no issues with the changes through year 5. It's not that hard to read and I'm sure I would quickly get used to it with practice. Past year 5, I don't understand what is happening and I literally can't read it.
wnoise 3y ago
It loses the ready access to the relatively deep history available due to spelling being nearly frozen since the rise of early modern English. Shakespeare, from circa 1600 is readable with only slight difficulty. In contrast, Chaucer, circa 1400 while recognizable, is a puzzle to decipher. This deep history also shows in etymological roots. It's also completely impractical given the wide variety of very differently pronounced English dialects and accents. In other words, it requires massive pronunciation reform too. If that's on the table, why not alter everyone's pronunciation to fit the orthography...
- tangus 3y ago
  People don't read ancient manuscripts but recent reeditions of old works. Those can be done using new spellings, as they are in, for example, Spanish. Nobody reads the Quixote, the Mio Cid or the Amadis with the Spanish orthography of their times.
  - wnoise 3y ago
    > Nobody reads the Quixote, the Mio Cid or the Amadis with the Spanish orthography of their times. And this is actually a loss. I have a fantastic edition of the Song of Roland with facing pages in Modern English and Medieval French, and there are nuances that would be lost in a straight translation to either Modern English or Modern French.
    - tangus 3y ago
      The grammar and vocabulary usually stay the same. But there's no sense in, for instance, keeping a confusing "auia" instead of spelling it "había", instantly recognizable by the modern reader.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  I'm not very interested in redesigning English spelling. However, it seems feasible to automate most of the encoding. I'd think most words could be rewritten with a lookup table, except for a short list of heteronyms. For printed material, I'm not convinced teaching kids how to read "Obsolete English" would be harder than teaching them to read cursive. Updating grammar would be a giant pain in the neck. Saying "we're gonna write 'cat' as 'kat' now sounds a lot simpler. It would also greatly reduce the number of times I'd have to say things like "I'm about to use a word I've read a thousand times but never heard anyone pronounce, so forgive me if I'm butchering it." My kid was hugely into cats as a little kid, and it was cute when they wanted to tell us cool things about lee-oh-pards. It's less cute when I'm in a meeting talking about a whitepaper I've read about something I've never heard spoken.
gumby 3y ago
since pronunciation shift, this leads to a drift from semantic (definitional) spelling. At least when you encounter an unknown word in English you can more likely understand it even if you aren't sure how to pronounce it. Languages with periodic spelling adjustments to re-align spelling with (ever shifting) pronunciation strip this info away. > Spelling in English is so hard we even have a contest for it, the spelling bee! Pfui. In France there is (or was -- I no longer live there) a popular prime time spelling bee, not just for kids.
SuperNinKenDo 3y ago
I'm mostly against such an idea. While it's intuitive to think this is a good thing, I believe we take for granted a lot of the etymological information embedded in our spellings. That probably seems like an intellectual concern divorced from day-to-day language use, but I think we take for granted how easy it is to figure out a word's meaning from its spelling once one has a grasp of written English. Words we typically think of as being clearly related, and pronounced as basically similar sounds are actually vastly different in basic pronunciation, and, thereby, reforming spelling in this way would eliminate visual relationships between related words that are otherwise totally non-obvious. And all this to perform a phonological mapping that would be out of date almost as soon as it was settled on. To say nothing of the actual practical concern of arriving at a consensus on which phonemes in which words should be spelt which way, what of the absolute deluge of different accents to be dealt with for instance. That's before we get to the part where now English speakers lose access to all pre-existing literature after about 2 generations. The longer you look at the proposal, the more counter-productive it obviously is.
thsksbd 3y ago
I used to hate English spelling, but I live it now English's spelling is part of the world's cultural heritage. Centuries of history are captured within it.

tetromino_ 3y ago

> There's no spelling bees in Russia ... but there are constant dictation exercises (диктанты) in school to force children to memorize the thousands of exceptions in the orthographic rules of literary Russian. A written Russian sentence is (usually) easy to read - but the reverse task, writing down a spoken sentence, can be rather complicated for a child. Especially when the distinction between words and phonemes can seem rather arbitrary in a language full of clitics.

sveolon 3y ago
In reality in Russia there has been planned a very ambitious reform aiming to radically simplify the orthography in the Khruschev time, but as he fell out of power, everything Khruschev was condemned and undone :( https://sergeytsvetkov-livejournal-com.translate.goog/1056256.html?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://sergeytsvetkov-livejournal-com.translate.goog/105625...
cyberax 3y ago
Back when I was at school in Russia, one spelling mistake in the final examination essay meant minus one mark ("A" to "B", "B" to "C" and so on). From today's point of view, this seems somewhat egregious. > Especially when the distinction between words and phonemes can seem rather arbitrary in a language full of clitics. Uhh... Russian doesn't have a lot of clitics. There are compound words like in German, but they are still understandable if you read them phonetically. And most children learn to read first by sounding aloud individual letters, and then just training to do it faster. It's called "reading by syllables". But Ukrainian is still even better. It's almost completely phonetic both ways and you usually can write down any word you hear without problems, even if you hear it for the first time. There are still some double consonants and a small amount of reduced vowels, but even they are still somewhat reflected phonetically.

bane 3y ago

One of the challenges with this is that the phonology of English as spoken varies quite a bit -- even among nearby regions -- particularly with vowels, but sometimes with consonants especially medial ones. https://youtu.be/sa3Tl3t88Mc https://youtu.be/sa3Tl3t88Mc https://www.youtube.com/shorts/82GgaT0Sx1o https://www.youtube.com/shorts/82GgaT0Sx1o

mostlylurks 3y ago
A challenge, yes, but an insurmountable one? No. There is no fundamental need to keep the written form of a language across various dialects unified. If people can understand each other's accents and dialects when speaking, they can also understand those same differences when expressed through writing (assuming that the writing system is capable of expressing those differences accurately enough, which the current English orthographies are not). In fact, writing in your own dialect and accent in informal contexts (e.g. on social media) is quite common in some language communities, and it doesn't particularly hinder communication. Thus, you could theoretically let the spelling vary by dialect and everything would work out just fine for the most part.
- guidoism 3y ago
  I’ve read phonetic English and it’s really hard at first but you eventually get the hang of it. Are you proposing that people just write out whatever they say in IPA and force the interpretation on the reader like we do with spoken language? I wonder how this would affect communities that speak AAVE for example.
limitedfrom 3y ago
Swiss German[1] is a related example for this. Even though Swiss German varieties are mostly unintelligible with Standard German (Hochdeutsch/Standard High German), German writing in Switzerland is mostly done with a variety of Standard German[2]. One of the main causes being, different varieties of Swiss German are so different that it would be difficult choosing a "standard" Swiss German orthography, so a very far variety closer to Standard German is used instead of Swiss German. There are other reasons for this, but this is one of them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_German https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_German [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Standard_German https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Standard_German

com2kid 3y ago

> This is why I'm a huge supporter of a radical English spelling reform. That has already happened, which is part of how we got into this mess. See isle vs island. IMHO The only real solution is to invent a time machine and keep England from getting conquered again and again and again. If you keep mashing languages together you are bound to get a mess.

pythonguython 3y ago
Every language has had spelling reforms. Orthographies would certainly be worse if we never had spelling reforms. Some have just worked out better than others
esafak 3y ago
This also reflects Britain's hands-off approach to language. If desired, the government could establish a council to police the language like the French: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise This is how Turkey ended up with its shallow orthography: the government designed a new alphabet. Before that they used Arabic.

crazygringo 3y ago

Although many here have surely seen this before, for those who haven't -- the famous "Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling" by (supposedly) Mark Twain. It made me wonder if I really would want reform after all! Here you go: ---- For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

feoren 3y ago
Just because something looks weird to us does not mean it's bad. I can read the last sentence at about 70% speed, and I suspect you can too; that means within the 20-year time frame (facetiously) proposed, we could both easily adapt to this. And that's with bad choices intentionally cherry-picked by Twain to ridicule the idea. If the reductio ad absurditem is not really all that absurdum, that's a point in favor of the idea.
- kelseyfrog 3y ago
  It should be possible to do orthographic replacement using an LLM-based browser plugin and a trivial prompt to subjectively test the hypothesis.
Wowfunhappy 3y ago
Why is this replacing "y" with "i"? I naturally read "iear" as "ear", not "year". And I read "awai" as something similar to "uh-why" (I'm having trouble translating the exact sound to text). Other than that, I see no issues with the changes through year 5. It's not that hard to read and I'm sure I would quickly get used to it with practice. Past year 5, I don't understand what is happening and I literally can't read it.

wnoise 3y ago

It loses the ready access to the relatively deep history available due to spelling being nearly frozen since the rise of early modern English. Shakespeare, from circa 1600 is readable with only slight difficulty. In contrast, Chaucer, circa 1400 while recognizable, is a puzzle to decipher. This deep history also shows in etymological roots. It's also completely impractical given the wide variety of very differently pronounced English dialects and accents. In other words, it requires massive pronunciation reform too. If that's on the table, why not alter everyone's pronunciation to fit the orthography...

tangus 3y ago
People don't read ancient manuscripts but recent reeditions of old works. Those can be done using new spellings, as they are in, for example, Spanish. Nobody reads the Quixote, the Mio Cid or the Amadis with the Spanish orthography of their times.
- wnoise 3y ago
  > Nobody reads the Quixote, the Mio Cid or the Amadis with the Spanish orthography of their times. And this is actually a loss. I have a fantastic edition of the Song of Roland with facing pages in Modern English and Medieval French, and there are nuances that would be lost in a straight translation to either Modern English or Modern French.
  - tangus 3y ago
    The grammar and vocabulary usually stay the same. But there's no sense in, for instance, keeping a confusing "auia" instead of spelling it "había", instantly recognizable by the modern reader.
kstrauser 3y ago
I'm not very interested in redesigning English spelling. However, it seems feasible to automate most of the encoding. I'd think most words could be rewritten with a lookup table, except for a short list of heteronyms. For printed material, I'm not convinced teaching kids how to read "Obsolete English" would be harder than teaching them to read cursive. Updating grammar would be a giant pain in the neck. Saying "we're gonna write 'cat' as 'kat' now sounds a lot simpler. It would also greatly reduce the number of times I'd have to say things like "I'm about to use a word I've read a thousand times but never heard anyone pronounce, so forgive me if I'm butchering it." My kid was hugely into cats as a little kid, and it was cute when they wanted to tell us cool things about lee-oh-pards. It's less cute when I'm in a meeting talking about a whitepaper I've read about something I've never heard spoken.

gumby 3y ago

since pronunciation shift, this leads to a drift from semantic (definitional) spelling. At least when you encounter an unknown word in English you can more likely understand it even if you aren't sure how to pronounce it. Languages with periodic spelling adjustments to re-align spelling with (ever shifting) pronunciation strip this info away. > Spelling in English is so hard we even have a contest for it, the spelling bee! Pfui. In France there is (or was -- I no longer live there) a popular prime time spelling bee, not just for kids.

SuperNinKenDo 3y ago

I'm mostly against such an idea. While it's intuitive to think this is a good thing, I believe we take for granted a lot of the etymological information embedded in our spellings. That probably seems like an intellectual concern divorced from day-to-day language use, but I think we take for granted how easy it is to figure out a word's meaning from its spelling once one has a grasp of written English. Words we typically think of as being clearly related, and pronounced as basically similar sounds are actually vastly different in basic pronunciation, and, thereby, reforming spelling in this way would eliminate visual relationships between related words that are otherwise totally non-obvious. And all this to perform a phonological mapping that would be out of date almost as soon as it was settled on. To say nothing of the actual practical concern of arriving at a consensus on which phonemes in which words should be spelt which way, what of the absolute deluge of different accents to be dealt with for instance. That's before we get to the part where now English speakers lose access to all pre-existing literature after about 2 generations. The longer you look at the proposal, the more counter-productive it obviously is.

thsksbd 3y ago

I used to hate English spelling, but I live it now English's spelling is part of the world's cultural heritage. Centuries of history are captured within it.