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A 1960s schools experiment that created a new alphabet
- bbminner 1y agoHm, I'm not a native speaker, but I had no issues reading that weird script, is it supposed to be hard somehow for native speakers?
- crazygringo 1y agoNope, it's a gimmick that's dumb. It's not as effortless to read as proper English, but it's still immediately obvious what the words are.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoThe difficulty is apparently in the child learning it and then later transitioning to standard English.
- vintermann 1y agoAs a radical spelling reform it may not have been so bad, as a pedagogical tool for graduating to "real" English it's not hard to see how it would have been a disaster.
- clickety_clack 1y agoI guess I wrote UK English until I came to the US a decade ago and spell check fixes a lot of those issues for me. I could imagine that’s something similar here where it seems the mother has no problem reading, but when writing she seems to confuse the weird spelling they taught her.
- fsckboy 1y agoit's not hard to read for native speakers, but you have to go slowly, where ordinary reading is very fast. reminds me of the experiment that shows you can read words with all the letters scrambled if the first and last letter are not part of the scramble https://www.sciencealert.com/word-jumble-meme-first-last-letters-cambridge-typoglycaemia https://www.sciencealert.com/word-jumble-meme-first-last-let... I assume that works in any language? but that "reads" fairly quickly whereas this one here for me at least is a little slower
- parlortricks 1y agoIt feels like I was able to read the text at the same speed as normal English text.
- sheiyei 1y agoYeah, and it's a matter of getting used to it for most. A bit like when text has an accent written out.
- fn-mote 1y ago> is it supposed to be hard somehow for native speakers? For mature readers, it is a big contrast because it requires "sounding out" the words instead of being able to decode them in chunks / a whole word at a glance. I would say it's more of a publicity stunt than anything. It looks kind of like Old English (maybe) and definitely isn't recognizable at a glance, but the fact that the letters make only one sound in this decoding system is a major advantage for beginners.
- wongarsu 1y agoA contrast only by familiarity. I imagine the difference would vanish very quickly. As a system for writing English it seems superior to what we have now. Spelling telling you how to pronounce something is how most languages work. English by comparison has no consistent framework, requiring a lot of memorization to build that mapping. ITA is only a stunt in retrospect because it never went anywhere
- foxglacier 1y agoNot the lower-case-omega letter which is the oo in book, and the ou in you.
- jsnell 1y agoThat's not my experience from the short samples in the article, I could get the correct meaning out of all of them at a glance. The only slowdown was in returning to the text after the initial read, to try to puzzle out the exact definitions for the new letters. I'm pretty sure that I could read English in this alphabet almost as fast as the normal one even with no practice.
- 0manrho 1y agoNative speaker here (American). I can read it, it's not necessarily difficult but it's much slower. I would not voluntarily read any book or long form text written in this script. This feels very much the same as those experiments where the words contain all the correct letters, and the first and last are in the right position, but the rest are in jumbled order. For example, "Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch" vs "According to a research" [0]. It's readable, but I hate it lol. EDIT: that said, I do recognize that it could be a useful tool for helping people that may not be native speakers or perhaps have some learning disability, or perhaps even a way to better encode text for text-to-speech uses or other accessibility purposes. I personally do not care for it, but I'm not against it. 0: https://www.sciencealert.com/word-jumble-meme-first-last-letters-cambridge-typoglycaemia https://www.sciencealert.com/word-jumble-meme-first-last-let...
- mock-possum 1y agoit’s a meme, in the format “If you X then you might be Y.” So - “If you enjoy walking around the hardware store for no reason, you might be someone’s dad.” Kind of misapplied in this case, but I think that’s the joke.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoI confess, I miss some of the experimental teaching techniques they tried in the late 60's. Education was a surprisingly dynamic field it seems. In the U.S. my mom moved my sister and I into a new public school for what would have been my 4th grade. What an odd school it was compared to the previous public schools I had been to. For starters, I was not in 4th grade, I was in Community 5 (I assume that Kindergarten was Community 1, so they decided to toss the zero-based system I was used to.) I seem to recall they had combined 5th and 6th grade into something called Suite 67. The school itself was circular in construction with a sunken library in the center of the circle — the wedge-shaped classes going radially around the library. (If it sounds like Moon Base from Space 1999, I suspect it's because everyone in the 70's were drinking the same Koolaid.) Classes were "open". While there were enough students to form two or more classes per grade, er, community, our community did not have a single teacher but a few. So you might have one teacher and learn reading, writing, and then later in the day another teacher would step in for science, math. I believe the two teachers swapped and would teach the other group in Community 5 — the other group getting Math and Science in the early part of the day, English after. And it was described as "open" and I believe that to mean that the two Community 5 classes had no physical wall between them. I don't remember though And, yeah, I know, sounds like trying to watch one movie at a drive-in while another screen is showing something else. I believe though there was perhaps some theory involving osmosis or some-such. I remember clearly, now almost fifty years later, at least two of the science experiments we did in Community 5. They involved experiments with a control group, collecting data (one involving the effects of sunlight on bean plant growth, the other on the temperature preferences of isopods). They had definitely nailed that curriculum. It was also where I was introduced to the Metric System (that Reagan would shitcan some years later). When, a few years back, I went back to Overland Park, Kansas to try and find the school I was sad to see that it had been torn down and a standard rectilinear building in its place. No memory from the front desk staff about its wild history. So sad.
- skavi 1y agoWow, was reading through this with a relatively detached interest and had to reread a few times to overcome the whiplash of you naming the city in which I attended elementary, middle, and high school. If it’s any consolation, the modern Blue Valley school district is still considered excellent [0]. And there are still a few interesting ideas being pursued. The CAPS center [1] had some cool things going on when I graduated in 2018. [0]: https://www.bluevalleyk12.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&ModuleInstanceID=38435&ViewID=7b97f7ed-8e5e-4120-848f-a8b4987d588f&RenderLoc=0&FlexDataID=59104&PageID=34288 https://www.bluevalleyk12.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&M... [1]: https://bvcaps.yourcapsnetwork.org/ https://bvcaps.yourcapsnetwork.org/
- readthenotes1 1y agoFixing the half-arssed effort Sam Johnson is famous for is long overdue. Although we owe him a debt, that unnecessary B in debt is completely ridiculous. The lack of correlation between sound and letter is embarrassing. I wish this would have taken off (Maybe even giving us a gender neutral pronoun?). Sadly, we'll need a dictator like Sejong the Great to make it happen.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago> Maybe even giving us a gender neutral pronoun? We have those. "He/him/his" are gender-neutral pronouns in English. People simply assume they are male-only, but that isn't true.
- AstralStorm 1y agoAmbiguous pronoun/declination is not the same as neutral. We have the same problem in Polish. People will assume the male gender even if it's technically correct.
- bigDinosaur 1y agoCurious what's wrong with 'they'?
- Waterluvian 1y agoYup. “They” has been accepted in major style guides and it’s what I use. It’s at times a bit limiting because there can be ambiguity for singular and plural but overall it’s pretty much a non-issue.
- sheiyei 1y agoImagine having a language with no issues cobbling together significant portions of vocabulary from at least 8 different languages, and then ending up with the same pronoun for plural and singular, in both the 2nd and 3rd persons...
- lehi 1y agoI kept expecting this article about the ITA (Initial Teaching Alphabet, a Latin-based script with new glyphs for spelling words phonetically, now unused) to mention the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet, a Latin-based script with new glyphs for spelling words phonetically, still widely used), but apparently there is no relation?
- marc_abonce 1y agoThe article doesn't explicitly mention the IPA but the illustration with the character set compares each character with its IPA equivalent. Same chart, from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet#/media/File:Initial_Teaching_Alphabet_ITA_chart.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet#/med...
- mousethatroared 1y agoI learned to read in foreigner and soon after moved to an English country at age 6. I was an atrocious speller until I moved back to foreign-land and had to take English class with my schoolmates. Learning how people mispronounce English phonetically fixed most of my spelling.
- leke 1y agoI'm English and an atrocious speller until I started learning Finnish and learned to pronounce the English words phonetically in my head using the Finnish phonetic system.
- sheiyei 1y agoThat's awesome, I'm Finnish but when at school in England I was very quickly one of the best spellers in my class.
- mousethatroared 1y agoI think learning to mispronounced English words is an under appreciated spelling technique.
- xeonmc 1y agoSo this is essentially the equivalent of teaching only hiragana for years and then immediately throw you into the deep end expecting you to suddenly know all the kanjis already, without any transition of gradually accumulating the mapping of morphemes to phonemes. It seems to me that this ITA would have been quite useful had it served an annotative role taught in tandem with canonical spellings to build the morpheme-to-phoneme mapping. Akin to kana rubytext for kanji in books targeted for younger learners that are then elided for adult readers.
- WillAdams 1y agoThere was another version of this where rather than a new alphabet, only the lower half of the letters were changed --- since text is easily read by only having access to the upper half of the letters, that made for a much easier transition.
- eviks 1y ago> The issue isn’t simply whether or not ITA worked – the problem is that no one really knows. For all its scale and ambition, the experiment was never followed by a national longitudinal study. Indeed, another tale of pure waste. How many of the opposite experiments are there? Is there at least 1 perfectly set up non-trivial experiment that added definitive knowledge in this sphere?
- noduerme 1y agoImagine how kids now will feel when they find out that prompting Claude isn't actually coding.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- n1b0m 1y agoI did this at primary skool, not an issue, my spelling is orsum
- senorqa 1y agoITA looks like the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to me. I like that. If all English text was written in this way it'd be really easy to learn (at least for me). It reads like a breeze.
- tigroferoce 1y agoI agree. As an Italian (where you read exactly what you say and you say exactly what you read) it was straightforward to read. I have always wondered why English has so many weird pronunciation exceptions.
- mnw21cam 1y agoBecause we nicked so many words from so many different other languages, and kept (to some extent) their so many different spellings and pronunciations.
- nkoren 1y agoThe standard joke is that English isn't actually a language: it's three languages stacked on top of each other wearing a trench coat, which go around beating up other languages and rifling through their pockets for loose vocabulary and spare grammar. This is funny because it's true. Modern Italian, on the other hand, makes a modicum of sense because it was explicitly constructed during the 19th-century unification of Italy, when somebody had the bright idea that if you wanted to have a nation called "Italy", you should also have a language called "Italian" and it should make a modicum of sense. This is a memo which English has somehow never gotten.
- egypturnash 1y agoThe monkey's paw curls a finger: "Today Donald Trump announced a new initiative to teach all children a new AI-normalized language known as Americish. All English signage will be replaced with Americish."
- Zambyte 1y ago
- Perenti 1y agoI encountered this in 1968. This was at Clarinda State School, in grade 1. The 1A class used ITA, and 1B used proper latin alphabet. My best friend, Steve Irwin (yes, _that_ Steve Irwin. Everyone had to go to school somewhere) was in 1A. Every afternoon after school he'd come to my place and we'd go through our readers for the day. I'd read the English one to him, and he'd memorise it to recite (pretending to read) to his teacher the next day. I assume he was taught properly when he moved to Queensland in 1969. I can't imagine how hard it was for people less bright than Steve. No wonder the scheme trained illiterates.
- sandworm101 1y agoBright, but it sounds like he was also overcompensating. Many celebs, leaders in thier respective fields, get there by being massive good at something. Often they get that good as mental cover for some other self-percieved failure. The drive required to be the absolute best is itself rather unnatural, requiring some sort of trigger. Being a totally friendly extrovert seems a logical cover for poor reading ability.
- Hasnep 1y agoThat's a lot to read into a story about a kid memorising books
- Perenti 1y agoI've taken my time to respond to this. Firstly, that's a big statement about someone you only know from TV. Secondly, he was one of the most functional human beings I've ever met. The reason he was so good at herpetology is because he was raised with dangerous reptiles. The backyard of his home in Botany Circuit was crawling with snakes, crocs and goannas. I rarely played at his place, because it un-nerved me. He was very confident and capable, and understood animal behaviour even at 6yo. I was better at playing with spiders though, no doubt that changed as he grew older.
- InsideOutSanta 1y agoWild. I can read this, no problem, and I can see that it is a clear improvement over standard letters and spelling. Latin letters are (quite literally) a poor match for the English language. They don't match the sounds required to speak English. I'm not sure if this is a valuable teaching tool, but I think it would be conceptually sound as a general replacement for Latin letters for English text. At this point, though, it's impossible to make such a drastic change. It would have global repercussions.
- throw310822 1y agoI think the issue is that, missing a clear correlation between spelling and sound, there's no unique pronunciation for words across countries and accents. Trivial example: data. It's either "dayta" or "dahta". Or privacy- pri-vuh-see or prai-vuh-see. You'd have to choose one.
- noosphr 1y agoWhy? We've managed to live with color and colour without destroying the space time continuum somehow.
- throw310822 1y agoIndeed, but there's not just US and UK. In northern Ireland house is sometimes pronounced "hoyse" (rhymes with choice). Time is "toyme" in Australian. Pen is "pin" in New Zealand. Etc. Speaking of which, it seems that the only case of spelling adapting to pronunciation in English is the commonly used spelling "me" for "my" in Irish dialects.
- ASalazarMX 1y ago> Pen is "pin" in New Zealand. I really want to hear a New Zealander quote "The pen is mightier than the sword".
- lcedp 1y agoI wonder if it's possible to come up with an alphabet where different sound clusters are addressed by individual letters. For instance: 'h𐑬se' and 'aut' - where 𐑬 is read as 'au' in RP, but as 'oy' in NI. The downside is that the said alphabet would have more letters and it won't be always easy to guess the spelling based on pronunciation (still easier than currently in English), but the upside is that one can always read any word correctly in their accent.
- totetsu 1y agoθaŋks fə ʃɛəɹɪŋ ðɪs. ɪts æktʃuəli səˈpɹaɪzɪŋli iːzi tə ɹiːd ðɪs. bət ɪt maɪt biː bɪˈkəz aɪ æm fəˈmɪljə wɪð ði aɪ.piː.eɪ. ɔːlsəʊ ɛlɛlɛmz siːm tə duː ə diːsənt ʤɒb æt aʊtpʊtɪŋ tuː, səʊ ðæt teɪks əˈweɪ ðə dɪfɪkəlti ɪn lɜːnɪŋ tə taɪp əˈɡɛn.
- singularity2001 1y agoaɪ ˈɹɪəli lʌv ðæt əˈpɹoʊt͡ʃ ðɛɹ ɪz ˈivən ə ˈkʌstəm ˌd͡ʒiːpiːˈtiː ðæt dʌz ðə d͡ʒɑb fɔɹ ju ənˈfɔɹtʃənətli ˈnən əv ðə ˈwənz aɪ ˈtɹaɪd ɡɪv jə ˌʌnkənˈdɪʃənəli ɪˈmidiət ˌaɪpiˈeɪ wɪˈðaʊt ɪnˈstɹʌkʃən ænd ˈnən əv ðəm ˈænsɚ ˈkwɛs.tʃənz ɪn ˌaɪpiˈeɪ bəɾ aɪ kən ˈfɪks ðɪs baɪ ˈsɪmpli kɹiˈeɪtɪŋ maɪ ˈoʊn ˌdʒiːpiˈti ðæt ˈdəz ɪɡˈzæktli ðæt https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ipafy/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ipafy/ https://chatgpt.com/g/g-6878bd78e06c8191bcdf6de7a57eac52-ipa-only https://chatgpt.com/g/g-6878bd78e06c8191bcdf6de7a57eac52-ipa... PS: it might take some time to learn the difference between IPA and API but it will be worth it finally we created the spelling reform we've always dreamt about
- kleiba 1y agoI briefly worked as a teacher for comp sci, math, and physics at a local high school. Luckily, I hardly ever had to interact with people higher up in the education hierarchy (DOE) but everytime I did, there was this attitude of "you know nothing about how to teach, we know everything". Like, you have to use tablets in math class these days, what am I thinking suggesting that pen and paper is appropriate?? The more I think about it, I can't help but think that pedagogy is borderline quackery. If you read articles like this (and that's certainly not the only one), you realize pretty quickly that there is little scientific basis and a lot of it is just plain guess work. And it all comes with this air of self-confidence that is really not grounded in reality. And don't get me wrong: I'm not against proposing a learning theory and then verifying or falsifying it empirically. But that's not really what's happening when you force some wild out-there method on a whole generation of students, only to find out years later that, oh, maybe that was all baloney. I mean, besides my foray into teaching I actually worked in academia for most of my career, and everytime you apply for funding for anything that's remotely related to user experiments, you must get ethics clearing, and that's not a joke. I'm amazed that new bogey teaching methods are so easily introduced and made mandatory in our school system with apparently no ethical considerations.
- makeitshine 1y agoHaving taught for about 15 years, your feeling that pedagogy, as taught in most professional development sessions, is quackery, is not wrong. There are so many hucksters writing books and doing seminars.
- Freak_NL 1y agoDon't worry. The pushing of tablets will soon be gone! To be replaced by the pushing of tablets with AI. Because it is inevitable, so they better get used to it in every aspect of their educational career. I wish I could state with certainty that this post is a hyperbolic piece of irony.
- kleiba 1y agoIt's funny - you would think that this new generation of "digital natives" is already so apt with everything IT-related that they could use their tablets like wizards and give additional value to the classroom that even surprises their teacher! In reality, however, >90% of the high school students I encountered were on the level of your grandparents 20 years ago. Like, say, they actually have trouble finding a file again they saved - mostly, because they don't even have a concept of the file system (thanks, mobile OS's!).
- akdor1154 1y agoI wonder if it is included in Unicode? Could the people here claim their native alphabet, taught to them in standard institutions from a western country, is not represented in Unicode?
- junon 1y ago> And many letter combinations contradict one another across different words: think of “through”, “though” and “thought”. I live in Germany now but I'm American. The poem "dearest creature in creation" is always a fun party trick. German is difficult but it's a good reminder that English is, too. If you're a non-native English speaker and you can get this poem even 50% correct you're doing really well. Most Americans (and, I'd imagine, other English native speakers) would also struggle with it. https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem.html https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem....
- Digit-Al 1y agoSoooo long; I got bored about halfway through. There was only one word I was not familiar with though.
- usrbinbash 1y agoThe fact it is so long, underlines the magnitude of the problem. English is one of THE WORST languages when it comes to encoding its phonemes in its alphabet. I am familiar with pretty much every word in that poem. Knowing the word isn't the problem. How these words are correctly PRONOUNCED though, that is the actual issue. And even I got tripped up on some of them.
- dpassens 1y ago> Sir Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand And, apparently, also the inventor of time travel—we know that various forms of shorthand have existed since antiquity.
- Rendello 1y agoI had a shorthand kick and learned about the Tironian Notes shorthand, which last from "1st century BC – 16th century AD". Apparently the ⁊ symbol is still used in Scotland and Ireland today in place of "&". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tironian_notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tironian_notes
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- throw310822 1y agoI always thought the exact opposite would be helpful: don't touch the alphabet but instead teach a fluent phonetic system in which each single letter has a sound and each word can be pronounced exactly as it's written. Remembering the spelling of a word is as easy as remembering its sound in the alternative phonetic system.
- acadapter 1y agoPhonemics is more important than phonetics for these things. Sometimes two sounds need to be represented with the same letter if they are similar and their difference is context-dependent. Then there's also the etymology and handling of grammatical endings. Polish spelling would be more difficult without "rz" for example, despite its two sounds already existing elsewhere in the spelling system.
- gavinray 1y agoHaving a language in which the exact same letter(s) make different sounds only based on context is absurd. Spanish, for example: everything is spelled exactly the way it sounds, a sane design.
- nulbyte 1y agoThe pronunciation of C in Spanish is context dependent. Before I or E, it shares the same sound as S. Before A, O, or U, the same sound as QU. Or how about G? It makes one sound before I or E, another before A, O, UE, or UI, and yet another before UA. Lots of folks think their language is simpler, but it's only because they can follow the rules so well they don't need to actually know them.
- bananaflag 1y agoI think the point is that you can derive the pronunciation from the spelling (though not, arguably, the other way round).
- throw310822 1y ago
- Taikonerd 1y agoIf anyone is interested in the history of spelling reform, I recommend Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell.[0] It's light and fun -- good beach reading, if you're a word nerd. And it does cover the ITA, from the article. One thing I thought was funny: English spelling became more-or-less standardized in the years after the printing press made it to England in 1476. And almost immediately after the spelling was standardized, 15th-century Englishmen started complaining that the new system made no sense. ("Why is there a b in 'debt'?") More than 500 years later, we're still complaining ;-) [0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0063360217/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0063360217/
- navark 1y agoIt's too bad that none of these reforms have succeeded. English has become the Lingua Franca due to the influence of the British Empire and American culture, along with it's ability to incorporate loanwords, but not because of it's spelling. Helping my kids learn how to read struck me by how insane English spelling really is. I recently found out that Theodore Roosevelt had signed an executive order to adopt new spelling rules from the Simplified Spelling Board in 1906, but backtracked when the press began mocking it. If it had been a better organized release it could have succeeded but now it's a cautionary tale. The future timeline extends out forever, if humanity is going to continue to primarily use an English-rooted language we need to make intentional improvements or we will be stuck with increased entropy, see the introduction of emoji's into text for example.
- Taikonerd 1y agoAgreed! It's sort of perverse: the more people speak English, the harder it is to reform it.
- memsom 1y agoWhen I was in school in the 80's, I remember seeing these books stacked up at the back of the classroom. There were other Ladybird books in English standard spelling (they were really common), but these were weird. The teacher just told us to ignore them. But weirdly, the text is really easy to read int he examples given. I never used or even read the ones in my youth, so it must just be easy for my brain to process (disclaimer, I am a speaker of basic Swedish and a little Norwegian, so I am used to reading words with odd spellings and going "oh right, that is X in English.")
- ajb 1y agoIt would be interesting to know more about why it failed. It's not obviously a dumb idea -it's basically Pinyin but for English, and that works very well for Mandarin as far as I know, which has a similar memorisation hump to get over.
- em-bee 1y agoaccording to the wikipedia page about IPA it was connected to phonics and fell out of fashion because in the 70s educational theory turned away from phonics. so it didn't fail on its own but it got canceled out by another mistake.
- rahimnathwani 1y agoIf you want to talk about failed attempts at teaching reading, the best example is in the US: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/lucy-calkins-child-literacy-teaching-methodology/680394/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/lucy-ca... https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/parents-sue-lucy-calkins-fountas-and-pinnell-and-others-over-reading-curricula/2024/12 https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/parents-sue-lucy-ca...
- gwbas1c 1y agoI'm a speed-reader, and I'm able to speed read the images. Some words are harder than others, yet I'm still comprehending faster than I can "speak".
- Taikonerd 1y agoI think the problem with the ITA, or other reform schemes, is that they try to change too much at once. So the new system looks silly and alien to existing speakers, and there's a backlash. If I were reforming English spelling, I'd take a much slower, more incremental approach. Make a simple change like SR1[0], that doesn't change that many words. Smaller change; less backlash. (And even in the worst case, if the reform doesn't take, it's easier for the people who learned it to re-learn "classic English" spelling.) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR1
- npteljes 1y agoI would have loved this growing up! The proposed spellings make so much more sense.
- ASalazarMX 1y agoIt made so much sense, what a great idea. This was literally debugging English.
- tianqi 1y agoThe story told in this article shocked me, even sending shivers down my spine. It was the first time I learned that such things had also occurred in the English-speaking world. China carried out its second round of character simplification in 1977[1], which has left many Chinese people, including my grandmother, unable to read characters normally to this day. They continue to write those weird "second simplified" in their lives. I always believed this to be one of the crime of the Bolsheviks destroying Chinese culture, and I never imagined such a thing could happen in the English-speaking world. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chinese_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chi...
- xenadu02 1y agoWe should consider scale in this scenario. What the Chinese did affected millions of people. This story is about a relative handful of kids. I also find it unfortunate that they bothered with this nonsense. If you're going to do anything just standardize the existing spellings with existing letters. Give long i a standard spelling and be done with it.
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- sergeykish 1y agoEnglish is my third language, first two use phonetic alphabet. Blaming bad spelling on ITA is like German, Spanish speakers blaming own languages. English spelling is a facade. Real English can be seen when sentences written in IPA. Having visual confirmation of sound feels refreshing. ITA "lief ov a fisherman" is neither phonetic nor English. It replaced broken system with another broken system.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]