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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, fro
by 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 agoPeople 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 agoThe 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 agoI'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.