Spelling reform

[Jonathon]

There are lots of instances where English picked up letters in order to seem more "educated" (read more like French or Latin).

One example, that our Head Word Nerd could explain better than I: debt.

Yup. It was borrowed from the French dette, which traces back to the Vulgar Latin *debita, meaning "something that is owed." Then at some point we slipped a silent b in there to make it look more like the Latin word, even though it's not pronounced like it.

And then there are words that were respelled based on false etymologies rather than real ones:

• island
     
• crumb, thumb, numb
     
• ghost, aghast, ghastly
     
• foreign, sovereign
     
• scythe
     
• ptarmigan
     
• rhyme
     
• ache, anchor

(From the Wikipedia article "Spelling Reform")

[Amilia]

Thank you!  Most interesting.

[pooka]

I bet ptarmigan is not in that list of 200 most commonly used words you mention in the other thread.

Anyone watched Spellbound lately?  It really makes you wonder about the Spelling Bee as a uniquely American pasttime.

[pooka]

King Sejong's simple act of benevolence shook the very foundations of class-conscious Korean society. Early critics dismissed the new writing because they thought that no one could learn to read horizontally. For the next few centuries scholars insisted on using Hanja. The literati not only opposed the new script, they feared it, hated it, and wanted desperately to abolish the onmun, or "vulgar script."

Okay, your assertion that everyone went along easily with it was puzzling to me.  Though, of course, Asians are always so pliant to authority.  [/sarcasm]  

So 500 years later, the South Koreans are still teaching their children 1400 Hanja characters.  

One funny scenario, which could make a good setting for a speculative story, is if Americans go through with spelling reform and only foreigners retain the old ways.  Well, along with maybe England.  Not sure what England and Canada would do.    

Basically, I dread spelling reform because our concept of what sounds vowels make is already so schlagged compared with the other European languages.  If it were an IPA based reform, it would render the teachers and mothers less literate than the children they hope to teach.  If we stick with our shifted vowels, we only make the problem worse.  The only possible good outcome would be a semitic style vowelless system (Dipthongs retain the second vowel/liquid/glide).  But I can only hope such a system would work without emphatic consonants, which I do not understand well in terms of their relationship to the underlying phonemic structure.

And that is the real problem.  Will phonetic spelling reveal or obfuscate the phonomorphology?  I mean, field linguists devise such systems for languages which have never been written all the time.  It's possible, it's just unlikely to be accepted.  

Take the word batel.  Maybe we say it's Bottle or Battle depending on the contest.  But some kid is going to say "Why is there a t in the middle that we don't pronounce?"

I also love that scene in "Driving Miss Daisy" where she's telling the driver how to spell "Bauer".  I'm not sure if she tells him it's just like it sounds, I just know he knows there's an R on the end even though he doesn't pronounce the R and was illiterate.

[Porter]

Okay, your assertion that everyone went along easily with it was puzzling to me.

I said nothing of the sort.  I said that they made it work well, after you said that trying to plan and order language is foolish.

[Jonathon]

Basically, I dread spelling reform because our concept of what sounds vowels make is already so schlagged compared with the other European languages.  If it were an IPA based reform, it would render the teachers and mothers less literate than the children they hope to teach.  If we stick with our shifted vowels, we only make the problem worse.

Exactly. Why adopt a phonetic spelling system if we're going to stick to our horribly incorrect perception of phonetics?

The only possible good outcome would be a semitic style vowelless system (Dipthongs retain the second vowel/liquid/glide).  But I can only hope such a system would work without emphatic consonants, which I do not understand well in terms of their relationship to the underlying phonemic structure.

Honestly, I don't even know how such a system works. The sequence bt could be read a dozen different ways, and context only helps so much.

And that is the real problem.  Will phonetic spelling reveal or obfuscate the phonomorphology?  I mean, field linguists devise such systems for languages which have never been written all the time.  It's possible, it's just unlikely to be accepted. 

I think it would obfuscate it. Consider morphological endings like -s/es for plurals and -d/ed for preterites and past participles. There are three different pronunciations for each (/s/, /z/, and /?z/, and /d/, /t/, and /?d/) , so that would mean three different spellings, which would further obscure the relationships.

Of course, that calls into question the purpose of a spelling system: is it to preserve etymology and underlying relationships, or is it to accurately reflect the pronunciation of the speakers?

[Porter]

Does anybody know anything about Chinese writing?  My understanding is that it can be used with pretty much any language with very little change, as the characters represent ideas, not sounds.

It would be cool if even though you couldn't speak more than one language, you could read (somewhat) a lot of languages.

[Jonathon]

Does anybody know anything about Chinese writing?  My understanding is that it can be used with pretty much any language with very little change, as the characters represent ideas, not sounds.

It would be cool if even though you couldn't speak more than one language, you could read (somewhat) a lot of languages.

As I understand it, Chinese characters contain pronunciation cues, but you don't need to know anything about those to understand the meaning.

The problem is that it wouldn't work well for many languages. Chinese is a highly analytical language (which means that it relies on word order, not word endings, to determine meaning), so its writing system wouldn't work well for inflectional languages (which rely on things like case endings and conjugations to determine meaning).

[Porter]

Is English an inflectional language?

[Jonathon]

Barely. On the spectrum between "highly analytic" and "highly inflectional," we're much closer to the analytic side, though not quite as analytic as Chinese. We still have inflections for plurals, possessives, and verb forms, but we lost our inflections for gender and case. So you could write English in Chinese characters without losing too much, but most other European languages wouldn't work.

[Porter]

Where do Latin or other romantic languages fall in the spectrum?

[Jonathon]

Latin was highly inflectional, but the Romance languages are much less so. Verbs still have numerous conjugations, and nouns still have gender and number but have lost all the case endings.

[Porter]

What's a case ending for a noun?  

[Jonathon]

Case is a system of word endings for nouns and adjectives that indicate the grammatical role of a word. We still have case for pronouns (he is a subject, him is an object[/i], and his is a possessive), but nothing else. Latin had a much more extensive system like this:

• hom? [the] man [as a subject] (e.g. hom? ibi stat the man is standing there)
     
• hominis of [the] man (e.g. n?men hominis est Claudius the name of the man is Claudius)
     
• homin? to [the] man (e.g. homin? donum ded? I gave a present to the man)
     
• hominem [the] man [as a direct object] (e.g. hominem vidi I saw the man)
     
• homine [the] man [in various uses not covered by the above] (e.g. sum altior homine I am taller than the man)

Linky


So you couldn't write something like "hominem vidi" with Chinese characters, because it would come out something like "man see," which is very different in meaning from "I saw the man."