It's possible that the difficulties of English spelling contribute to dyslexia.

Sometimes I'm sympathetic to the spelling reformers, but they have an almost impossible task ahead of them, and sometimes they're very confused.

Ms Bell says, "Unlike Chinese pictograms, the spellings of English words give us no clue to their meaning."

Yet I was just thinking at the beginning of the article, that 'simplifying' the spelling of 'said' to 'sed' is highly confusing. The correct spelling (as with most words in English) provides a clue to its meaning by incorporating the verb root ['say', with "y becomes i"]. 'Sed' on the other hand calls to mind 'sedate', sedentary, and other relatives of 'sedere' to sit.

It seems peculiar that a polyglot is all for this 'wrong' spelling, when her knowledge of languages makes it easy for her to identify the meaning of new words encountered in reading.

Spelling a word so that it is easily pronounced out loud 'correctly' doesn't get you far in English anyway. There are just too many regional accents.

I find her examples using "o" and "oo" to be confusing, both due to regionalism and to the multiple ways we pronounce these and other vowels.

No easy task!

I haven't watched the video (low bandwidth left this month) but from bethree and Geoff's quotes it seems that there are some daft arguments.
So, Chinese pictograms give an indication of the meaning, do they. I wonder why I can't read Chinese then. If you can work out the meaning just from looking everybody should be able to read it. The truth is that the shape of a Chinese pictogram gives no more hint at its meaning than the shape of an English word.

Geoff also hits on a good point. Let's take the word (used in the article) "you". Who's pronunciation will you use? In my area you would have to spell it "yo" or maybe "yoe". It could be "yu", "yoo", "yer", "yuh".

If you spell it using RP(not sure if that term is used in the US)or using whatever the US equivalent is then you spell it in a way that does not reflect the pronunciation of 90% of the users of the language.

In the current limerick game attention was drawn to different US and UK pronunciations of "coffee". Do we want to adopt separate British, US and Australian spellings for words. Spelling reformers never seem to consider all the implications.

So, Chinese pictograms give an indication of the meaning, do they. I wonder why I can't read Chinese then. If you can work out the meaning just from looking everybody should be able to read it. The truth is that the shape of a Chinese pictogram gives no more hint at its meaning than the shape of an English word.

Well, having studied Chinese and Japanese characters, I can say that many of them are made up of two or more radicals (sub-parts), one of which (usually on the left (or the top) give a rough idea at semantic field, while the other radical (right (or bottom) gives a rough indication of pronunciation. The pictorial nature of almost all the characters is not immediately obvious to the uninitiated viewer, but once you know what you are looking at (i.e., have learned the system) they act as a kind of mnemonic. Those who have not studied Chinese characters, often assume upon hearing that the thousands necessary to read a simple newspaper article are monolithic and must be memorized, but the radicals (of which there are roughly 200 hundred) provide a much simpler set of elements to first memorize.

This is not to say that their system is easy or always logical, just it is not as bad as is often assumed by folks who have not studied it. (Japanese, though it uses less Chinese characters than Chinese, actually has a much tougher writing system, in that characters usually have two or more different pronunciations, and there is no way to tell which one to use from just looking at them, though context helps.)

That having been said, historically Western scholars have had all sorts of peculiar and oftentimes wrong notions about Chinese character systems (which nowadays are called logographic, rather than pictographic).

Let's take the word (used in the article) "you". Who's pronunciation will you use? In my area you would have to spell it "yo" or maybe "yoe". It could be "yu", "yoo", "yer", "yuh".

If you spell it using RP(not sure if that term is used in the US)or using whatever the US equivalent is then you spell it in a way that does not reflect the pronunciation of 90% of the users of the language.

I know we've had this argument before, but here's my take on it again. The only way to represent, scientifically, the sounds of language or dialect is to use the IPA (or its equivalent). Ad hoc systems based on English orthography just won't hack it at all.(I just state this one more time, but believe me, I realize that not everybody who wants to talk about language believes this is necessary, and I have gotten used to it.)

Yes, RP (or received pronunciations), which used to be the preferred register of the prestige dialect in the UK, at least the southern part of it, is known (and has been used on these forums before) by yours truly. Indeed, formerly, a great deal of a person's education was taken up by replaced his or her regional pronunciation of English with RP.

Leaving aside the Black Country dialect(s), and speaking only of the regional accent in roughly the same area, it is not as dire as you make out. A thorough comparison of the vocalic phonemes of the regional accent with those of RP, would note how they differ, but I hazard to guess that the vocalic inventory of the two pronunciations (i.e., the actual number of phonemes) does not differ greatly. That having been said, a more phonemic spelling system (NB, not phonetic as is usually mentioned in these kinds of reforms and articles about them) would be an improvement. That having been said, I will repeat, short of something catastrophic it ain't going to happen.

My point with pictograms is that to the uninitiated reader they are no more representative than words made up of letters. I am aware that they are made up of radicals and that the system is by no means as random and disorganised as it may appear to someone who doesn't read Chinese.

According to Google translate the Chinese for "banana" is 香蕉. I'd hazard that the word "banana" looks a good deal more like the fruit than 香蕉 does. A silly and irrelevant thing to say, I know, but I'm trying to make the point that suggesting the Chinese system is somehow to be used as a justification for reforming English spelling is such a non sequitur of an argument it isn't worth considering. That doesn't mean you can't make valid arguments for spelling reform, just that this isn't one of them.

Re RP and the IPA. We have indeed talked about this before and are, as always, in one hundred percent agreement. IPA is the best way to represent the sound of a word on paper. And if used accurately will represent either the way I pronounce it or the way you pronounce it or the way someone speaking RP pronounces it or the way your dictionary, my dictionary or any other dictionary suggest it should be pronounced. The same word can have different IPA representations in USA English and in UK English. Many dictionaries give both.

Ad-hoc systems by their very arbitrary nature just add another potential level of misunderstanding which is why the IPA should be used. None of this alters the fact that if someone wants to introduce a spelling system based on pronunciation they first have the impossible task of agreeing whose pronunciation is to be used.

Incidentally I have had conversations with native speakers of English from parts of the USA, indeed from parts of the UK, where the vast bulk of the conversation has consisted of each of us trying to repeat the same words over and over with additional explanation because our accents were so radically different that we could hardly understand each other, so I do think the situation can get pretty bad. Only last week I bought some fish in the local supermarket where the assistant, not a local, had to repeat six times the phrase "do you want that in an oven bag" before I managed to sort out what she was saying.)

Yes, Bob, we are pretty much in agreement on Chinese characters, orthographies, and IPA. The arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign and its meaning(s) was one of the things we were discussing down in Linguistics back during our Saussure reading group. He was talking about the mapping between sound and meaning, but there is another rather arbitrary mapping between sound and written representation. To somebody who does not know the Roman alphabet, the word banana is just as incomprehensible, but perhaps less exotic, as the Chinese characters 香蕉 (Mandarin pinyin xiāng jiāo, Cantonese hoeng1 ziu1). (An aside, the first character which means 'sweet smelling, fragrant, aromatic' occurs in the place-name Hong Kong.

The same word can have different IPA representations in USA English and in UK English. Many dictionaries give both.

Yes, because there are two different standards for English that most of these dictionaries are aimed at. (We'll ignore the perfectly valid other standards in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and other Commonwealth states.) A prerequisite for these spelling reforms that usually is tacit in popular articles is that some standard would have to be adopted and that's what would get encoded in the new spelling system. As interesting as I may find some regional English dialect or accent, I do not think that the medium of education would use them. There would have to be a return to some standard if you wanted the spelling reform to hold over a nation-state rather than a region within. Note, I am not advocating replacing dialects or regional accents. As far as I'm concerned folks are perfectly capable of learning a new language or dialect and using it in the appropriate contexts. In fact, if we switched to a more phonemic spelling system, then these dialects could be transcribed in something more rigorous than the usual eye-dialect kinds of "systems".

Perhaps naive of me, but why isn't IPA taught in schools? As you say, Z, it's THE accepted way of representing sounds through writing - although not too good with clicks and gutturals as far as I can tell, but then such sounds aren't common to the Latin alphabet. It would certainly cure the reformers of their malaise.

why isn't IPA taught in schools?

A good question, and I am not really sure, except that most instruction having to do with language in Anglophone countries has completely ignored the past 200 plus years of linguistics. Many foreign ESL students I have met are familiar with it, and it seems to have been part of their education. Maybe Bob can enlighten us.

As I have said before, to learn the subset that is applicable to one's own language is a simple task. To learn the complete IPA and how phonology works was the subject of one 10-week undergraduate course at university. I found it a lot easier than, and in the long run, more useful than chemistry of physics.

Following a request from a couple of students I did a brief session on IPA a few weeks ago. It actually came about because I discovered one student with a sheet that he had copied out from a dictionary showing the dictionary's pronunciation guide. He was using it to transcribe unfamiliar words. A good idea if it had been the IPA but it wasn't, it was a completely arbitrary transcription system that used multiple symbols for the same sound, missed out some sounds altogether, represented in some instances different sounds as being the same and was in general completely useless. I suggested that he throw it away and I'd do a session on the right way to do it. I also suggested he buy a better dictionary.

What I found was that two students had used it before. My sole Chinese student knew it very well, probably as well as I know it, and could quickly and easily identify the correct transcriptions. Unexpectedly the other student who knew it was Eritrean but I found out that before coming to England he had lived in Russia and had learned it there.

Most students found it interesting but how useful it is to them remains to be seen. The only symbols I usually teach are /θ/, /ð/ and /ə/. I only teach the rest of it if requested to do so or, as in this case, if I need to fix some bad habits they have picked up elsewhere.

quote:

Originally posted by BobHale:
I haven't watched the video (low bandwidth left this month) but from bethree and Geoff's quotes it seems that there are some daft arguments.

The comments by bethree5 and Geoff were about the link I posted, not Geoff's link.

Opponents of spelling reform sometimes say strange things too. In the link I posted, Masha Bell, a spelling reformer, and Vivian Cook, a linguist, have a debate about spelling reform. Cook says

quote:

The danger is that if children are encouraged to think of reading as turning letters into sounds and we change spelling to make this easier, they will forever be reading only as fast as they can speak rather than at the reading speed two or three times greater than speech that fluent readers reach. We want children to be able to read and understand what they read, not just to read it aloud.

He seems to be saying that a spelling that has a one-to-one correspondence between sound and letter will prevent children from reading fluently?

The danger is that if children are encouraged to think of reading as turning letters into sounds and we change spelling to make this easier, they will forever be reading only as fast as they can speak rather than at the reading speed two or three times greater than speech that fluent readers reach. We want children to be able to read and understand what they read, not just to read it aloud.

I have my dobuts that the man is a linguist. This is silliness raised to a new level. How is ðə any less a "symbol" than the? He seems to advocate a non-phonemic spelling, more along the lines of a Chinese one to improve reading.

Also in the article he says: i]The languages that people cite as having simple, desirable spellings are almost invariably those that had their writing system standardised very recently, like the Scandinavian languages in the 19th Century. As languages grow old their spelling systems apparently drift away from a straight sound-to-letter relationship.[/i]

Many of the languages in Europe have had multiple systems over the course of their history. Even French which is rather closer to the English "system" in multiple eccentric mappings of letters to sounds had an orthographic reform in the 16th century. Old and Middle English had much better orthographies than does Modern English. The guy is definitely not a historical linguist.

He does mention:

Spelling reform for English based on links between sounds and letters has to relate to a single accent [witness the difficulty with Middle English texts spelled in many dialects]. This disadvantages once again children with non-standard accents, say those who would naturally spell "bath" as "barf". It also cuts accents of English off from each other; a Londoner would not be able to read Geordie, a person from Sydney a letter from someone in Ottawa.

Which I also mentioned in this thread. I have never argued against teaching a national standard, and I reiterate that if the spelling system was phonemic, there would be no great problems to overcome. As simple a thing as marking the stress in a word would be a huge improvement.

This is an interesting discussion that I've very much enjoyed. Before Wordcraft I might have thought a simpler spelling system would be beneficial. However, as was said by many above, the regional accents would prevent that perfection anyway.

As for teaching IPA, I think it would be quite beneficial to English, language, etc., majors, but perhaps too complex for every student...at least before college. I could be wrong though.

The main reason that I don't teach it unless requested to do so is that most of my students have first languages with entirely different orthographies. I believe that it's difficult enough, especially initially, to learn one totally different system without confusing them by teaching them two. I also have many students who are illiterate in their first languages and are, as adults, learning to read for the first time.

I would certainly be in favour of teaching the basics of IPA to all young teenagers even if only to the level where they can decipher the pronunciation guides in a dictionary.

quote:

How is ðə any less a "symbol" than the?

One minor problem might be that the pronunciation and therefore the 'spelling' of the would change depending on whether the word was before a word beginning with a vowel or a consonant. To use ðə would be fine before a consonant but we talk about "thee apple" and so on, although it's the same word.

Sorry, I'm at work and using IE6, so have no access the the 'proper' IPA symbols, although I copy/pasted Zm's some of post, so hopefully part of this post uses the correct symbols.

One minor problem might be that the pronunciation and therefore the 'spelling' of the would change depending on whether the word was before a word beginning with a vowel or a consonant.

I thought of the difference between pronunciations after I posted. There is an unstressed version of the /ðə/ as well as a stressed one /ði:/. There are other words, like the indefinite article, that change pronunciation and spelling, a and an. Then there are words that change pronunciation (mainly which syllable is stressed) like contract (depending on whether it is a noun or a verb. Then there are the homonyms like to, too, and two.

I don't see these as any more problematic with a phonemic spelling than their "solutions" with our unsystematic orthography.

It's slightly annoying that our IS division at work have decided not to upgrade yet from IE6, as that browser has poor support for unicode characters. For instance, the eth symbol (ð ) appears correctly, but the schwa (ə ) shows as a square. Odd, really, as I'd have thought that more use would be made of the schwa.

There are many homonyms in English already; adding words like to, too, and so on shouldn't make much difference...

This message has been edited. Last edited by: arnie,

For instance, the eth symbol (ð ) appears correctly, but the schwa (ə ) shows as a square. Odd, really, as I'd have thought that more use would be made of the schwa.

I think it has more to do with the fact that the eth symbol (ð) was part of the extended (8-bit) ASCII encodings for PCs for many more years than Unicode has been supported. Same goes with accents, grave and acute, and umlauts over the five vowels, but not macrons (macra?) and hačeks (carons).