# What about Language reforms? (for foreigners)



## Jigoku no Tenshi

What do you think about reforming your language? so It can be easier to learn not for you but for foreigners, I've seen how Japanese have Katakana, and how it is used for foreign words and you can perfectly start learning japanese using katakana and you can read and write without many problems. Chinese has a simplified system so they can write and read easier as well as foreigners, but what about your own language?

All of the vowel in Spanish are always pronounced just the same way, but consonants not, you can find "C","S","Z" which sound the same or not depending of the location, as well as "B" and "V" which always sound the same, no matter where you are, so Why don't we fuse all those letters in one?, Haven't anyone propose that? 

And what about English, we have vowel sounds, who are just the same but when is written have different letters like "bird" and "word", and what about "blood" and "good" who are written very similar but the sound different, so Why don't we create a new vowel system so I can Identify a vowel sound just seeing it? and stop wondering how is it pronounced? is it like this? is it like that?

I can go on all night with other languages, so Have you ever thought about that? for foreigners? or even for yourselves?

Please If you understand me and you can explain it better, feel free for correcting it


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## Victoria32

Jigoku no Tenshi said:


> What do you think about reforming your language? so It can be easier to learn not for you but for foreigners, I've seen how Japanese have Katakana, and how it is used for foreign words and you can perfectly start learning japanese using katakana and you can read and write without many problems. Chinese has a simplified system so they can write and read easier as well as foreigners, but what about your own language?
> 
> All of the vowel in Spanish are always pronounced just the same way, but consonants not, you can find "C","S","Z" which sound the same or not depending of the location, as well as "B" and "V" which always sound the same, no matter where you are, so Why don't we fuse all those letters in one?, Haven't anyone propose that?
> 
> And what about English, we have vowel sounds, who are just the same but when is written have different letters like "bird" and "word", and what about "blood" and "good" who are written very similar but the sound different, so Why don't we create a new vowel system so I can Identify a vowel sound just seeing it? and stop wondering how is it pronounced? is it like this? is it like that?
> 
> I can go on all night with other languages, so Have you ever thought about that? for foreigners? or even for yourselves?
> 
> Please If you understand me and you can explain it better, feel free for correcting it


There has been a great deal of talk over the years about reforming English spelling - the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw left money in his will for the purpose of advocating this. 
Here are some links. 
http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/spell/histsp.html
and 
http://www.nuspel.org/phonics1c.html
You should find these interesting! 

Vicky


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## Joelline

The Académie Française revised the spelling of many French words a few years ago. They dropped some accent marks, tried to eliminate the hypens in many words (especially those of foreign origin: le week-end became le weekend), etc.  

As Victoria32 mentions, the idea pops up all the time for English.  But, it seems to me that this is a perpetually losing cause.  First, there is no "central authority" governing language use in English-speaking countries (equivalent to the Académie Française)--so who would decide which words to change and how to change them?  And what would happen if one English-speaking country decided to change, but the others did not?  

Often, time and usage modifies words, so, for example, in English, you'll see "night" and "nite" used in advertising and in informal writing.  I would imagine that, eventually, instant messaging will cause additional changes  in spelling!  So there's hope for the future.


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## Lombard Beige

Joelline said:


> First, there is no "central authority" governing language use in English-speaking countries (equivalent to the Académie Française)--so who would decide which words to change and how to change them?  And what would happen if one English-speaking country decided to change, but the others did not?



You are perfectly right.

In some cases the differences between WRITTEN US and UK (or Commonwealth) English are being attenuated and in some they are being accentuated. 

For example, "-ise" and "-ize". The Oxford dictionaries, etc. suggest "-ize", which is in many cases the etymological spelling, while others prefer "-ise", on the French model. 

According to the Wiki article on "International English" the statistical tendency to use "-ise" or "-ize" differs from one country to another. Canada, for instance, usually follows the American (and Oxford model) with "-ize", while Australia  statistically prefers "-ise". 

In the UK itself, I think the situation is changing with an increasing tendency to use "-ise", "to be different from the Yanks". I also think this tendency was encouraged by Microsoft et al. to sell two versions of spelling checkers, although my current programs accept both.

Canadian English spelling checkers seem to me to be the most flexible, as they accept both UK and US variants. I think this is because, in Canada, the government tends to maintain the British connection (I remember a road sign on entering Canada "RailWAY crossing" vs. US "RailROAD crossing"), whereas the business community possibly favors/favours US spelling. 

For international users, I think the situation must be confusing and in Wiki there is a list of the various preferences of the EU, the United Nations, etc.

regards


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## Outsider

Jigoku no Tenshi said:


> What do you think about reforming your language? so It can be easier to learn not for you but for foreigners, I've seen how Japanese have Katakana, and how it is used for foreign words and you can perfectly start learning japanese using katakana and you can read and write without many problems. Chinese has a simplified system so they can write and read easier as well as foreigners, but what about your own language?
> 
> All of the vowel in Spanish are always pronounced just the same way, but consonants not, you can find "C","S","Z" which sound the same or not depending of the location, as well as "B" and "V" which always sound the same, no matter where you are, so Why don't we fuse all those letters in one?, Haven't anyone propose that?
> 
> And what about English, we have vowel sounds, who are just the same but when is written have different letters like "bird" and "word", and what about "blood" and "good" who are written very similar but the sound different, so Why don't we create a new vowel system so I can Identify a vowel sound just seeing it? and stop wondering how is it pronounced? is it like this? is it like that?
> 
> I can go on all night with other languages, so Have you ever thought about that? for foreigners? or even for yourselves?
> 
> Please If you understand me and you can explain it better, feel free for correcting it


My answer to such proposals is "After you..." Reform English spelling first, and then we'll talk. 

There is actually a spelling reform underway for Portuguese (well, on hold is a better term  ). It's primarily meant to make life easier for native speakers, although foreigners were also taken into consideration. Currently, there are two standard orthographies for Portuguese, the Brazilian one and the European one, and this is a nuisance for anyone who wishes to write bilingual dictionaries, or teach/learn Portuguese abroad. Unfortunately, I'm afraid our goverments have not been taking this matter very seriously, of late.


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## sdr083

Norwegian spelling was updated in reforms (of both or only one of the two official orthographies) in 1907, 1917, 1938, (1941), 1986 and 2005.  Not for the sake of foreigners, but to keep a more or less updated and logical link between the spoken language and the written language.  I think that for English (and some other languages) it may be a bit late to do this.  If you reform the English spelling enough for it to actually make sense compared to how other europeans pronounce different letters, you will end up with something radically different from the current English spelling.  Teach this new spelling to a generation and they will lose access to all litterature in "old English".  It is quite easily possible to read really old English litterature in the original version, but try understanding anything of Norwegian a few hundred years ago...  
From a linguistic point of view it may be possible to actually create some kind of logic in the English spelling based on today's pronunciation, but I think it would be very difficult to put into use considering the amount of people who speak English, and all the different countries where it is the official language.


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## Victoria32

sdr083 said:


> I think that for English (and some other languages) it may be a bit late to do this.  If you reform the English spelling enough for it to actually make sense compared to how other europeans pronounce different letters, you will end up with something radically different from the current English spelling.  Teach this new spelling to a generation and they will lose access to all litterature in "old English".  It is quite easily possible to read really old English litterature in the original version, but try understanding anything of Norwegian a few hundred years ago...
> From a linguistic point of view it may be possible to actually create some kind of logic in the English spelling based on today's pronunciation, but I think it would be very difficult to put into use considering the amount of people who speak English, and all the different countries where it is the official language.


I fully concur with you there sdr083... 

VL


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## xarruc

I dont think that you can control it too much. If you try and get people to do things that are unnatural they will refuse. The langauage changes naturally, despite organizations that try and stop this, or to promote change. Many Americanised spellings are now acceptable in English, with one big exception being colour. This is because people are used to reading American and don't necessarily take note of whether it is in British English or not. They write what comes out naturally. The same is true of the spoken language. Many Americanisms have come to the UK through film, but many remain distinctly foreign to us, especially those that are regionalisms within the US, or that seem exaggerated or loud.

To rewrite the rules would be as the attempts in the US referred to above, or like Esperanto, designed I believe to be a new standard language for everybody to learn; good ideas that never took off. 

The truth is that people are change-averse. The Americanisms we have are concentrated in the younger population, as is much slang. To try and reform a lifetime of habit is futile - especially when the benefit is not to us but to others, and not instantly noticeable.

I think that the biggest effects on spelling reform now will be spellcheckers. These set a much stronger standard than a dictionary. Firstly as people don't have to look it up, secondly because correcting it is so easy (right click) and thirdly because it has that annoying red line that says "WRONG" that niggles until corrected. The day Microsoft declares that all Brits have to write thru will be the day the reformists win.

On the other hand, the internet counters this, and forums, especially those anarchistic ones without mods, allow new norms and abbreviations to be created and for slang from all around the world to be shared. Now that internet browsers are incorporating spell checkers, I wonder if it that will change.


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## Pedro y La Torre

English spelling badly needs to be reformed.

There is no sensible reason why labor and labour or tire and tyre should be spelled differently, they are the same words after all. The same seems to the case in almost all spelling differences in English.


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## Outsider

Pedro y La Torre said:


> English spelling badly needs to be reformed.
> 
> There is no sensible reason why labor and labour or tire and tyre should be spelled differently, they are the same words after all. The same seems to the case in almost all spelling differences in English.


I disagree. English is global enough to get by with a largely non-phonetic spelling, and two orthographies (which are not that different, anyway). Other languages do not have this luxury.

Anyway, I kind of like English spelling (mostly). It's full or quirks and intricacies, but also full of history! It's dusty but charming, like an old book.


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## xarruc

> English spelling badly needs to be reformed.
> 
> There is no sensible reason why ...


 
A good, sensible reason is that it's not worth the effort.

To change a few things without changing the rest would be pointless. To change the lot would require a huge upheaval of the system, or is that upheevle ov ver sistum? Whose pronounciation do we use? A Scot's?, A West country Lad's?, a Londoner of Jamaican descent's?, and thats just Britain, or do we all go for our own versions. That's how it was when Shakespeare wrote - write how you like was the rule. 

Maybe we should declare Britain's English the correct English and reset all those pesky yankyisms that have corrupted it since. Or perhaps that quaint old-fashioned stuff is out and the modern, evolved American standard is the way to go.

Will I have to start saying things like I ain't a-fixing? (what does this mean by the way?).


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## ziu

Who would be in charge of such reforms anyway? ...seeing as we don't have an RAE or Académie française-type organization for English. I agree with what xarruc has said:


xarruc said:


> I dont think that you can control it too much. If you try and get people to do things that are unnatural they will refuse. The langauage changes naturally, despite organizations that try and stop this, or to promote change.


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## Pedro y La Torre

Outsider said:


> I disagree. English is global enough to get by with a largely non-phonetic spelling, and two orthographies (which are not that different, anyway). Other languages do not have this luxury.



They're not that different sure. But it seems to make little sense to have two spellings for one word, when you could easily just have one.



Outsider said:


> Anyway, I kind of like English spelling (mostly). It's full or quirks and intricacies, but also full of history! It's dusty but charming, like an old book.



I don't know, English spelling annoys me at times. For instance, the spelling of island. Really it should be spelled Eiland (like German) or Iland but some genius 200+ years ago decided to try and latinize it by putting in an S. There seems to be many of these rather ludicrous spellings in the language.



			
				zarruc said:
			
		

> That's how it was when Shakespeare wrote - write how you like was the rule.



Den shud I b able 2 rite lik dis coz I tink dat it luks gud?


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## ziu

xarruc said:


> Will I have to start saying things like I ain't a-fixing? (what does this mean by the way?).


I ain't a-gonna be ajustizing my riting for no-boy, dude.


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## Outsider

Pedro y La Torre said:


> For instance, the spelling of island. Really it should really be spelled Eiland (like German) or Iland but some genius in 200+ years ago decided to try and latinize it by putting in an S. There seems to be many of these rather ludicrous spellings in the language.


I think there are only a few of those, really. Another one is "debt", if I'm not mistaken. But we can always excuse those away as "Norman influence". 

One thing I find annoying about English spelling is when they borrow a foreign word and then insist on spelling it like the original, even though it's pronounced in a completely different way in English. Like cliché or café (cleeshay, cafay).

Another one is the irrational attachment to Latin plurals (radii, fora). Speak English, man!


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## Jigoku no Tenshi

sdr083 said:


> Norwegian spelling was updated in reforms (of both or only one of the two official orthographies) in 1907, 1917, 1938, (1941), 1986 and 2005. Not for the sake of foreigners, but to keep a more or less updated and logical link between the spoken language and the written language. I think that for English (and some other languages) it may be a bit late to do this. If you reform the English spelling enough for it to actually make sense compared to how other europeans pronounce different letters, you will end up with something radically different from the current English spelling. Teach this new spelling to a generation and they will lose access to all litterature in "old English". It is quite easily possible to read really old English litterature in the original version, but try understanding anything of Norwegian a few hundred years ago...
> From a linguistic point of view it may be possible to actually create some kind of logic in the English spelling based on today's pronunciation, but I think it would be very difficult to put into use considering the amount of people who speak English, and all the different countries where it is the official language.


I agree with you, but I'm based in Japanese, not for using katakana, Kanji disapeared, you can see a movie subtitled in Japanese with kanji and katakana above it just for people who can't understand kanji, but can speak and know the katakana syllables, remenber I'm talking about foreigners, people in their own countries don't have to change all of his languages but they could add something to make things easier for foreigners, if I could I'd write everything with IPA symbols, but just the people who like languages would understand me


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## Venezuelan_sweetie

I must confess I haven't read all the posts, paisano, but I found an interesting (and even viable) suggestion in the largest-running thread we've ever had in this forum (now closed, unfortunately).

Anyway, the suggestion is this --> Language reforms in the European Union.

(Hope you don't hate me afterwards...)


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## ernest_

I read an interesting article by John Wells about this subject, available here:
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/accents_spellingreform.htm


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## Jigoku no Tenshi

Venezuelan_sweetie said:


> I must confess I haven't read all the posts, paisano, but I found an interesting (and even viable) suggestion in the largest-running thread we've ever had in this forum (now closed, unfortunately).
> 
> Anyway, the suggestion is this --> Language reforms in the European Union.
> 
> (Hope you don't hate me afterwards...)


It's really funny, I guess something like that could happen if we start simplifying our languages, can you imagine that in Spanish?, with all the C, and Z, B and V, which in spoken language can alreadyconfuse some words I remember a friend who told me "Me acuerdo cuando tenia 15 años y me iba a cazar", but I understood, "Me acuerdo cuando tenia 15 años y me iba a casar", I freaked out and I thought "¿¡Este se iba casar?!", but after that he told me "si aquellos tiempos, cuando casaba cotejos y pajaritos, con mis amigos", So It could be a mess if we get that level in simplying a language just like your link suggests


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## Venezuelan_sweetie

Well, paisano, I just added that link in order to show that such reforms coming true is rather... erm... difficult? (I'm trying not to use a stronger word, like impossible, absurd, ludicrous..., well I think you get it)

I mean, do you really think countries would be allowing such changes, just for the benefit of others? I pretty much agree with xarruc's words:


> The truth is that people are change-averse. (...) To try and reform a lifetime of habit is futile - *especially when the benefit is not to us but to others, and not instantly noticeable*.


I think someone else mentioned Esperanto, in here. That is a very graphic example, don't you think? I must say that, in my view, those things you suggested are, unfortunately, "just sooo not-happening"...


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## Jigoku no Tenshi

Jigoku no Tenshi said:


> I agree with you, but I'm based in Japanese, not for using katakana, Kanji disapeared, you can see a movie subtitled in Japanese with kanji and katakana above it just for people who can't understand kanji, but can speak and know the katakana syllables, remenber I'm talking about foreigners, people in their own countries don't have to change all of his languages but they could add something to make things easier for foreigners, if I could I'd write everything with IPA symbols, but just the people who like languages would understand me


 


Venezuelan_sweetie said:


> Well, paisano, I just added that link in order to show that such reforms coming true are rather... erm... difficult? (I'm trying not to use a stronger word, like impossible, absurd, ludicrous, well I think you get it)
> 
> I mean, do you really think countries would be allowing such changes, just for the benefit of others? I pretty much agree with xarruc's words:
> 
> I think someone else mentioned Esperanto, in here. That is a very graphic example, don't you think? I must say that, in my view, those things you suggested are, unfortunately, "just sooo not-happening"...


 
I quote myself, and say again, Japanese people did it, they just found a way to make it easier, They still use Kanji, It might be because they were interested in make it easier for foreigners, of course English and Spanish and other languages which are spoken in a lot of countries, I find it hard this to happen, but I'm looking forward to it, As a Spanish speaker I love my language just as it is, but Spanish used to have and in some cases still have "X" pronounced as "J", as in "Mexico", "Oaxaca", "Truxillo", yes The city we call Trujillo, it was spelt "Truxillo" as far as I know, but no one force us to change it, but it happened, so even if it's not for a reform eventually all of our languages will change maybe not in a year or even Century, but sooner or later will change, I'm just a catalyst, I'm kidding, I just want to know if you've heard about it, and what do you think about it


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## ireney

Jigoku no Tenshi the Japanese, from what I understand by what you write use an already existing writing system which, people who already know Japanese can use to understand subtitles. 
If we too had 3 writing systems we could maybe use the one that foreigners found easier in our subtitles. As it is we have one and I see no reason to change it  We could simplify the spelling, true, but I am against that too (will make reading texts prior to the spelling change quite difficult if not impossible and will take us one step further from understanding the etymology and deeper meaning of many words)


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## Jigoku no Tenshi

ireney said:


> Jigoku no Tenshi the Japanese, from what I understand by what you write use an already existing writing system which, people who already know Japanese can use to understand subtitles.
> If we too had 3 writing systems we could maybe use the one that foreigners found easier in our subtitles. As it is we have one and I see no reason to change it  We could simplify the spelling, true, but I am against that too (will make reading texts prior to the spelling change quite difficult if not impossible and will take us one step further from understanding the etymology and deeper meaning of many words)


Well I have to give up, you have a point, katakana wasn't made for foreigners, It was developed a long time ago, before people started learning languages for hobby as I do , That katakana is easier for foreigner, and it is used for foreign words it's something else, it's like learning Spanish with "tu"(you) and not "Usted"(Formal you) because verbs with usted is conjugated in third person, It's easier learn it with "Tu" and use the verb according to the subject, so I have to give up using "Japanese" as an example, but I won't give up in thinking about the future and possible reforms. Thanks for making me remind that


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## Athaulf

Pedro y La Torre said:


> English spelling badly needs to be reformed.
> 
> There is no sensible reason why labor and labour or tire and tyre should be spelled differently, they are the same words after all. The same seems to the case in almost all spelling differences in English.



The problem is that spelling each major variety of English phonetically would necessarily break English into a number of mutually barely comprehensible written languages. Otherwise, a single "phonetic" standard could really be phonetic only for one particular variety. Also, in my opinion, phonetically representing all 25 or so English vowels and diphthongs would require using some alphabet other than Latin. 

Even as it is now, I don't see any great problems with English spelling from a learner's perspective. It's harder than the spelling of most other languages, but it has never been anywhere near the top of the list of my problems with written English.


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## BlueWolf

Athaulf said:


> The problem is that spelling each major variety of English phonetically would necessarily break English into a number of mutually barely comprehensible written languages. Otherwise, a single "phonetic" standard could really be phonetic only for one particular variety. Also, in my opinion, phonetically representing all 25 or so English vowels and diphthongs would require using some alphabet other than Latin.



I don't agree with you. It is possible to create a new system more consistent than the existing one which doesn't simply copy a single dialect. For example, in Italian the letter "z" can be read in two ways, and there's no attempt to use two different letters or digraphs for them, since its pronunciation vary greatly along Italy. Lots of people think that creating new spelling rules means to create a perfect phonemic alphabet (or using the Latin alphabet in that way). That's not true. Italian and Spanish alphabet for example aren't perfectly phonemic (for example in Italian the sound [k] can be written in two ways, depending on the following letter). I see no need to differentiate the two sounds of "th" for example, since a lot of English themself have problem to recognise them. In the same way, the sound [z] doesn't have to be written "z", when in almost all the words is written "s". An intelligent reform would try to make changes the less possible, as happened in many other reforms about other languages.
A reform the most neutral as possible, which doesn't follow a single pronunciation, would be easier for the English people themself than the present one, even if it doesn't perfectly coincide with their own pronunciations.
English isn't a special case. It is possible to write it consistently, it's not the only one to have a lot of dialects and accents.
And above all, the legend that the Latin alphabet isn't big enough to write English in a logic way is a myth. Almost no language that use the Latin alphabet has 5 vowels and 21 consonants.



> Even as it is now, I don't see any great problems with English spelling from a learner's perspective. It's harder than the spelling of most other languages, but it has never been anywhere near the top of the list of my problems with written English.



Well, if you haven't you're lucky. Instead I don't know what the right pronunciation of almost half of the words I could write. And viceversa I sometimes don't remember how writing words I could pronounce, and I have to check my mini-dictionary.


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## panjabigator

I like American English the way it is.  Pronounciations vary from area to area, and since there is no standard ortographical standard who gets a say in how the language should be spelled?

Now with India, I would like some language reforms.  I would honestly like the presence of English to diminish and the strength of regional languages to strengthen.  I mean not to suggest English's complete removal but a perhaps a secondary lesser role.  

I would never support a script change though, no matter HOW popular.


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## Outsider

panjabigator said:


> I would never support a script change though, no matter HOW popular.


You mean, a change into the Roman script?

What about using a common script for Indic languages? It seems each of them has its own script. In a country with so many languages, that can't be very practical...


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## panjabigator

Absolutely. It is not practicle at all. But each culture is so independent that choosing another script one would, in my opinion, would lead to "language-merging" and de-officialization.

If you know one, in my opinion, you can learn others simply (at least for the northern ones). There are about three (Devanagri, Gurumukhi, and Gujarati) which look pretty similar to each other. Bengali and Assamese are nearly identical and aren't an incredible difficulty to learn. The only northern language that is at lest in my eyes "weird" looking is Oriya. The southern ones are all (I believe) divulgent from Tamil.


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## karuna

> Also, in my opinion, phonetically representing all 25 or so English vowels and diphthongs would require using some alphabet other than Latin.


That problem can be easily solved by using diacritics. For example, long vowels could be marked with macron – ā, ī, ū, ō, ē. Such system is already used for Hawaiian names in the USA. Another example is how Vietnamese are able to use Latin alphabet (Tiếng Việt) with easy. So, why not English?


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## winklepicker

Athaulf said:


> The problem is that spelling each major variety of English phonetically would necessarily break English into a number of mutually barely comprehensible written languages...


 
So no change there...  



sdr083 said:


> From a linguistic point of view it may be possible to actually create some kind of logic in the English spelling based on today's pronunciation, but I think it would be very difficult to put into use


 
Also, pronunciation is changing all the time - which explains many of the spelling oddities in English: writing does not keep up with speech*. So you might be able to fix a spelling that represented today's pronunciation - but then you'd have to redo it every few years; that sounds nightmarish.

* One example: in a discussion about what makes the English such bad cricketers the derivation of the Aussie word _pom_ I discovered that pomegranate (one alleged source) used to be pronounced pome-granate, the pome to rhyme with home! I never knew that...


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## Athaulf

BlueWolf said:


> I don't agree with you. It is possible to create a new system more consistent than the existing one which doesn't simply copy a single dialect. For example, in Italian the letter "z" can be read in two ways, and there's no attempt to use two different letters or digraphs for them, since its pronunciation vary greatly along Italy. Lots of people think that creating new spelling rules means to create a perfect phonemic alphabet (or using the Latin alphabet in that way). That's not true. Italian and Spanish alphabet for example aren't perfectly phonemic (for example in Italian the sound [k] can be written in two ways, depending on the following letter). I see no need to differentiate the two sounds of "th" for example, since a lot of English themself have problem to recognise them. In the same way, the sound [z] doesn't have to be written "z", when in almost all the words is written "s". An intelligent reform would try to make changes the less possible, as happened in many other reforms about other languages.
> A reform the most neutral as possible, which doesn't follow a single pronunciation, would be easier for the English people themself than the present one, even if it doesn't perfectly coincide with their own pronunciations.
> English isn't a special case. It is possible to write it consistently, it's not the only one to have a lot of dialects and accents.



In my experience, as soon as you step away from pure phonetic spelling, serious problems emerge  immediately. My native language (Croatian) is written using one of the purest phonetic scripts in the world. However, when it comes to those relatively few cases where the Croatian script is not purely phonetic or where the local dialect has a somewhat different phonology than the standard language, people tend to be horribly lost and make mistakes all the time. Such cases are, for example, the generally inaudible difference between the syllables _ije_ and _je_, the difference between _č_ and _ć_, which is mostly inaudible in the dialects of Northern Croatia, or recognizing when negations should be separated from the verb. 

Despite its near-phonetic alphabet, I see people constantly making mistakes when writing in Croatian due to these few non-phonetic rules. From this experience, I have the impression that some kind of a universal English semi-phonetic script would still present an immense number of problems, so it certainly wouldn't be worth the exorbitant cost of changing the standard. 

Another reason why an English spelling reform would be bad in practice is the issue of words with Latin and Greek roots. These words are nowadays pronounced in English totally differently from the ways speakers of any other European languages pronounce them. Their spelling is the only thing that maintains an important lexical overlap between English and other European languages, which greatly facilitates learning the language in both directions. Most Europeans will immediately recognize what words like, say, _rational _or_ diagnosis _mean; few would recognize them instantly if their spelling were faithful to their pronunciation.

All this is of course pure speculation, since English doesn't even have any formal procedures for standardization that could be used to undertake such a reform, so any proposals are doomed to stay at the level of thought experiments anyway.



> And above all, the legend that the Latin alphabet isn't big enough to write English in a logic way is a myth. Almost no language that use the Latin alphabet has 5 vowels and 21 consonants.


Very few, however, have ~25 vowels like English, and in those that have, this is indeed a problem. In Croatian, for example, there are only five vowels (or six, if you also count the rolled _r_), but each of them can be accented in multiple ways. An accurate representation of the accent, which is both extremely irregular and extremely important if you want to sound right, would require an elaborate scheme beyond the expressive power of the Latin alphabet (unless you really went crazy with various diacritics, but that's in fact a way of substantially expanding the Latin alphabet). The way it is, the accent is simply left unmarked, which creates difficulties almost comparable to the present English spelling for the language learners and less educated native speakers. 



> Well, if you haven't you're lucky. Instead I don't know what the right pronunciation of almost half of the words I could write. And viceversa I sometimes don't remember how writing words I could pronounce, and I have to check my mini-dictionary.


True, I also have the problem of not knowing how exactly to pronounce many words that I've used only in writing so far, although these tend to be the words one never uses in speaking anyway. However, when it comes to writing, figuring out how to spell a word has always been a relatively small problem for me (note that I'm saying "relatively"!). In my experience, mastering English spelling is a piece of cake compared to getting the use of articles and prepositions reasonably right.


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## winklepicker

Outsider said:


> Another one is the irrational attachment to Latin plurals (radii, fora). Speak English, man!


 
Oh yes: I'm looking forward to your forthcoming book on the natural world of Western Iberia, Outsider. I gather you're planning to call it _'The Florums and Faunums of Portugal'_?!


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## ireney

I'm sorry but I have  some considerable difficulty getting in terms with the idea of changing your language in any way so that it will become easier for foreigners.
So, yes, even now, the spelling of pronunciation of some words in English is a game of pin-the-tale-on-the-donkey for me. It's not the only language with spelling "quirks" (after all we have 3 letters and 3 diphthongs for the sound of /i/). And no one forced me to learn English. And while both spelling and pronunciation are a bother when you learn a language, if you ask me they are both the least of a learner's trouble. 

Let's take Chinese for example. Let's suppose they did away with both the traditional and simplified characters and opted to keep only pinyin.  If you think I my tone-deaf humbleness would be able to learn Chinese easier you are mistaken . In fact I prefer to agonise over such "simple" matters as spelling and pronunciation since in the process of doing so I get a better feel for a language.


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## Athaulf

winklepicker said:


> Oh yes: I'm looking forward to your forthcoming book on the natural world of Western Iberia, Outsider. I gather you're planning to call it _'The Florums and Faunums of Portugal'_?!



_ 

Flora _and _fauna _are both Latin nominative singulars of the first declension; their Latin plurals are _florae_ and _faunae_. 

There are indeed Latin plurals in English that can't be replaced by the ordinary English plurals ending in _-s_; for example, using _agendums_ instead of _agenda_ would certainly sound odd. However, such plurals tend to degenerate into English singulars with time; nowadays, few people except classicists perceive _agenda _as a plural, and the others happily construct the English plural _agendas_ out of it.

I very much share Outsider's dislike of Latin plurals in English, although the main reason why I dislike them is that they often lead unsuspecting folks into committing unspeakable linguistic enormities  with nouns that happen to end in _-us_, _-um_, or _-a_, but _aren't_ Latin nouns of the first two declensions.


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## karuna

Athaulf said:


> Another reason why an English spelling reform would be bad in practice is the issue of words with Latin and Greek roots. These words are nowadays pronounced in English totally differently from the ways speakers of any other European languages pronounce them. Their spelling is the only thing that maintains an important lexical overlap between English and other European languages, which greatly facilitates learning the language in both directions. Most Europeans will immediately recognize what words like, say, _rational _or_ diagnosis _mean; few would recognize them instantly if their spelling were faithful to their pronunciation.



But for non-Europeans such similarity to Greek or Latin spelling do not matter. Even for Latvians such recognition based on spelling is dubious, not considerably better than pronunciation. I would say that there are more loanwords from English that are spelled phonetically in Latvian, rather than transcribed from other languages.



> Very few, however, have ~25 vowels like English, and in those that have, this is indeed a problem.



Are there really 25 vowels in English? I think you are including diphtongs that are normally written with two letters anyway. Besides many, if not most, languages that use Latin script implements some kinds of diacritics or accents, so it isn't something extrordinary. Also such combinations as 'th', 'ng' can be used as well. The problem with English is that it is terribly inconsistent. Not that it cannot be learned but IMHO it is not very esthetic. 



> The way it is, the accent is simply left unmarked, which creates difficulties almost comparable to the present English spelling for the language learners and less educated native speakers.



I don't know about Croation but Russian marks accents on words when ambiguous reading is possible. Apart from that, even if you use incorrect accents, people will understand you from the context unambiguously. 

Of course, I don't seriously think that English will change their spelling to phonetic one but it is only because of conservative nature of people, not that there are any technical problems for it. It is simply not possible to change the way the things are done at the present stage of English language.


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## karuna

ireney said:


> Let's take Chinese for example. Let's suppose they did away with both the traditional and simplified characters and opted to keep only pinyin.  If you think I my tone-deaf humbleness would be able to learn Chinese easier you are mistaken . In fact I prefer to agonise over such "simple" matters as spelling and pronunciation since in the process of doing so I get a better feel for a language.



But for Japanese that I am learning at the moment, kanji is a big obstacle however. It is not possible to learn all of them, despite that the spoken language is relatively simple. And my biggest grudge is that all good study materials use full fledged kanji instead of hiragana/katakana or furigana, and for this reason they are inaccessible to me. Apparently the authors of these textbooks assume that a student at first will spend a few years trying to memorize all 3000 kanjis. But what if I just want to learn to speak and understand spoken language?


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## Athaulf

karuna said:


> But for non-Europeans such similarity to Greek or Latin spelling do not matter. Even for Latvians such recognition based on spelling is dubious, not considerably better than pronunciation.



However, I would bet that for a speaker of a non-European language, everything in English will be so hard to learn that spelling won't be even near the top of the list of his greatest problems. This holds to a large degree even for the speakers of many European languages. I was still having major problems with many intricacies of the English grammar and phraseology long after I had become quite comfortable with the spelling. Some of them are still giving me lots of trouble, even though I barely make any spelling errors these days except for typos. In my opinion, the relative difficulty and importance of spelling from the perspective of a language learner is usually highly overrated. Its contribution to the overall difficulty of English is kind of like the contribution of a desktop computer to the electric bill of a household with an electric stove and heating system, at least in my experience.

I'm however surprised that you say that it's not much easier for Latvians to recognize the Latin words in English in their written form. It certainly was much easier for me with my Croatian background. To take my previous example, when I first saw the adjective _rational_ in writing, I could immediately connect it to its Croatian equivalent _racionalan_, whereas its pronunciation sounds to me like something that would be written _rešonl_ or _rešunl_ in Croatian, without any obvious connection to the equivalent Croatian word. It was very similar with most of the other Latin and Greek words in English I've ever encountered. There are even more extreme examples. _Ultimatum_ is written identically in Croatian and English, but its English pronunciation sounds like a word that would be spelled _altimejtm_ in Croatian.



> The problem with English is that it is terribly inconsistent. Not that it cannot be learned but IMHO it is not very esthetic.


On the other hand, I consider the present English spelling as quite pleasing aesthetically -- certainly infinitely more pleasing than a phonetic script would be. But this is of course a matter of taste.


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## Lombard Beige

xarruc said:


> ... Many Americanised spellings are now acceptable in English, with one big exception being colour. ...
> 
> I think that the biggest effects on spelling reform now will be spellcheckers. These set a much stronger standard than a dictionary. Firstly as people don't have to look it up, secondly because correcting it is so easy (right click) and thirdly because it has that annoying red line that says "WRONG" that niggles until corrected. The day Microsoft declares that all Brits have to write thru will be the day the reformists win." ...



Well, personally I've had trouble with "-ise" and "-ize". I do a lot of work for a French-language university and, as the English-language texts are intended for a world-wide audience, I opted for the UK spelling that is least divergent from US  (i.e. Canadian, also because of my personal experience). However, the person in charge (or Editor in Chief, let's call him John Bull) is an English guy who wants nothing to do with "Yanks" ""We invented the language"). So he insists on "-ise", "-isation", etc., notwithstanding the Oxford dictionary, etc.

Re spellcheckers, on my Windows 98 version of word, the UK spellchecker insisted on "-ise", so to use either I had to select "Canadian". On my current version, the UK English spellchecker has become "Canadian". In other words, I can now write as I please. But, to keep Mr. JB happy, I have to do a search and replace of "-ize". All these things are sent to try us. 

Following up this topic I discovered a couple of things:


1) "-ise" does have the internal advantage of avoiding one set of words (of French origin, etc.)  with "-ise" (advertise, etc.) and another with "-ize" (organize, etc.), but it creates an unnecessary visual difference with North American English  


2) American spelling was inspired by Noah Webster  ("American Spelling Book", 1783, and "American Dictionary of the English Language", 1828). However, Webster saw himself as a REFORMER of the WRITTEN ENGLISH language as a whole, not just American. 

Webster originally proposed: public, favor, *nabor/neighbour, *hed/head, *proov/prove, *flem/phlegm, *hiz/his, *giv/give, *det/debt, *ruf/rough, *wel/well
Nobody accepted the spellings marked with *
The Americans alone adopted "favor" for "favour", and both British and Americans adopted "public" instead of "publick".

The main Webster reforms adopted in America were:
- -or for -our : favor vs favour
- -er for -re : center vs centre
- "traveler" vs "traveller", etc.
- -s- for -c- : defense vs defence
- a number of simplifications: ax/axe, catalog/catalogue, check/cheque, jail/gaol, +mask/masque, +program/programme, +story/storey

I appreciate that for people used to UK English "traveler's check" is "a bit much",but would even John Bull today use "gaol"? 
Also, the words marked + are used in UK English with two different meanings, e.g. "A development programme including the installation of a number of computer programs". Similarly, the use of "meter" (= counter) and "metre" (= unit of measurement) avoids some ambiguity.

Hoping this information is useful to somebody.

regards


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## karuna

Athaulf said:


> I'm however surprised that you say that it's not much easier for Latvians to recognize the Latin words in English in their written form.



Most words with Latin or Greek origins are used only in science. We don't really use such word as _racionāls _in the same meaning as the English word_rational__, _except in Mathematics_. _This is a false friend where similarity is only misleading. Scientists may applaud such similarities but then they are often the ones who are later unable to speak in their native language without unnecessarily using too many foreign words. 

For me the English spelling was a big psychological obstacle in learning until one day I found a good dictionary with a wonderful two-page pronunciation guide. It explained that English spelling is actually very phonetic (in 99% of cases), except that there are 3 or more systems merged together but the rules are not that complicated and reading can be easily learned. Spelling is more tricky but little reforms now and then like Americans have been doing is probably a way to go to systematize the language.


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## xarruc

Re Lombard B's post.

The -ise -ize distinction is an editor's choice to go with one or the other. As should the -ologue vs. -olog. My company chooses AE. Even then it's mixed: we -ize everything yet -ologue

Some people do dig their heals in regarding the BE/AE distinction, others are hardly aware of any differences. In some part it's national pride in another simply habbit, in yet others an aesthetic choice: Personally I prefer -ise to -ize but edema to oedema (diahorrea, hematology etc.). I tend to lean towards British as I'm used to it and have a very little bit of national pride left somewhere (esp. against the yanks!), yet am paid to write in AE and don't suffer unduly for it. (Thanks to a spellchecker). The only real change that particularly grates is that I can't use my beloved whilsts and amongsts, and have to put while and among, respectively.


Below is my opinion on what an average Englishman might consider of your BE/AE examples in informal writing.



> - -or for -our : favor vs favour Englishman would probably note as wrong.
> - -er for -re : center vs centre Englishman would consider wrong
> - "traveler" vs "traveller", etc. Englishman may well not even notice.
> - -s- for -c- : defense vs defence Englishman would recall a difference and scramble for the dictionary to check
> ax/axe, Englisman would consider wrong,
> catalog/catalogue, Englisman may not notice
> check/cheque, Englishman would probably note as wrong.
> jail/gaol, Englisman would consider gaol as the old-fashioned spelling and change it to jail.
> +mask/masque, As above
> +program/programme, Englishman would scramble for dictionary to check the difference.
> +story/storey Englishman would probably note as wrong.


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## winklepicker

Athaulf said:


> _Flora _and _fauna _are both Latin nominative singulars of the first declension; their Latin plurals are _florae_ and _faunae_.


 
I collapse, chastened. My Latin teacher must be turning in his grave: this is probably a phenomena that occurs regularly. He had a criteria for success which I have failed to reach. It's the media which is affecting me.


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## Lombard Beige

Re Center vs Centre

Has anybody seen the TV show "Centre Street"?
The action revolves around the night court in New York, at 100 Centre Street.
This spelling must have been retained from the early days of NYC.

Subjectively, "centre" and "catalogue" do seem more "classy" and sophisticated.

regards


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## Pedro y La Torre

Athaulf said:


> The problem is that spelling each major variety of English phonetically would necessarily break English into a number of mutually barely comprehensible written languages. Otherwise, a single "phonetic" standard could really be phonetic only for one particular variety. Also, in my opinion, phonetically representing all 25 or so English vowels and diphthongs would require using some alphabet other than Latin.
> 
> Even as it is now, I don't see any great problems with English spelling from a learner's perspective. It's harder than the spelling of most other languages, but it has never been anywhere near the top of the list of my problems with written English.



Never mind phonetics. Just settle on one spelling for a word and use it. That's my view.

For instance, even in America there are differences! I've often seen theater spelled theatre and canceled spelled cancelled.

Why not just settle on a standard version and have it like that for everyone. It really would make things so much easier.


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## Outsider

Athaulf said:


> I very much share Outsider's dislike of Latin plurals in English, although the main reason why I dislike them is that they often lead unsuspecting folks into committing unspeakable linguistic enormities  with nouns that happen to end in _-us_, _-um_, or _-a_, but _aren't_ Latin nouns of the first two declensions.


Or even to nouns that are Latin, but are incorrectly declined, such as _alga_ --> _algi_ _algae_



Athaulf said:


> In my experience, as soon as you step away from pure phonetic spelling, serious problems emerge  immediately. My native language (Croatian) is written using one of the purest phonetic scripts in the world. However, when it comes to those relatively few cases where the Croatian script is not purely phonetic or where the local dialect has a somewhat different phonology than the standard language, people tend to be horribly lost and make mistakes all the time. Such cases are, for example, the generally inaudible difference between the syllables _ije_ and _je_, the difference between _?_ and _?_, which is mostly inaudible in the dialects of Northern Croatia, or recognizing when negations should be separated from the verb.
> 
> Despite its near-phonetic alphabet, I see people constantly making mistakes when writing in Croatian due to these few non-phonetic rules. From this experience, I have the impression that some kind of a universal English semi-phonetic script would still present an immense number of problems, so it certainly wouldn't be worth the exorbitant cost of changing the standard.


This is very interesting, because I think we have very similar opinions on the current topic, but here we part. 

I think it's a matter of perspective and background. Because your native language has a largely phonetic script and in the few cases where it isn't quite phonetic people make lots of mistakes, you conclude that the same would happen in any other language.

Did it never occur to you that perhaps it's because Croation speakers are so used to phonetic spelling that they get lost the moment the strict connection to pronunciation is lost?... 

What BlueWolf was suggesting for English is a good description of the orthography of Portuguese. It's not terribly phonetic, but we manage. In fact, I would say that BlueWolf's suggestion is what English orthography already _is_; and English speakers manage, too.



Lombard Beige said:


> I appreciate that for people used to UK English "traveler's check" is "a bit much",but would even John Bull today use "gaol"?


I do believe he would. 

"Gaol" is one of my pet hates in English spelling. What was the guy who came up with that one smoking?...


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## ireney

karuna said:


> But for Japanese that I am learning at the moment, kanji is a big obstacle however. It is not possible to learn all of them, despite that the spoken language is relatively simple. And my biggest grudge is that all good study materials use full fledged kanji instead of hiragana/katakana or furigana, and for this reason they are inaccessible to me. Apparently the authors of these textbooks assume that a student at first will spend a few years trying to memorize all 3000 kanjis. But what if I just want to learn to speak and understand spoken language?



Look, I'm not saying it isn't. And to my simple mind, an alphabet of the European kind is much more preferable (what did you expect? That's the one I feel comfortable with  ) BUT Japanese (to take your example) know about the European methods of noting words and still use theirs. And it works for them. Now when I learn a language I do it because I also want to get to know the culture, the mind set, the works (as much as I can as an outsider not living there and all). It is I who must try to understand them. Since it works for them, I must make the effort. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I want to have to make the effort.


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## Lombard Beige

Re Japanese:

Does "Romanized" Japanese work? 

As far as I know, Romanized Chinese really means Romanized Mandarin (or Cantonese, etc.). So the advantage of the pan-Chinese script is lost (people speaking different but related languages understand each other). 

But, as in the case of Turkish, I assume Romanized Japanese (or Korean) would work. (I'm not suggesting they should, but only that they could).

regards


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## karuna

Lombard Beige said:


> Re Japanese:
> 
> Does "Romanized" Japanese work?
> 
> As far as I know, Romanized Chinese really means Romanized Mandarin (or Cantonese, etc.). So the advantage of the pan-Chinese script is lost (people speaking different but related languages understand each other).
> 
> But, as in the case of Turkish, I assume Romanized Japanese (or Korean) would work. (I'm not suggesting they should, but only that they could).



It all depends what we mean by _it works. _The unification of Chinese is done at the great expense of subduing personal creativity and expresivity. In this aspect the Chinese writting *doesn't work *and they would be doing much better if they recognised that these so-called dialects are really different languages and employed more translators for communication and/or learned them as foreign languages when necessary. 

As for Japanese, it already has two phonetic alphabets – hiragana and katakana – that are used for children books, so Romanized Japanese is not necessary.


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## Pedro y La Torre

Lombard Beige said:
			
		

> I appreciate that for people used to UK English "traveler's check" is "a bit much",but would even John Bull today use "gaol"?



No, "gaol" fell out of use many years ago. The only time one would see it now is in old novels.

I don't see what's so bad about traveler's check, even though I would say "traveller's cheque" looks better as a spelling, but really it's one and the same.


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## BlueWolf

Athaulf said:


> Despite its near-phonetic alphabet, I see people constantly making mistakes when writing in Croatian due to these few non-phonetic rules. From this experience, I have the impression that some kind of a universal English semi-phonetic script would still present an immense number of problems, so it certainly wouldn't be worth the exorbitant cost of changing the standard.



Every script is difficult to master, because they are based on conventions. However English children spend three years to reach the same level reached by other Europeans in one. I think it _would_ be worth.



> Another reason why an English spelling reform would be bad in practice is the issue of words with Latin and Greek roots. These words are nowadays pronounced in English totally differently from the ways speakers of any other European languages pronounce them. Their spelling is the only thing that maintains an important lexical overlap between English and other European languages, which greatly facilitates learning the language in both directions. Most Europeans will immediately recognize what words like, say, _rational _or_ diagnosis _mean; few would recognize them instantly if their spelling were faithful to their pronunciation.


Is it usefull that the word _island_ is spelled with the Latin root, but when you pronunce it almost half of the non-native speakers think that the s is to be pronounced? Moreover an intelligent reform can keep these similarities. It's easy to immagine, for example, a rule that says "The sound [s] is to be written "sh", unless before an [(schwa)n]". In this way you can keep all the -tion endings. A reform doesn't have to change all the words, it only has to change the words spelled illogically.



> All this is of course pure speculation, since English doesn't even have any formal procedures for standardization that could be used to undertake such a reform, so any proposals are doomed to stay at the level of thought experiments anyway.


This is true, but the true problem is that people don't want to change. If they wanted, this problem can be easily outdone.



> Very few, however, have ~25 vowels like English, and in those that have, this is indeed a problem.


I agree with the karuna's answer.



> In my experience, mastering English spelling is a piece of cake compared to getting the use of articles and prepositions reasonably right.



Yeah, but two and one are three. Why do we accept three, if we can have two as difficulty. Moreover this is a problem for the English generations too, not just for the foreign lerners.


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## karuna

Let's count how many vowels the standard Latvian has: a, ā, i, ī, u, ū, e, ē, e (open), ē (open), o, ō. Diphtongs: ai, au, ei, ie, oi, ui, iu, o [uo], ou, eu. So, it is 12 vowels and 10 diphtongs. Not as many as English but still enough and they can be easily written in Latin script. 

In fact, before Latvian was written in Ghotic script that was inadequate and often you had to guess the correct pronunciation like in English. Therefore the writting system was reformed and was changed to Latin script with macrons for long vowels. Latin script is actually quite suitable for using diacritics on top of vowels. Besides macron (ā) it is possible to use marks like à, á, â, ã, ä, å, ă, etc. I don't know for all languages but it seems that almost every language that uses Latin script has one or two from this list.

Even many textbooks of Latin nowadays use macrons (ā, ī, ū...). So, there is no place for excuse that only original Latin alphabet without diacritics can be accepted.


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## agliagli

As it has already been mentioned before, Japanese language did not choose to have three writing systems to make it easier for the foreigners to learn it  : 

1) *the kanji* (汉子or 漢子 _hanzi_ in Chinese) were borrowed from the Chinese translations of sutras when Buddhism was flourishing in China.
2) *the hiragana* developed thanks to some noble women, who were unable to write in kanjis.
3) *katakana* was a necessity, since it enabled to transcribe foreign words such as "check-out" (cheku-auto); "tomato"...

This is part of their tradition, and I do not think that all the three systems of writing will merge into one at the moment. But it would be better to ask a Japanese person on the subject. The hiragana system is not limited to children literature. They also play on the specificity of their language with poetry such as tanka or haiku (I can't remember which form of poetry), the rule of which is to avoid using Chinese character in order to express the essence of something (feeling, etc.) that speak directly to the senses.




karuna said:


> It all depends what we mean by _it works. _The unification of Chinese is done at the great expense of subduing personal creativity and expresivity.


 
I am not sure that I get your point. Do you mean that it has been done recently? Or do you refer to the Qin dynasty? I am not sure I follow...



karuna said:


> In this aspect the Chinese writing *doesn't work *and they would be doing much better if they recognised that these so-called dialects are really different languages and employed more translators for communication and/or learned them as foreign languages when necessary.


 
But, what about the writing system of the dialects? Do you mean that a new writing system should be created for the transcription of the dialects? This has been done in Hong Kong for instance... and it would be better to ask them what they think of it. And this has also been done for some ethnic minorities, but unfortunately failed...


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## mplsray

BlueWolf said:


> Is it usefull that the word _island_ is spelled with the Latin root, but when you pronunce it almost half of the non-native speakers think that the s is to be pronounced?


 
_Island_ is not related to the Latin word _insula._ Its spelling was changed by etymological respellers who had an erroneous belief about the history of the word—a bit like the change which led to the _u_ in _avoirdupois,_ which, from an etymological point of view, should be an _e,_ but which was changed, as the OED puts it, by an "ignorant improver."

The _i_ in _island_ (formerly _iland_) is related to, although not descended from, the Latin word _agua._


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## Athaulf

karuna said:


> Most words with Latin or Greek origins are used only in science. We don't really use such word as _racionāls _in the same meaning as the English word_rational__, _except in Mathematics_. _This is a false friend where similarity is only misleading. Scientists may applaud such similarities but then they are often the ones who are later unable to speak in their native language without unnecessarily using too many foreign words.



Yes, I see what you mean. Some Latinisms have indeed crept from English into Croatian this way (although most of them have the same form as if they were imported directly from Latin, so they don't look like Anglicisms at all). But many Latinisms shared with English, probably the majority of them, have traditionally been used in Croatian even in non-technical contexts. 



> For me the English spelling was a big psychological obstacle in learning until one day I found a good dictionary with a wonderful two-page pronunciation guide. It explained that English spelling is actually very phonetic (in 99% of cases), except that there are 3 or more systems merged together but the rules are not that complicated and reading can be easily learned. Spelling is more tricky but little reforms now and then like Americans have been doing is probably a way to go to systematize the language.


Yes, pronunciation is indeed relatively easy once you realize the existence of several parallel systems, although the problem is that it's usually impossible to figure out which system to use from the word itself (e.g. the ever random pronunciation of _ea_, as in _speak_/_steak_/_steady_), and the occasional wild exceptions are pretty frustrating. 

But the other way around, the situation is infinitely worse and, in my opinion, hopelessly outside the reach of any reform. The problem is that the most common everyday words are the worst offenders in this regard, and their spelling is the most entrenched and difficult to change in practice. Even if English had an equivalent of Academia Real, I would still find it hard to imagine a reform that would reconcile the spelling of _stuff_ and _tough_ or _shake_ and _break_ and the infinity of similar examples.

But to vent my principal frustration once more, these are all trivialities compared to the difficulty of figuring out English articles.


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## Athaulf

BlueWolf said:


> Every script is difficult to master, because they are based on conventions. However English children spend three years to reach the same level reached by other Europeans in one. I think it _would_ be worth.



On the other hand, I view it from the perspective of adults: does the English spelling make an average English speaker significantly more prone to misunderstandings and embarrassing mistakes, and does it make English significantly more difficult to learn as a foreign language? I don't think the answer to either question is a decisive "yes." In any language, regardless of the simplicity of its spelling, one's writing will immediately show one's level  of education and writing skills; there is far more to good language than good spelling. And spelling, hard as it is, is still a relatively minor item on the overall list of difficulties that foreigners face when learning English. (Of course, this is my personal subjective judgment, but I've also observed it with many other people from different backgrounds.)

As for the school kids, spelling indeed makes their lives more difficult. But frankly, I'd say that at the age at which spelling is learned, they don't have anything better to do anyway. When I was in elementary school in Bosnia, I had to learn two different writing systems in the first two grades (Cyrillic and Latin). I didn't notice that this doubling of the effort with regards to spelling ever interfered with the the other aspects of our learning. 



> Is it usefull that the word _island_ is spelled with the Latin root, but when you pronunce it almost half of the non-native speakers think that the s is to be pronounced? Moreover an intelligent reform can keep these similarities. It's easy to immagine, for example, a rule that says "The sound [s] is to be written "sh", unless before an [(schwa)n]". In this way you can keep all the -tion endings. A reform doesn't have to change all the words, it only has to change the words spelled illogically.


But as I've noted above, the words that are spelled most illogically are exactly the most frequent and most entrenched ones in everyday use. Changing their spelling would be immensely hard in practice even if all other circumstances were much more favorable for a reform.


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## Athaulf

Pedro y La Torre said:


> Never mind phonetics. Just settle on one spelling for a word and use it. That's my view.
> 
> For instance, even in America there are differences! I've often seen theater spelled theatre and canceled spelled cancelled.
> 
> Why not just settle on a standard version and have it like that for everyone. It really would make things so much easier.



Interestingly, my Canadian spelling checker is underlining the latter parts of both your examples, even though I've seen other spelling checkers set on "English (Canada)" that would judge them quite differently. Talk about confusion. 

But in my experience, such differences are overall so minor and few in number that they don't create any significant problems in practice.


----------



## Lombard Beige

Talking about the difficulty of learning English spelling, I read somewhere that somewhere in the US (including Puerto Rico), possibly New Mexico, or Miami, or somewhere, where bilingual children learn to read in both English and Spanish at that same time, they learn to read and write in Spanish faster. This includes so-called "Anglo" children who attend these schools. Does anyone else know anything about this, or was I dreaming?

regards


----------



## ireney

A note: Minorities are not foreigners.


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## cuchuflete

Politically correct people, take note: You may be offended by the following, and that will not be accidental.

The PC crowd likes to talk about "diversity" as a noble condition or objective.  What could be more diverse that the way different cultures have evolved, with their multitude of distinct grammars, orthographies, and writing systems?   The notion of homogenizing these for the convenience of lazy foreign learners of a language is therefore offensive to the entire idea of diversity.  

Yesterday's news reports included a brief BBC article about the consequences of such homogenization on rural Romanian sheep farmers.  It seems that the politically kerrect burrrocrats in Brussels want all cheeses to be made by the same sanitary methods, in stainless steel vats.  Some village people in Romania have been using wooden casks of brine for hundreds of years.  The "one size fits all" approach will kill the diversity of cheese flavors, just as a movement to make languages look alike, spell alike, etc., will trample on the cultural diversity of languages.  

Pass the Esperanto, please.   Hmmmmm....flavorless.


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## emma42

I could not agree more, cuchuflete.


----------



## agliagli

cuchuflete said:


> The notion of homogenizing these for the convenience of lazy foreign learners of a language is therefore offensive to the entire idea of diversity.


 
Thank you Cuchuflete.  



cuchuflete said:


> The "one size fits all" approach will kill the diversity of cheese flavors, just as a movement to make languages look alike, spell alike, etc., will trample on the cultural diversity of languages.
> 
> Pass the Esperanto, please. Hmmmmm....flavorless.


 
However, I think a "national standard" is necessary to allow people of in same "nation" to understand each other (I hope I will not offend anybody... ), at least, as a practical tool... for example, if we were a group of medical doctors who gather to discuss some crucial issues on that or that illness and each doctor was talking his or her specific jargon (which sometimes really happens... ) there would be some serious communication problems, and it would take ages before comming up with a good medical response. Now, if we were state rulers who want to communicate something to the people of a big country, how much time would it take to say it in 100 languages and dialects?

Off-topic: I've been told that Bush English was not English at all...


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## Lombard Beige

emma42 said:


> I could not agree more, cuchuflete.



So do I re the diversity of languages and, above all, cheeses, but I think that some simplification and convergence (or alternatively tolerance of different standards) would be helpful to everyone, not just foreign learners, in English, above all taking into account the present role of English as a lingua franca. 

I think the Scots language (cf. the Wikipedia in Scots) provides a good model for a strictly local version of English.   

regards


----------



## uchi.m

Jigoku no Tenshi said:


> I agree with you, but I'm based in Japanese, not for using katakana, Kanji disapeared, you can see a movie subtitled in Japanese with kanji and katakana above it just for people who can't understand kanji, but can speak and know the katakana syllables, remenber I'm talking about foreigners, people in their own countries don't have to change all of his languages but they could add something to make things easier for foreigners, if I could I'd write everything with IPA symbols, but just the people who like languages would understand me



The Japanese Katakana was not at first designed to represent foreign words as it is the common usage nowadays. Before the World Wars, it was rather used mixed up with Hiragana where one would nowadays employ only Hiragana, such as on particle usage or Okurigana.

I think that language reforming is essential to establish some kind of logic and reduce redudancies in the target language, but not necessarily aiming at the difficulties of foreigners, specially because not all foreigners would struggle at the same pitfalls of a language.


----------



## BlueWolf

Athaulf said:


> On the other hand, I view it from the perspective of adults: does the English spelling make an average English speaker significantly more prone to misunderstandings and embarrassing mistakes, and does it make English significantly more difficult to learn as a foreign language? I don't think the answer to either question is a decisive "yes." In any language, regardless of the simplicity of its spelling, one's writing will immediately show one's level  of education and writing skills; there is far more to good language than good spelling.



I think it is a decisive "yes", and I really don't see why it shouldn't be. In a language with consistent spelling rules, it's easier to write. Period. If we have to keep an illogical system because it doesn't resolve all the problems of the world, we'll never go so far in life.



> And spelling, hard as it is, is still a relatively minor item on the overall list of difficulties that foreigners face when learning English. (Of course, this is my personal subjective judgment, but I've also observed it with many other people from different backgrounds.)


I can assure you that it is, especially if you natively speak a language with a consistent one. And, as I said before, this is not just a problem for learners, but natives themself. They need three time the time other ones need to learn to write in their own language, and moreover this cause a higher level of illiteracy. It is a problem of English people, not of the foreign lerners, who, after all, probably use English for a little part of their lives.



> As for the school kids, spelling indeed makes their lives more difficult. But frankly, I'd say that at the age at which spelling is learned, they don't have anything better to do anyway.


When English children of my age were still learning to write, I and my class started grammar.



> But as I've noted above, the words that are spelled most illogically are exactly the most frequent and most entrenched ones in everyday use. Changing their spelling would be immensely hard in practice even if all other circumstances were much more favorable for a reform.


Sweden changed its driving direction, and English world can't change its spelling rules? 
The world imitated the English world in many things. If English world isn't able to imitate the rest of the world in the things it's better, it'll only be damage for the English world.


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## Kajjo

cuchuflete said:


> What could be more diverse that the way different cultures have evolved, with their multitude of distinct grammars, orthographies, and writing systems?   The notion of homogenizing these for the convenience of lazy foreign learners of a language is therefore offensive to the entire idea of diversity.


I completely agree.

Further, I am strictly opposed to reforms, because they are always carried out by a however formed committes representing only a minority of speakers and most certainly will neither fit the feelings nor requirements of the people involved. We had such reform in Germany and it is a pure catastrophe in every regard: Rationally, emotionally and linguistcally bad executed by a committee of so-called language experts.

Language does change, live, evolve. By itself, by usage, by necessity. Slowly.

Language should not be changed by committes in drastic, rapid steps.

Kajjo


----------



## Pedro y La Torre

BlueWolf said:


> Is it usefull that the word _island_ is spelled with the Latin root, but when you pronunce it almost half of the non-native speakers think that the s is to be pronounced?



But Island does not have a Latin root. It derives from the Old English ealand which is a cognate of the modern day German eiland.


----------



## BlueWolf

Pedro y La Torre said:


> But Island does not have a Latin root. It derives from the Old English ealand which is a cognate of the modern day German eiland.



I do know it, but it's spelled in this way because it copies the Latin root.


----------



## mplsray

cuchuflete said:


> Politically correct people, take note: You may be offended by the following, and that will not be accidental.
> 
> The PC crowd likes to talk about "diversity" as a noble condition or objective. What could be more diverse that the way different cultures have evolved, with their multitude of distinct grammars, orthographies, and writing systems? The notion of homogenizing these for the convenience of lazy foreign learners of a language is therefore offensive to the entire idea of diversity.
> 
> Yesterday's news reports included a brief BBC article about the consequences of such homogenization on rural Romanian sheep farmers. It seems that the politically kerrect burrrocrats in Brussels want all cheeses to be made by the same sanitary methods, in stainless steel vats. Some village people in Romania have been using wooden casks of brine for hundreds of years. The "one size fits all" approach will kill the diversity of cheese flavors, just as a movement to make languages look alike, spell alike, etc., will trample on the cultural diversity of languages.
> 
> Pass the Esperanto, please. Hmmmmm....flavorless.


 
Many Esperantists consider the adoption of Esperanto as a worldwide lingua franca would be more likely to ensure linguistic diversity than the adoption of a national language for the same purpose, but that's an argument for another time, I suppose.

Both British and American standard dialects are in effect homogenized, somewhat artificial means of communication. Have we actually suffered as a result of that? I certainly don't think so. It's nice to be able to go to any part of the US and expect that I will be understood by just about anyone, and will be able to understand anyone speaking the standard dialect. It's nice to be able to read anything written in the standard dialect by an American—and most things written in the standard dialect by a speaker of British English. In other words, the homogenization was well worth it.


----------



## Frank06

Hi,


BlueWolf said:


> I do know it, but it's spelled in this way because it copies the Latin root.


Just a footnote in this interesting discussion: island (written iland 888), the spelling changed under influence os Fr. isle due to a *mistaken *etymology, hence no 'Latin roots' or something. See here.

F


----------



## Pedro y La Torre

BlueWolf said:


> I do know it, but it's spelled in this way because it copies the Latin root.



In fact it was spelled this way in a mistaken attempt to link it's etymology to a latin root, of which there is none. It should be spelled iland as it was in Middle English.


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## agliagli

I remember having attending a French class in highschool in which the teacher showed us why today French was so illogical in terms of spelling.  When Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists tried to unify the language, some copists were so tired of their work that they "mispealt" some words, forgetting an "n" somewhere, doubling other consonants somewhere else, etc. And this passed into the language usage. Later on (excuse me for having forgetting when it was), the French Academists tried to "correct" the mistakes made by copists in Voltaire's time, but they failed, because of people's habits to conform to the Encyclopaedists. Then, we were given a entire list of words to pay attention to, which were originally sharing the same root, but which root was no longer written the same as before the Encyclopaedists.


----------



## emma42

Interesting.  I learnt about twin words, which had come from the same Latin root word, but one was "learned" and one was "vulgar".  I wonder if that is the same issue you describe, or perhaps I am misunderstanding you? (Au fait, c'est "copyists").


----------



## Jigoku no Tenshi

cuchuflete said:


> Politically correct people, take note: You may be offended by the following, and that will not be accidental.
> 
> The PC crowd likes to talk about "diversity" as a noble condition or objective. What could be more diverse that the way different cultures have evolved, with their multitude of distinct grammars, orthographies, and writing systems? The notion of homogenizing these for the convenience of lazy foreign learners of a language is therefore offensive to the entire idea of diversity.
> 
> Yesterday's news reports included a brief BBC article about the consequences of such homogenization on rural Romanian sheep farmers. It seems that the politically kerrect burrrocrats in Brussels want all cheeses to be made by the same sanitary methods, in stainless steel vats. Some village people in Romania have been using wooden casks of brine for hundreds of years. The "one size fits all" approach will kill the diversity of cheese flavors, just as a movement to make languages look alike, spell alike, etc., will trample on the cultural diversity of languages.
> 
> Pass the Esperanto, please. Hmmmmm....flavorless.


 
I agree, a language reform seems impossible, but if it ever happened, It wouldn't be for lazy foreigners, It'd be just because it's the right time and there is the will to do it. 

I think It's impossible such reforms because as you say the diversity of languages won't allow it, If I create a phonetichal system for English and I take American English as base, It'd be a mess using it in Australia and England, because they have different accents, and If I do it with Latin American Spanish then It'd be a mess using it in Spain(S,C,Z case), so It seems we are headed to reform our languages according to our necesities so maybe in 500 or 1000 years from now, we'll have a lot of languages derived from Spanish and English, because If you check your PC you already find a lot of settings in different English, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. or haven't you find a person who talks your language, but you can't undertand it because of his accent?



uchi.m said:


> The Japanese Katakana was not at first designed to represent foreign words as it is the common usage nowadays. Before the World Wars, it was rather used mixed up with Hiragana where one would nowadays employ only Hiragana, such as on particle usage or Okurigana.
> 
> I think that language reforming is essential to establish some kind of logic and reduce redudancies in the target language, but not necessarily aiming at the difficulties of foreigners, specially because not all foreigners would struggle at the same pitfalls of a language.


 
You're right, all of us don't have the same difficulties to learn a language, Grammar in Spanish and French (as far as I know)are alike so I could learn French and Grammar wouldn't be such a problem, but if a Japanese person is learning French, it'd be harder because Grammar is totally different than Japanese, so now what should we do?, If I try to change it for making it easier to a Japanese person, I'll have problems later with Spanish speakers because French grammar would be harder to them, so It's a catch 22, and then is when I say, Everything is just like it's meant to be


----------



## Athaulf

BlueWolf said:


> I think it is a decisive "yes", and I really don't see why it shouldn't be. In a language with consistent spelling rules, it's easier to write. Period. If we have to keep an illogical system because it doesn't resolve all the problems of the world, we'll never go so far in life.



However, as with everything else, you have to count both costs and benefits. You'll probably agree that the costs of any radical language reform cannot be other than immense. To argue effectively in favor of the reform, you would have to demonstrate that its benefits would outweigh the costs, not merely that they would be great by some other measure. 



> I can assure you that it _[English spelling -- A.]_ is _[among the greatest problems for language learners -- A.]_, especially if you natively speak a language with a consistent one.


Well, I have learned English as an non-native language, and my native language has such a simple, regular, and consistent spelling that it makes Italian and Spanish look like English.   

Honestly, however difficult the English spelling was for me, I have found numerous other things in English so much more difficult that they've always completely overshadowed the issues of spelling. I understand that your experiences might be different, but the cases of people around me are usually similar to mine -- and I work in an environment populated mostly by non-native English speakers. Furthermore, since nowadays most writing is done using computers, the difficulty of proper spelling has certainly diminished. 

I would compare the issue of spelling when learning English to the issue of recognizing the traffic signs when learning to drive. Sure, it's difficult to memorize them all, and even more difficult to be able to recall them to make instant decisions in practice, but compared to all the other things one needs to learn and rehearse to become a really good driver, it's a relatively minor issue. 



> And, as I said before, this is not just a problem for learners, but natives themself. They need three time the time other ones need to learn to write in their own language, and moreover this cause a higher level of illiteracy. It is a problem of English people, not of the foreign lerners, who, after all, probably use English for a little part of their lives.
> 
> When English children of my age were still learning to write, I and my class started grammar.


But is this _really_ a problem? Are there any studies suggesting that English-speaking teenagers are falling behind their peers in other countries in other subjects because they had to spend more time learning how to spell? I don't believe it. In elementary school, one doesn't learn much useful stuff other than reading and writing anyway.

Furthermore, I wouldn't say that there is much, if any connection between the complexity of English spelling and the supposedly higher levels of illiteracy in English-speaking countries. What is "illiteracy" anyway? I don't think that there are significantly more people in the English-speaking world than in other developed countries who are illiterate to the point that they can't read a simple warning notice or write a short note that will get a point across. There is only a minuscule percentage of those anywhere in the developed world nowadays.

People are also sometimes considered "illiterate" if they make many embarrassing mistakes in writing that betray a low level of education and culture. However, spelling is again of secondary importance when it comes to such errors. You can run embarrassingly bad writing through a spelling checker, and it certainly won't make it much better. 



> Sweden changed its driving direction, and English world can't change its spelling rules?


In Sweden (like everywhere else) there's traffic police all around the place controlling how people are driving. For language, such an enforcement mechanism is not available --  fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view.


----------



## agliagli

emma42 said:


> Interesting. I learnt about twin words, which had come from the same Latin root word, but one was "learned" and one was "vulgar". I wonder if that is the same issue you describe, or perhaps I am misunderstanding you?


No, not at all. It has something to do with the spelling... (my pain in the neck!) 

I have an example: ratio*n*alité/ratio*nn*el 

Same root: ratio
Moreover, rationalité is a noun and rationnel is its adjective. (why do we need to double the "n" in the adjective? this is mere illogism induced by the copyists...)



emma42 said:


> (Au fait, c'est "copyists").


Thank you Emma.  I am a bad copyist as well...


----------



## Lombard Beige

Lombard Beige said:


> Talking about the difficulty of learning English spelling, I read somewhere that... bilingual children learn to read ... in Spanish faster. ...



As further information, I found this on the Internet:

"Spanish is easier to decode phonetically, as there is one sound per phoneme. Therefore, the average bilingual learner will master the decoding technique in Spanish more quickly and easily transfer it to English. It is the plan of this program that the majority of the bilingual children will make the transition to English reading, while continuing Spanish reading, early in their second year ..."

regards


----------



## emma42

Ah, c'est compris.  Merci, Algliagli.


----------



## BlueWolf

Athaulf said:


> However, as with everything else, you have to count both costs and benefits. You'll probably agree that the costs of any radical language reform cannot be other than immense. To argue effectively in favor of the reform, you would have to demonstrate that its benefits would outweigh the costs, not merely that they would be great by some other measure.



See below, please.



> Honestly, however difficult the English spelling was for me, I have found numerous other things in English so much more difficult that they've always completely overshadowed the issues of spelling. I understand that your experiences might be different, but the cases of people around me are usually similar to mine -- and I work in an environment populated mostly by non-native English speakers. Furthermore, since nowadays most writing is done using computers, the difficulty of proper spelling has certainly diminished.


The problem for the learners isn't just spelling properly the words, but the opposite. Since it's not their native language, they often have no clue about the right pronunciation.



> I would compare the issue of spelling when learning English to the issue of recognizing the traffic signs when learning to drive. Sure, it's difficult to memorize them all, and even more difficult to be able to recall them to make instant decisions in practice, but compared to all the other things one needs to learn and rehearse to become a really good driver, it's a relatively minor issue.


Well, here it's full of people who after having studied years English can write it, but when they speak even natives understand nothing of what they say or viceversa.



> But is this _really_ a problem? Are there any studies suggesting that English-speaking teenagers are falling behind their peers in other countries in other subjects because they had to spend more time learning how to spell? I don't believe it.


- Even after 11 years at school barely half of all English speakers become confident spellers.
- Italian children can spell accurately after just 2 years at school.
- Italy has only half as many identified dyslexics as England.
- Around 7 million British adults and 40 million US adults are functionally illiterate.
- English speaking adults always come near the bottom in international studies on literacy.
- In 1992 Dr. Lamb reported on the poor spelling standards of university students in the UK.
- In 1998 Bernard Richards reported on the poor spelling of many students at Oxford.
- In all UK schools there are some teachers who regularly make spelling mistakes on school reports.
_Web source:_ http://www.spellingsociety.org/aboutsss/leaflets/whyeng.php



> In elementary school, one doesn't learn much useful stuff other than reading and writing anyway.


Well, of course, if they need years to learn to write properly...



> Furthermore, I wouldn't say that there is much, if any connection between the complexity of English spelling and the supposedly higher levels of illiteracy in English-speaking countries. What is "illiteracy" anyway? I don't think that there are significantly more people in the English-speaking world than in other developed countries who are illiterate to the point that they can't read a simple warning notice or write a short note that will get a point across. There is only a minuscule percentage of those anywhere in the developed world nowadays.


Oh, yeah, so people who can't write properly aren't illeterate? I think that writing properly is important nowdays. What aspirations or opportunities can a person who can only write "I reech hapyness" have?



> People are also sometimes considered "illiterate" if they make many embarrassing mistakes in writing that betray a low level of education and culture. However, spelling is again of secondary importance when it comes to such errors.


Is it of secondary importance? As I said before, I think it's essential.



> You can run embarrassingly bad writing through a spelling checker, and it certainly won't make it much better.


We could stop to teach English children to write properly so, couldn't we? After all, they have a computer. 
Moreover even spelling checker has their limits. They can't help you very much when it's time to choose between it's and its, there, their and they're, sea and see, etc, right and rite.



> In Sweden (like everywhere else) there's traffic police all around the place controlling how people are driving. For language, such an enforcement mechanism is not available --  fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view.


It's good, isn't it? People have more time to get used, they've not to change in a day as for driving.


----------



## Athaulf

BlueWolf said:


> The problem for the learners isn't just spelling properly the words, but the opposite. Since it's not their native language, they often have no clue about the right pronunciation.
> [...]
> Well, here it's full of people who after having studied years English can write it, but when they speak even natives understand nothing of what they say or viceversa.



I'd say that's more due to a lack of listening practice.  Picking up a native speaker's informal, natural talk is extremely difficult in any foreign language and requires an immense amount of exposure to achieve.  As for the pronunciation, I know many people in Croatia who speak terrible broken/pidgin English, and their accent certainly isn't pretty (neither is mine, for that matter), but their pronunciation is never so bad that they can't be understood.  What they pick from the TV and music is enough in this regard. Furthermore, I haven't noticed people mispronouncing English on average more badly than German (which is another language that Croatians often speak at low levels of proficiency). 

Maybe the difference is due to different levels of exposure to English-language media.  Is the popular entertainment in Italy, especially the TV, principally in English these days?  (In Croatia, it definitely is.)



> - Even after 11 years at school barely half of all English speakers become confident spellers.
> - Italian children can spell accurately after just 2 years at school.
> - Italy has only half as many identified dyslexics as England.
> - Around 7 million British adults and 40 million US adults are functionally illiterate.
> - English speaking adults always come near the bottom in international studies on literacy.
> - In 1992 Dr. Lamb reported on the poor spelling standards of university students in the UK.
> - In 1998 Bernard Richards reported on the poor spelling of many students at Oxford.
> - In all UK schools there are some teachers who regularly make spelling mistakes on school reports.
> _Web source:_ http://www.spellingsociety.org/aboutsss/leaflets/whyeng.php
> 
> Well, of course, if they need years to learn to write properly...


Well, this is the site of a single-issue organization promoting a spelling reform. I don't have the time to check and analyze the data behind all these claims, but even like this, I can make several observations.

First, believe me, I can report on depressingly poor standards of writing by university students and graduates in Croatia -- despite one of the most user-friendly spelling systems in the world. It's so bad that adding bad spelling wouldn't make it much worse.

Second, how is "functionally illiterate" defined? If you take the least educated and literate 13% of the Italian or Croatian adults, do you think that most of them actually have good enough writing skills for a job that requires active written communication -- even though I'm sure that on average, they'll make fewer spelling errors than the least literate 13% of Americans? And I certainly don't believe that 13% of Americans are illiterate to the point that they can't read the sports section of a newspaper or a bus schedule, which is the Wikipedia definition of "functional illiteracy." 



> Oh, yeah, so people who can't write properly aren't illeterate? I think that writing properly is important nowdays. What aspirations or opportunities can a person who can only write "I reech hapyness" have?


You're absolutely right -- however, I've never heard of anyone whose spelling would be so bad, but whose other aspects of writing (grammar, vocabulary, phraseology, composition...) would be much better.  Someone with such a low level of education and culture writing in a language with simpler spelling would certainly make fewer spelling mistakes, but his writing would still be judged as unacceptably bad -- illiterate, if you will -- because of many other problems.  Correct all the spelling mistakes in a text written by someone who writes "reech hapyness" and I guarantee you that the result won't be any more adequate for any purpose.

I keep getting back to the same point: I find it hard to imagine a user of English, native or not, whose non-spelling aspects of the language are just fine, and only spelling holds him back.  I just don't see any such people around. If you take the effort to pick all the aspects of the language right, whether a native speaker or not, spelling won't be a very large part of the overall effort.



> We could stop to teach English children to write properly so, couldn't we? After all, they have a computer.
> Moreover even spelling checker has their limits. They can't help you very much when it's time to choose between it's and its, there, their and they're, sea and see, etc, right and rite.


Well, if all these homophones were written identically, that certainly wouldn't improve the legibility of the written text. And if there existed some special way of differentiating them in writing (like e.g. Spanish differentiates the homophones _él_ = _he_ and _el_ = _the_), we'd be back to the same problem.


----------



## BlueWolf

Athaulf said:


> Maybe the difference is due to different levels of exposure to English-language media.  Is the popular entertainment in Italy, especially the TV, principally in English these days?  (In Croatia, it definitely is.)



Precisely. Italian TV is in Italian, not in English. But I'll say you I'm happy for this, not disappointed. 



> Well, this is the site of a single-issue organization promoting a spelling reform. I don't have the time to check and analyze the data behind all these claims, but even like this, I can make several observations.


I do know it's a partial source, but if they promote a new spelling it means there are problems with the present one, doesn't it? After all, there are thousands proposals about English around the web, while the only one about Italian I found is about writing "k" instead of "ch".



> First, believe me, I can report on depressingly poor standards of writing by university students and graduates in Croatia -- despite one of the most user-friendly spelling systems in the world. It's so bad that adding bad spelling wouldn't make it much worse.


I don't know Croatian. I'll do a study.  This isn't my experience with Italian however.



> Second, how is "functionally illiterate" defined? If you take the least educated and literate 13% of the Italian or Croatian adults, do you think that most of them actually have good enough writing skills for a job that requires active written communication -- even though I'm sure that on average, they'll make fewer spelling errors than the least literate 13% of Americans? And I certainly don't believe that 13% of Americans are illiterate to the point that they can't read the sports section of a newspaper or a bus schedule, which is the Wikipedia definition of "functional illiteracy."


They'll make surely many fewer spelling mistakes, without a dobt. And they won't need anything when they need to write or to read an unusual word.



> You're absolutely right -- however, I've never heard of anyone whose spelling would be so bad, but whose other aspects of writing (grammar, vocabulary, phraseology, composition...) would be much better.  Someone with such a low level of education and culture writing in a language with simpler spelling would certainly make fewer spelling mistakes, but his writing would still be judged as unacceptably bad -- illiterate, if you will -- because of many other problems.  Correct all the spelling mistakes in a text written by someone who writes "reech hapyness" and I guarantee you that the result won't be any more adequate for any purpose.


Surely they'll have a low level of education and culture, but I don't think we can only think to a sort of stupid monkey man when we think about an illeterate man. I think for example a boy who's 15 years-old can have many things to say, but it seems it's impossible to expect they have a more or less perfect usage of written English. At the age of 15 a boy or a girl is expected to master the written Italian, even the "difficult" parts (like accents and silent h's), while I know English boys who still can't distinguish they're, their and there.



> I keep getting back to the same point: I find it hard to imagine a user of English, native or not, whose non-spelling aspects of the language are just fine, and only spelling holds him back.  I just don't see any such people around. If you take the effort to pick all the aspects of the language right, whether a native speaker or not, spelling won't be a very large part of the overall effort.


I don't agree as I said above. Moreover I don't think you need master anything to can finally write in your own language. That's not democratic.



> Well, if all these homophones were written identically, that certainly wouldn't improve the legibility of the written text. And if there existed some special way of differentiating them in writing (like e.g. Spanish differentiates the homophones _él_ = _he_ and _el_ = _the_), we'd be back to the same problem.


The difference is that in Spanish or in Italian those ones are the only difficult parts of writing, so when you finish the lower levels of school you can master them perfectly (of course we're human and we can wrong, but if someone shows me I've mistaken I know where's the mistake. In English instead a friend of mine wrote "There beautiful", I told him he wronged and he said: "Oh, sorry. THEIR beautiful" [of course he meant "they're beautiful])


----------



## Athaulf

BlueWolf said:


> Precisely. Italian TV is in Italian, not in English. But I'll say you I'm happy for this, not disappointed.



But then we've established a data point that can be interpreted as supporting my position.  You blamed the terrible (as you describe them) pronunciation problems by many Italian speakers of English on the obscurity of English spelling; I claimed that it's rather mostly due to insufficient exposure to the spoken language.  In Croatia, where there's apparently far more popular exposure to English, because almost everyone watches TV in English on a daily basis, such problems are far less widespread.  (Even the worst broken English I've ever heard in Croatia wasn't pronounced so badly as to be incomprehensible to native English speakers.)  Thus it seems to me that more exposure to the spoken language would significantly mitigate the problems of the English speakers who can read and write, but not pronounce understandably. 



> Surely they'll have a low level of education and culture, but I don't think we can only think to a sort of stupid monkey man when we think about an illeterate man. I think for example a boy who's 15 years-old can have many things to say, but it seems it's impossible to expect they have a more or less perfect usage of written English. At the age of 15 a boy or a girl is expected to master the written Italian, even the "difficult" parts (like accents and silent h's), while I know English boys who still can't distinguish they're, their and there.


I don't know about Italian, but in both languages that I've used extensively in my life (Croatian and English), there is a vast difference between the spoken language and the proper written language, and I suspect that this holds for any other language too.    By this I mean that someone who writes the same way he speaks will come off  either as oddly stuck up and ultra-formal when speaking or as uneducated and semi-literate when writing (except that one sometimes might want to speak the literary language in very formal circumstances). 

When students learn to write, they're not just learning to spell what they speak -- they're also learning the rules and standards of vocabulary, grammar, and composition quite different from those they practice when speaking.  This is the truly difficult and challenging part of learning to write, much more difficult than even the English spelling, and people who fail to acquire those standards will remain incapable of formal writing regardless of whether they also have spelling problems.   And now we get to the issue of the quality of education.  If an education program is good enough to teach a student to organize one's writing sensibly and coherently (which is by far the most important!) and to avoid the use of slang, dialect, vulgarisms, and substandard vocabulary and grammar, then mastering an English-like spelling system is not hard to integrate into such a good and well executed curriculum.  On the other hand, if an education program fails to achieve these former goals, the result won't be much better even if the spelling is mostly a non-issue (hence my complaints about the writing skills of Croatian students). 

If one is capable of expressing oneself well in the written English language in terms of the vocabulary, grammar, and (most importantly) organization, occasionally mixing up things like "they're" and "there" is in practice a very minor problem, not much more significant than typos. Otherwise, the result will look semi-literate at best even if there's not a single spelling mistake.   And I've never seen anyone whose logic and composition of writing would be acceptable, but who would still _systematically_ confuse "they're" and "there."   I think I should add that I'm basing these conclusions on a pretty large sample, since I've been teaching first-year students at an English-speaking university for the past several years.  When I look at their writing, spelling is never much of an issue, even when it comes to those whose writing is depressingly bad overall.


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## Thomsen

Over 10% of the US population was foreign born. While that does of course include some Brits, Irish, Canadians, Australians, etc.... it also means a lot of people who don't speak English as a first language. So when they say whatever % is functionally illiterate. They mean English literacy (that they can't speak or write English well), so that is going to effect the percentage. I'm not even saying its the majority because there are many woefully undereducated people who were born in this country. Just something to keep in mind. I'm sure that applies to Germany, France, and the UK, so it would be interesting to know if the literacy rates in those countries are similarly efffected.
--------
Also, I have often heard that Spanish for example is a phonetic language, but I have seen a large number of spelling mistakes by native speakers that made it almost incomprehsinble for me.  Added or omitted H's, V<>B, C<>S, Y<>LL and a few others which are less common.  This could largely be related to regional differences.  The same is true of English.  Someone somewhere used to pronounce a lot of words differently, and there is the famous English vowel shift which I don't know much about, but it explains how we basically started saying words differently and the langauge has yet to catch up.  Furthermore, in some cases we use spelling differences to differentiate what could be ambiguous in spoken English.  It's and its.  Pear, pare, and pair.  Rote and Wrote.  I am not a bad speller, but I know bad spellers in English.   I know bad spellers in Spanish, too.


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## BlueWolf

Athaulf said:


> But then we've established a data point that can be interpreted as supporting my position.  You blamed the terrible (as you describe them) pronunciation problems by many Italian speakers of English on the obscurity of English spelling; I claimed that it's rather mostly due to insufficient exposure to the spoken language.



While while exposure surely helps, what I'm saying is that you can't be sure of the pronunciation of a word just seeing how it is written. And since written English is surely easier to have in your own country, this causes problems.



> I don't know about Italian, but in both languages that I've used extensively in my life (Croatian and English), there is a vast difference between the spoken language and the proper written language, and I suspect that this holds for any other language too.    By this I mean that someone who writes the same way he speaks will come off  either as oddly stuck up and ultra-formal when speaking or as uneducated and semi-literate when writing (except that one sometimes might want to speak the literary language in very formal circumstances).
> 
> When students learn to write, they're not just learning to spell what they speak -- they're also learning the rules and standards of vocabulary, grammar, and composition quite different from those they practice when speaking.  This is the truly difficult and challenging part of learning to write, much more difficult than even the English spelling, and people who fail to acquire those standards will remain incapable of formal writing regardless of whether they also have spelling problems.   And now we get to the issue of the quality of education.  If an education program is good enough to teach a student to organize one's writing sensibly and coherently (which is by far the most important!) and to avoid the use of slang, dialect, vulgarisms, and substandard vocabulary and grammar, then mastering an English-like spelling system is not hard to integrate into such a good and well executed curriculum.  On the other hand, if an education program fails to achieve these former goals, the result won't be much better even if the spelling is mostly a non-issue (hence my complaints about the writing skills of Croatian students).
> 
> If one is capable of expressing oneself well in the written English language in terms of the vocabulary, grammar, and (most importantly) organization, occasionally mixing up things like "they're" and "there" is in practice a very minor problem, not much more significant than typos. Otherwise, the result will look semi-literate at best even if there's not a single spelling mistake.   And I've never seen anyone whose logic and composition of writing would be acceptable, but who would still _systematically_ confuse "they're" and "there."   I think I should add that I'm basing these conclusions on a pretty large sample, since I've been teaching first-year students at an English-speaking university for the past several years.  When I look at their writing, spelling is never much of an issue, even when it comes to those whose writing is depressingly bad overall.


Sure, Italian has higher and lower levels too, but this doesn't mean that everything you write has to be written as a book. And yes, we study to write avoiding the "slangs" of the spoken language, we have a lot of time to do it, since we don't have to spend too much in learning the spelling rules. Moreover this isn't the school policy here in Italian, since every important spelling mistake in a test (except in Elementary School, of course) is _very_ penalising in calculating the final mark. They aren't accepted at all.



Thomsen said:


> Over 10% of the US population was foreign born. While that does of course include some Brits, Irish, Canadians, Australians, etc.... it also means a lot of people who don't speak English as a first language. So when they say whatever % is functionally illiterate. They mean English literacy (that they can't speak or write English well), so that is going to effect the percentage. I'm not even saying its the majority because there are many woefully undereducated people who were born in this country. Just something to keep in mind. I'm sure that applies to Germany, France, and the UK, so it would be interesting to know if the literacy rates in those countries are similarly efffected.



Well, isn't it one more reason to say English spelling how it is doesn't work? If at least 10% of US population finds it difficult, the reason doesn't matter, does it? Or should we say "Who cares, English isn't even their first language, they can stay in their ignorance for all their lives".



> Also, I have often heard that Spanish for example is a phonetic language, but I have seen a large number of spelling mistakes by native speakers that made it almost incomprehsinble for me.  Added or omitted H's, V<>B, C<>S, Y<>LL and a few others which are less common.  This could largely be related to regional differences.  The same is true of English.  Someone somewhere used to pronounce a lot of words differently, and there is the famous English vowel shift which I don't know much about, but it explains how we basically started saying words differently and the langauge has yet to catch up.  Furthermore, in some cases we use spelling differences to differentiate what could be ambiguous in spoken English.  It's and its.  Pear, pare, and pair.  Rote and Wrote.  I am not a bad speller, but I know bad spellers in English.   I know bad spellers in Spanish, too.


True, in fact I never considered Spanish a so good example of phonetic writing system, but there's to say you can summarise all the problems of Spanish in half line. And it's not a case if so many people consider Spanish a phonetic language, because its spelling problems are really few after all (and often limited to a particular region where it's spoken).


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## Athaulf

BlueWolf said:


> Sure, Italian has higher and lower levels too, but this doesn't mean that everything you write has to be written as a book. And yes, we study to write avoiding the "slangs" of the spoken language, we have a lot of time to do it, since we don't have to spend too much in learning the spelling rules. Moreover this isn't the school policy here in Italian, since every important spelling mistake in a test (except in Elementary School, of course) is _very_ penalising in calculating the final mark. They aren't accepted at all.



It's not about writing "as a book."  Even a small piece of good writing, perhaps of only a few sentences, still has to be written very differently from how one would make the same points in the spoken language. A decent education will make one switch into the written language mode naturally as soon as one takes a pen or keyboard, but learning this is very hard. 

Of course, we're now discussing things that are difficult or even impossible to quantify exactly, so I can't really offer a positive proof of my claims, but it still seems to me that even the English spelling is not so hard that its mastering would require an effort comparable to the mastering of the written language in general, even for the native speakers.  As for the non-native ones, my experience definitely suggests that mastering spelling is relatively easy compared to the effort necessary for learning even the intermediate-level grammar, let alone the more advanced grammar issues -- honestly, I think that right now it would be less difficult for me to learn the spelling all over again than it will be to eliminate my remaining difficulties with the articles and prepositions. 

Having made and summarized all these points, I think we can finally agree to disagree about the topic of this thread and let the readers judge the presented arguments for themselves.


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## BlueWolf

Athaulf said:


> It's not about writing "as a book."  Even a small piece of good writing, perhaps of only a few sentences, still has to be written very differently from how one would make the same points in the spoken language. A decent education will make one switch into the written language mode naturally as soon as one takes a pen or keyboard, but learning this is very hard.
> 
> Of course, we're now discussing things that are difficult or even impossible to quantify exactly, so I can't really offer a positive proof of my claims, but it still seems to me that even the English spelling is not so hard that its mastering would require an effort comparable to the mastering of the written language in general, even for the native speakers.  As for the non-native ones, my experience definitely suggests that mastering spelling is relatively easy compared to the effort necessary for learning even the intermediate-level grammar, let alone the more advanced grammar issues -- honestly, I think that right now it would be less difficult for me to learn the spelling all over again than it will be to eliminate my remaining difficulties with the articles and prepositions.
> 
> Having made and summarized all these points, I think we can finally agree to disagree about the topic of this thread and let the readers judge the presented arguments for themselves.



Wait, I've the last thing to say about this topic! 
Have you never thought that the two difficulties in writing (spelling and written style) could be connected? Some interesting passages from this article: http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j13/reports.php

_[...] British teachers have recently faced conflicting advice, with priority sometimes  given to technical accuracy (eg correct spelling), but sometimes to content and  style instead. It is claimed, on the one hand, that children's writing is inhibited  by spelling difficulty and would blossom if correct spelling had lower priority,  but, on the other, that correct spelling is a prerequisite for effective  communication.
[...]The study shows poor spellers using 35% more regularly spelt words than good  spellers, and pupils diagnosed as dyslexic using 47% more. The poor spellers and  dyslexics also used significantly more short words than the good spellers.  
_Moderator Note: Excessive text deleted. Please comply with forum rules for quoted text. 

Moreover this makes me reflect that in our discussion we never spoke about dyslexia. English spelling is almost _impossible_ to master for dyslexics. I can assure you that spelling isn't a minor problem for dislexics, who, on the other hand, can reach an excelent written style as anyone else (I have a dislexic parent, so I know what I'm talking about).


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## CrazyArcher

It seems odd to me that students have difficlty in English spelling after graduating school... Personally I have no troubles with spelling, and it's not my native language, and I haven't studied it as pupils native to English-speaking countries do, and I'm sure that many other forum members can say the same about themselves. I don't consider myself a genius or something, and the reason is probably incorrect teaching methods, although I'm not someone who can firmly stand behind this statement.
I was, however, thinking for some time about romanizing Russian. In my opinon, the words in general are unnessesarily long, character-wise. A writing system based on Latin, with umlauts and circumfelxes (for instance), would greatly fasciliate writing. All the Russian-speaking forum participants are welcome to express their opinons on this subject.


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## Tensai

Jigoku no Tenshi said:


> Chinese has a simplified system so they can write and read easier as well as foreigners, but what about your own language?


 

simplified Chinese is a disgrace to the Chinese language, i hope it will be replaced by traditional Chinese again.


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## mplsray

CrazyArcher said:


> It seems odd to me that students have difficlty in English spelling after graduating school... Personally I have no troubles with spelling, and it's not my native language, and I haven't studied it as pupils native to English-speaking countries do, and I'm sure that many other forum members can say the same about themselves. I don't consider myself a genius or something, and the reason is probably incorrect teaching methods, although I'm not someone who can firmly stand behind this statement.


 
English spelling is a pain in the neck. I'm no genius either, but I'm well educated, having been the valedictorian of my senior class in high school, having gone on to earn a degree from a 4-year university, and having learned French, and I _still_ have to look up the correct spelling for some words in English. Not only that, on occasion I make mistakes such as spelling _their_ for _there, __your_ for _you're,_ and _it's_ for _its._ Even minor reforms would spare English-speakers a lot of grief.


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## CrazyArcher

Well I agree that English spelling is terribly inconsistent, but the occasions where some obscure word is spelt in a weird way are not so frequent in the everyday life. It's not nice to have to memorize spellings of words (such as above 'occasion', where you have to remember it has 2 C's and one S), but it's not that terrible either. It's a matter of personal opinion, of course... I think that if _wan wud jus fonetik skript fo' Inglish_, it's going to be too drastic a change.


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## Lombard Beige

The problem of a spelling reform on phonetic lines in English is that it would divide the language into a number of closely related separate languages (cf. Croatian, Bosnian and Serb, or, remaining close to English, look at Scots). For example, New York in British English, written according to current English spelling conventions, would be New Yawk ... with no "r". And what about Tronno or Bawlamore or New Orleenz?

Personally, I think the written conventions that separate US and UK are bad enough and should be reduced, but who is going to do the reducing?

Reforms along the lines suggested by Webster would be a good thing, as they preserve the UNITY of the language, BUT they were and possibly are still perceived as TOO American. As I mentioned before, Webster's more radical proposals, e.g. "nabor" for "neighbour/neighbor" were not accepted even in America, so perhaps it's time for "back to Webster"?

regards


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## Jigoku no Tenshi

Tensai said:


> simplified Chinese is a disgrace to the Chinese language, i hope it will be replaced by traditional Chinese again.


Hello Everybody!

I started this thread thinking about what experiences do you have or know about it, Now I see how complicated It would be a language reform, and all of the consequences it would have, so I think it's better let languages grow thenselves and just watch how they evolve.

Tensai, I don't know much Chinese, but I think you're right because even if it's easier learn Chinese using the simplified system, simplified system has lost much of the beauty that traditional Chinese has, I find it easier learning Japanese with katakana and hiragana, but I like writting Tenshi with Kanji, I would be against anyone who says "since katakana is used for foreign words and it seems to be easier to learn katakana than kanji, we better forget kanji and use only katakana" because most the beauty in Japanese is the kanji writting, as hard as it is, the same with Spanish, English, or any other language, I would be against anyone who says "let's change "X" letter for "Y" letter, since they sound the same, why must we have both?, let's change it", I think it depends on the natural evolution of any language, and it's up to every one of us to accept and promove a change, or just let it be just like it is now if we like it that way


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## uchi.m

Tensai said:


> simplified Chinese is a disgrace to the Chinese language, i hope it will be replaced by traditional Chinese again.



It would be so good if language reforms were just a matter of taste or elegance, but it appears not to be so.

People may say that the simplified script is simpler and therefore easier to read and faster to write, so that the focus of the script reform was making the access to the written language easier for the population, and that the simplified script would be more prone to accelerate literacy nationwide.

But I would speculate that this script reform was mainly a Chinese government attitude aiming at the establishment of national sovereignty. You may disagree with me, but then I ask you: where is traditional Chinese script currently being used?

So my personal opinion is that the simplified Chinese script is likely not to be reverted to traditional Chinese script unless there are good _political_ reasons for doing this.


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## Frank06

Hi,


Jigoku no Tenshi said:


> I started this thread thinking about what experiences do you have or know about it, Now I see how complicated It would be a language reform, and all of the consequences it would have, so I think it's better let languages grow thenselves and just watch how they evolve.


So far, *language* reform was not discussed at all. The posts only dealt with *spelling* (or script) reforms. And though spelling agreements are important, let's not overate spelling, or rather, equate spelling with language.
Whether we write 'John playz' or 'John plays', neither of these have a lot of impact upon the English _language_ (the standard variant): it's only a matter of agreement. 
The moment we would suggest 'John _play_', then we're talking about _language_ reforms.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## BlueWolf

CrazyArcher said:


> Well I agree that English spelling is terribly inconsistent, but the occasions where some obscure word is spelt in a weird way are not so frequent in the everyday life. It's not nice to have to memorize spellings of words (such as above 'occasion', where you have to remember it has 2 C's and one S), but it's not that terrible either. It's a matter of personal opinion, of course... I think that if _wan wud jus fonetik skript fo' Inglish_, it's going to be too drastic a change.



Well, from this article: http://www.spellingsociety.org/news/pvs/pv13bell.php

_[...] I then identified the basic spelling patterns for individual phonemes and all the  words with spellings which diverge from each. I ended up with a list of *3456  words out of 6856 which have at least one element of unpredictability in them*. [...] Those 3456 words all  require the memorising of __something in addition to phonics for their  spelling.

[I am sorry for last time, now my quote is shorter!]
_


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## karuna

uchi.m said:


> But I would speculate that this script reform was mainly a Chinese government attitude aiming at the establishment of national sovereignty. You may disagree with me, but then I ask you: where is traditional Chinese script currently being used?



I would give benefit of doubt and think that they really felt that such writing reform was necessary. It was just easier for a dictatorship to accomplish these changes where democratic governments would be still quarrelling back and forth. As much as I hate communists I would say that in this case they did something progressive. Many seem to support traditional writing for its own aesthetic value or for the sake of backwards compatibility but if these things are getting in the way of practical needs then at times there is a need to break away from tradition. 

It reminds me of the spelling reforms in Bengali in the beginning of the last century when linguists decided to remove many old sanskritized forms that were no longer used in the spoken language. Many religious groups actively protested by saying that Sanskrit is cultural heritage, divine language, etc. that needs to be protected. But really who is to say that the modern spoken languages are less "sacred" than the languages of yore?


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## Athaulf

BlueWolf said:


> Moreover this makes me reflect that in our discussion we never spoke about dyslexia. English spelling is almost _impossible_ to master for dyslexics. I can assure you that spelling isn't a minor problem for dislexics, who, on the other hand, can reach an excelent written style as anyone else (I have a dislexic parent, so I know what I'm talking about).



I checked out the pages of the Simplified Spelling Society,  and it seems to me that their treatment of the issue is rather one-sided.  I googled for  what the actual research has to say on the matter, and it seems like the topic is more complex and controversial than one might conclude from reading the SSS pages.   

A paper published in 2003 under the title _"Developmental dyslexia in different languages: Language-specific or universal?"_ (which seems to be a major and widely quoted reference in the area) concluded that the irregularity of the English spelling actually has less significance for dyslexia than commonly believed (they compared English- and German-speaking pupils).   Unfortunately, I don't think the paper is available online for free -- I was able to access it only because my university has subscription to the publisher's digital library.  Thus I'll quote their conclusions (moderators -- I hope you'll agree that this is well within the limits of fair use): _"The results clearly showed that the similarities between orthographies were far bigger than their differences. [...] [W]hen effect sizes [of dyslexia]... were compared, the dyslexics in the two countries exhibited very similar patterns. [...] [It] seems quite clear that the causes and consequences of dyslexia are extremely similar across regular and less regular orthographies."

_Thus, it seems to me that the research results are not so one-sided, although I'm certainly not an expert on the matter.  Of course, if you have some personal experience with the problem, I'll certainly accept your first-hand account rather than the second-hand references.  But did you actually observe a difference in a dyslexic person's problems in several different languages yourself?


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## BlueWolf

Athaulf said:


> I checked out the pages of the Simplified Spelling Society,  and it seems to me that their treatment of the issue is rather one-sided.  I googled for  what the actual research has to say on the matter, and it seems like the topic is more complex and controversial than one might conclude from reading the SSS pages.
> 
> A paper published in 2003 under the title _"Developmental dyslexia in different languages: Language-specific or universal?"_ (which seems to be a major and widely quoted reference in the area) concluded that the irregularity of the English spelling actually has less significance for dyslexia than commonly believed (they compared English- and German-speaking pupils).   Unfortunately, I don't think the paper is available online for free -- I was able to access it only because my university has subscription to the publisher's digital library.  Thus I'll quote their conclusions (moderators -- I hope you'll agree that this is well within the limits of fair use): _"The results clearly showed that the similarities between orthographies were far bigger than their differences. [...] [W]hen effect sizes [of dyslexia]... were compared, the dyslexics in the two countries exhibited very similar patterns. [...] [It] seems quite clear that the causes and consequences of dyslexia are extremely similar across regular and less regular orthographies."
> 
> _Thus, it seems to me that the research results are not so one-sided, although I'm certainly not an expert on the matter.  Of course, if you have some personal experience with the problem, I'll certainly accept your first-hand account rather than the second-hand references.  But did you actually observe a difference in a dyslexic person's problems in several different languages yourself?



First of all, I made a little mistake, I've not a dyslexic parent, but a dyslexic sister (I meant to use "relative" in that sentence).  So I have seen her acquisition of the ability to write, and not just hers, since there are dislexics' association in Italy, as, I hope, in any country.
Saying that the orthography doesn't count is not right. About that, you just have to think that dyslexia has even been known here in Italy since very few years ago, even when in UK it was already known. This is because dyslexics' problem in languages like English are deeper and graver, while in languages like Italian dyslexics are hardly ever recognised, since the more consistent orthography "hides" their problems.
Of course dyslexia does exist in Italy, but only in the most "acute" cases it is evident. And the only permanent difficulty in Italian for the major part of them, after some helps, is the existence of double letters (that in Italian have a different meaning than single letters, so they aren't unconsistent).
So, if you ask me if orthography doesn't count, I'll say, no, it counts a lot, though the problem can't be complitely solved with a more consistent orthography.


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## Anatoli

Tensai said:


> simplified Chinese is a disgrace to the Chinese language, i hope it will be replaced by traditional Chinese again.


I hope Chinese will have one script for Chinese lnguage, be it traditional or simplified. Users of traditional are in minority now but heavily brainwashed against simplified characters  They, in the mainland, don't think it's a disgrace and they don't feel they need to be saved, LOL.


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## Tensai

Jigoku no Tenshi said:


> Hello Everybody!
> 
> I started this thread thinking about what experiences do you have or know about it, Now I see how complicated It would be a language reform, and all of the consequences it would have, so I think it's better let languages grow thenselves and just watch how they evolve.
> 
> Tensai, I don't know much Chinese, but I think you're right because even if it's easier learn Chinese using the simplified system, simplified system has lost much of the beauty that traditional Chinese has, I find it easier learning Japanese with katakana and hiragana, but I like writting Tenshi with Kanji, I would be against anyone who says "since katakana is used for foreign words and it seems to be easier to learn katakana than kanji, we better forget kanji and use only katakana" because most the beauty in Japanese is the kanji writting, as hard as it is, the same with Spanish, English, or any other language, I would be against anyone who says "let's change "X" letter for "Y" letter, since they sound the same, why must we have both?, let's change it", I think it depends on the natural evolution of any language, and it's up to every one of us to accept and promove a change, or just let it be just like it is now if we like it that way


 
Many young Japanese people now do not know that many kanjis, the use of katakana is one of the reasons why this is happening, if they want to say something, and there are two words with simililar meanings in kanji and katakana, it is likely they will choose katakana..this is just sad, a Japanese friend of mine usually kind of refuses to teach me katakana, he likes kanjis and hates katakanas, his kanji level is like 1.5 which is the second highest level in Japanese Kanji test.

Studies have shown that users of traditional Chinese can learn simplified Chinese much faster than the vice versa.

Learning simplified Chinese is not a shortcut to learning Chinese, there are no shortcuts for learning any languages, if you really want to learn Chinese, just learn traditional, if you really need to learn simplified Chinese, you can do so after you have become very efficient traidtional Chinese (though i do not encourage learning simplified).


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## Tensai

uchi.m said:


> It would be so good if language reforms were just a matter of taste or elegance, but it appears not to be so.
> 
> People may say that the simplified script is simpler and therefore easier to read and faster to write, so that the focus of the script reform was making the access to the written language easier for the population, and that the simplified script would be more prone to accelerate literacy nationwide.
> 
> But I would speculate that this script reform was mainly a Chinese government attitude aiming at the establishment of national sovereignty. You may disagree with me, but then I ask you: where is traditional Chinese script currently being used?
> 
> So my personal opinion is that the simplified Chinese script is likely not to be reverted to traditional Chinese script unless there are good _political_ reasons for doing this.


 
It is true, the Chinese government adopted the use of simplified Chinese system for two reasons:
1.To increase the national literacy level
2.Easier for them to spread Communist propagandas

A country can not be united if we don't use the same writing script, lets not forget that many Chinese people speaks different dialects, so its nesscessary for Chinese government to force the use of simplified Chinese all over the country

If you learn simplified Chinese, its likely that you will come in contact with materials that somehow contains Communist thinking 

Traditional Chinese is used for all purposes in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan and by oversea Chinese who are from those three areas


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## mplsray

Tensai said:


> It is true, the Chinese government adopted the use of simplified Chinese system for two reasons:
> 1.To increase the national literacy level
> 2.Easier for them to spread Communist propagandas


 
Both points, if true, make the simplified system superior to the traditional system. Point two is part of a two-edged sword: Anything that makes it easier for someone to read makes it easier for him to read all sides of an argument, not just the side that happens to be pushed by the language reformers.


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## Tensai

mplsray said:


> Both points, if true, make the simplified system superior to the traditional system. Point two is part of a two-edged sword: Anything that makes it easier for someone to read makes it easier for him to read all sides of an argument, not just the side that happens to be pushed by the language reformers.


 
They could raise literacy level by spending more money and building more schools especially in rural areas, they didn't need to change the writing system, Taiwan - which uses the traditional writing system - has a higher literacy rate than mainland China. Many mainland Chinese can not read traditional Chinese characters and ancient Chinese characters, while many in Hong Kong, Taiwan can read or even write simplified Chinese, we don't even really have to learn how to read them, we just know. Simplified Chinese also makes it harder to understand because Chinese characters are pictures, when you alter the parts of a picture, the meaning changes, and they have too many words that look too similar or same but with totally different meanings.


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## mplsray

Tensai said:


> They could raise literacy level by spending more money and building more schools especially in rural areas, they didn't need to change the writing system, Taiwan - which uses the traditional writing system - has a higher literacy rate than mainland China. Many mainland Chinese can not read traditional Chinese characters and ancient Chinese characters, while many in Hong Kong, Taiwan can read or even write simplified Chinese, we don't even really have to learn how to read them, we just know. Simplified Chinese also makes it harder to understand because Chinese characters are pictures, when you alter the parts of a picture, the meaning changes, and they have too many words that look too similar or same but with totally different meanings.


 
Note that when replying to the point you made that the Chinese government had adopted a simplified writing system "1.To increase the national literacy level," I qualified my comments by writing "if true." I was aware of arguments against the simplified system, but you seemed to be saying it was indeed successful in increasing the mainland's national literacy level.

Now, either (1) the simplified system does not have any effect on the level of national literacy (or even a negative effect) or (2) it increases the level of national literacy. You can't have it both way: Does it or doesn't it?

As for your point that the Chinese government could spend more money and build more schools, of course it could, but that's a non sequitur to what was being discussed. It's better to have both seat belts and an airbag, but if you don't have an airbag, it's still a good thing to have a seat belt. Or, to make an even more apt metaphor, it is beneficial for a country's commerce to have a standard system of measurement and rigorous standards for commercial scales, but even if it doesn't have rigorous standards for commercial scales, it's still a good thing to have a standard system of measurement. If the simplified writing system is easier to learn, then it is a good strategy on the part of the government to adopt it whether or not the government also decides to spend more money and build more schools.


----------



## Athaulf

mplsray said:


> Both points, if true, make the simplified system superior to the traditional system. Point two is part of a two-edged sword: Anything that makes it easier for someone to read makes it easier for him to read all sides of an argument, not just the side that happens to be pushed by the language reformers.



Not necessarily.  The new system can make a lot of the material to which the regime is opposed effectively inaccessible to the wider population.  If a new generation grows up without the knowledge of the old script, they will have access only to the new materials, which have all been produced under the supervision of the existing regime in power.  This will effectively obliterate the influence of the older materials as if they were physically destroyed, only sparing the inconvenience of doing so. Furthermore, it also has an effect of isolating the population from the materials published on the enemy side that continues using the old script, again easing the burden of having to physically prevent access to them.  If I were a member of the Chinese nomenklatura, I would certainly consider it a very pleasant side-effect of the reform if people can't read stuff published in Taiwan any more.

I don't know the specifics of the Chinese situation, but the above certainly seems like a plausible argument in favor of radical writing reforms from the standpoint of any regime that has the intention of controlling the minds of its subjects.


----------



## mplsray

Athaulf said:


> Not necessarily. The new system can make a lot of the material to which the regime is opposed effectively inaccessible to the wider population. If a new generation grows up without the knowledge of the old script, they will have access only to the new materials, which have all been produced under the supervision of the existing regime in power. This will effectively obliterate the influence of the older materials as if they were physically destroyed, only sparing the inconvenience of doing so. Furthermore, it also has an effect of isolating the population from the materials published on the enemy side that continues using the old script, again easing the burden of having to physically prevent access to them. If I were a member of the Chinese nomenklatura, I would certainly consider it a very pleasant side-effect of the reform if people can't read stuff published in Taiwan any more.
> 
> I don't know the specifics of the Chinese situation, but the above certainly seems like a plausible argument in favor of radical writing reforms from the standpoint of any regime that has the intention of controlling the minds of its subjects.


 
You make some good points. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the ability to read and write and the printing press—and printing press substitutes such as the mimeograph, the photocopier, and a typewriter with carbon paper (samizdat)—have been among the most powerful means to protect individual thought throughout history. The more literacy in a population, then, the greater potential freedom for the individual. If I am correct about that, then increasing literacy remains, as I put it before, a two-edged sword.


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## Athaulf

mplsray said:


> You make some good points. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the ability to read and write and the printing press—and printing press substitutes such as the mimeograph, the photocopier, and a typewriter with carbon paper (samizdat)—have been among the most powerful means to protect individual thought throughout history. The more literacy in a population, then, the greater potential freedom for the individual.



Yes, but unfortunately only potential.  A regime with truly skilled leaders will usually find ways to make both educational and technological advances serve in its favor.  I would say that on the net, the combination of mass literacy and the printing press has been a key factor in the rise and success of various totalitarian  regimes during the past century -- certainly far more than it's been a factor in their undermining. An interesting issue is how these things will change with the still fairly recent rise of the internet; personally, I have an ambivalent attitude towards this medium.  But we're getting so far off topic now that I'm afraid that even this post might get deleted...


----------



## Gnosi

ireney said:


> We could simplify the spelling, true, but I am against that too (will make reading texts prior to the spelling change quite difficult if not impossible and will take us one step further from understanding the etymology and deeper meaning of many words)


 
I complete agree with you Ireney. If we change 
/simplify the spelling, the language will lose a lot and the meaning of homophones will be confusing. Also studying Ancient Greek (at least for greek speakers) will be a nightmare!


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## Sepia

I am pretty shocked by this discussion.

In theory you could cover pretty much all phonems distinguishable by the average human with an alphabet consisting of about 50 characters. At least that is one basic rule in linguistics that I have learned, and I have not yet seen anything disproving this. That, of course would require a new alphabet. So much for theory.

And in real life - statements like:

Simplifiying orthography would make texts more difficult to read ...

(WHAT!!!?? What are we talking about here, simplifying means just that, and if things get more difficult things have not been simplified)

English has 25 wowels (Show me! I wonder where you'll find them. At least one person pointed out that the English language uses different characters to express the same phonem, all depending on the combination of letters.)

Spanish has one sound for every phonem. (Of course it has. But does it also have only one charater to signify the same phonem - and does the orthography have means to express if a vowel is long or short. Finnish is a good example of a language that does. And is the same character always pronounced the same way. What about the G?)

And one forum-user asks the other what he means with "does it work well"  - hey boys and girls, have you forgotten what language is for? Communicating. So if communication flows more smothly with less misunderstandings, that is at least what I would understand by "working well".

Those are just a few examples - not the best or the worst - simply examples. And if you compare the posts in this thread you'll probably aggree with me: There is not chance in a 100 years that any really significant reforms will take place - and I think it is because hardly anyone ever sat down and enjoyed the luxury of forgetting history and forgetting dogmatism for a few minutes and phantasized about this: 

What would REALLY make things easier?

And because they don't they will probably have difficulties recognizing a good idea when they hear one.


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## Athaulf

Sepia said:


> English has 25 wowels (Show me! I wonder where you'll find them. At least one person pointed out that the English language uses different characters to express the same phonem, all depending on the combination of letters.)



I did exaggerate when I wrote 25, but only slightly.  The exact number depends on the dialect, but it's generally in the range of 10-15 pure vowels and around 10 diphthongs. You can see a list with examples here: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_chart_for_English



> Spanish has one sound for every phonem. (Of course it has. But does it also have only one charater to signify the same phonem - and does the orthography have means to express if a vowel is long or short. Finnish is a good example of a language that does. And is the same character always pronounced the same way. What about the G?)


 No language that I know of, including Spanish, has "one sound for every phoneme". Rather, a phoneme can be realized as several different sounds in different words, which the native speakers however intuitively perceive as the same phoneme (even though these sounds might stand for different phonemes in some other language).


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## Outsider

The International Phonetic Alphabet has well over 50 pulmonic consonants alone. And that's not counting secondary articulations, syllabicity, or length, stress, tone and contour, and so on. Of course, if you coded all of this information in binary, you could get away with just two symbols.


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## mplsray

Sepia said:


> English has 25 wowels (Show me! I wonder where you'll find them. At least one person pointed out that the English language uses different characters to express the same phonem, all depending on the combination of letters.)



I've mentioned before in a WordReference forum how Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, is famous (or, to some, infamous) for having more pronunciation variants than any other English dictionary. In its "Guide to Pronunciation" by Edward Artin--not to be confused with the one-page "Merriam-Webster Pronunciation Symbols--I've counted up 53 different vowel or vowel-combinations (diphthongs and glides-plus-vowel) and syllabic consonants (the second syllable of _table,_ for example) which can be considered vowels. This excludes their symbols used for transcribing foreign vowels and a few alternate forms. 

As it happens, that dictionary is missing one English vowel, the pronunciation used by some British people for _restaurant_ that has a French-style nasal vowel at the end (and no /t/). It gives that vowel only as a foreign vowel, but it has indeed been naturalized, so make that 54 English vowels.


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## ernest_

Sepia said:


> And in real life - statements like:
> 
> Simplifiying orthography would make texts more difficult to read ...
> 
> (WHAT!!!?? What are we talking about here, simplifying means just that, and if things get more difficult things have not been simplified)



Sorry, but I think you're wrong here. You can "simplify" a car by removing several pieces from the engine, like, say, the spark plugs, but that doesn't mean that now going from one place to another will be any simpler. In fact, it'll be much more difficult, because your "simplified" car won't move at all.


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## Sepia

ernest_ said:


> Sorry, but I think you're wrong here. You can "simplify" a car by removing several pieces from the engine, like, say, the spark plugs, but that doesn't mean that now going from one place to another will be any simpler. In fact, it'll be much more difficult, because your "simplified" car won't move at all.



You can do that to make the engine cheaper or to make it work better. Removing parts that are vital to its function is not simplification. It is damaging it.

You cannot make a language cheaper so the only logically justifiable target of such an action would be to make it work better. And a language does work better when everybody knows how to spell right. I don't know any language where even highly educated native speakers make as many spelling errors as in English. Orthografic rules in this language are not simple.


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## Athaulf

Sepia said:


> You can do that to make the engine cheaper or to make it work better. Removing parts that are vital to its function is not simplification. It is damaging it.



And it can be argued that the present English spelling system is vital to the functioning of the language. It keeps the language globally unified and mutually comprehensible in its written form, whereas phonetic spellings of various regional variants of English would be cryptic for readers elsewhere. 



> You cannot make a language cheaper so the only logically justifiable target of such an action would be to make it work better. And a language does work better when everybody knows how to spell right.


I'm afraid that "everybody knowing how to spell right" is a utopian goal. Even in languages with vastly more regular spelling, such as e.g. Spanish, uneducated people make spelling mistakes constantly. My native language (Croatian) has one of the most regular spelling systems in the world (I'm not exaggerating when I say this!), and yet, most people make plenty of mistakes. 



> I don't know any language where even highly educated native speakers make as many spelling errors as in English. Orthografic rules in this language are not simple.


This is contrary to my experience. If a university degree counts as "highly educated", I know lots of highly educated people in Croatia who keep making embarrassing spelling mistakes in their Croatian writing. In fact, from what I've seen, I wouldn't be surprised to find more spelling errors in the writing of a typical Croatian university student than a Canadian English-speaking one. 

One problem is that it's impossible to design a spelling system that would be free of problematic points where one has to choose between several equally reasonable options, one of which is then recognized as the "correct" one by sheer convention. In each of those cases, people will have to painstakingly learn a number of arbitrary rules, which will turn out to be too much effort for many. Overall, my impression is that speakers of languages other than English that use alphabets tend to grossly underestimate the difficulty of their own spelling systems.


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## Gnosi

It's not easy to compare a language to a car! No matter what, I agree with ernest. Changes in a language should be made very carefully in order not to damage it. Either we want this or not, a language evolves. Vocabulary changes, grammar and even spelling. The problem is that we can't  deliberately make changes for the sake of simplification.  Imagine adopting sms spelling for words thanks = thx, how are you? =how r u? etc! This would be language murder!


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## Sepia

Athaulf said:


> And it can be argued that the present English spelling system is vital to the functioning of the language. It keeps the language globally unified and mutually comprehensible in its written form, whereas phonetic spellings of various regional variants of English would be cryptic for readers elsewhere.
> ....




A lot of things can be argued - and that is exactly what I said further up thread. No real reforms are going to take place in any language because so few people can liberate themselves from dogmatism for 10 Minutes and try to imagine what might make things easier and more workable.

Sure a lot of spelling rules make logical sense, there are just too many of them that arrive at the same result.
Take the words

"kite"

and 

"night"

Obviously the pronounciation of one of these words has changed along the way and the spelling not, because then we probably would not have the same syllable pronounciation-wise but totally different spellings. All languages have such nonsense, but the worst I know are English and French, where you could find hundreds or even thousands of such examples. One more: (stake/steak). I am not the first one to notice this. Not that many years ago you'd still see the spelling "Nite Club" on signs - that is just about all of the reform (or at least an attempt) initiated by the Webster Brothers that survived till present days.


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## Athaulf

Sepia said:


> A lot of things can be argued - and that is exactly what I said further up thread. No real reforms are going to take place in any language because so few people can liberate themselves from dogmatism for 10 Minutes and try to imagine what might make things easier and more workable.



I don't think that there is any widespread dogmatism that prevents people from recognizing the problems of the present English spelling system. On the contrary, they are widely recognized and discussed, and in fact, I'd say that the situation is quite the opposite from what you write -- people are usually unaware of the difficulties and problems of _phonetic_ spelling systems.

I know very well how it is to use a regular, phonetic spelling system -- I grew up using one with my native language. Because of this, I am well aware of the difficulties that such a system presents in practice, and they are much greater than most proponents of English spelling reform believe. 



> Sure a lot of spelling rules make logical sense, there are just too many of them that arrive at the same result.
> Take the words
> 
> "kite"
> 
> and
> 
> "night"
> 
> Obviously the pronounciation of one of these words has changed along the way and the spelling not, because then we probably would not have the same syllable pronounciation-wise but totally different spellings.
> [...]


Such examples are often offered as an argument against the present English spelling, but similar arguments can also be used to show the insurmountable difficulties of devising a phonetic spelling system for English. 

For example, there are dialects of English in which _often _is pronounced exactly the same as _orphan_; there are also dialects in which _short_ is pronounced the same way as _shot_. For others, the pronunciation of these words is drastically different. Should these words then be spelled the same way, or differently in an "ideal" spelling system? If they are the same, then most speakers will perceive it as an "illogical" rule similar to the present examples you mention above. If they are spelled differently, then the speakers of dialects in which these words are homophones will make mistakes with them all the time. 

Because of cases like this, a "regular" spelling system for English could be satisfactory only for the speakers of some particular dialect of English. For others, it would be full of illogical and unpredictable spellings -- only somewhat less than the present one. We have a very similar situation in Croatian: despite the almost unprecedented regularity and simplicity of its spelling system, if your native dialect happens to have somewhat different pronunciation than the standard, it's extremely hard to learn to write without constant spelling mistakes.


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## Outsider

Athaulf said:


> I know very well how it is to use a regular, phonetic spelling system -- I grew up using one with my native language. Because of this, I am well aware of the difficulties that such a system presents in practice, and they are much greater than most proponents of English spelling reform believe.
> 
> [...] We have a very similar situation in Croatian: despite the almost unprecedented regularity and simplicity of its spelling system, if your native dialect happens to have somewhat different pronunciation than the standard, it's extremely hard to learn to write without constant spelling mistakes.


To be honest, I'm surprised by that statement. Is it all because of pronunciation differences between dialects?


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## Hakro

Sepia said:


> All languages have such nonsense, but the worst I know are English and French, where you could find hundreds or even thousands of such examples.


I agree 100%. I do translations both from English and from French, and it's hard to say which one is more difficult because of this "nonsense". In the French text I find every day mistakes of plural/singular as they never pronounce the plural -s (but the text is written by educated people). Now the translator has to know which one is right, singular on plural! 

English can be even even worse. I have often had an English text that is not a language: It's just words after words but they don't make any sentences.

As the most common English words have many totally different meanings it's practically impossible to find the idea that the writer may have had. 

Several times I have even asked natives to help but usually they can't understand what their compatriot has said. Funny, isn't it?


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## sound shift

Hakro said:


> English can be even even worse. I have often had an English text that is not a language: It's just words after words but they don't make any sentences.


That's a reflection of the level of literacy of the writer, not of the language itself. All languages possess grammar; it's just that some people don't know how to use it or that they write as they speak.


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## sound shift

Hakro said:


> Several times I have even asked natives to help but usually they can't understand what their compatriot has said. Funny, isn't it?


I don't agree with *usually *here. In my experience, native speakers from the same country understand each other in the great majority of cases.


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## ColdomadeusX

Jigoku no Tenshi said:


> What do you think about reforming your language? so It can be easier to learn not for you but for foreigners, I've seen how Japanese have Katakana, and how it is used for foreign words and you can perfectly start learning japanese using katakana and you can read and write without many problems. Chinese has a simplified system so they can write and read easier as well as foreigners, but what about your own language?
> 
> All of the vowel in Spanish are always pronounced just the same way, but consonants not, you can find "C","S","Z" which sound the same or not depending of the location, as well as "B" and "V" which always sound the same, no matter where you are, so Why don't we fuse all those letters in one?, Haven't anyone propose that?
> 
> And what about English, we have vowel sounds, who are just the same but when is written have different letters like "bird" and "word", and what about "blood" and "good" who are written very similar but the sound different, so Why don't we create a new vowel system so I can Identify a vowel sound just seeing it? and stop wondering how is it pronounced? is it like this? is it like that?
> 
> I can go on all night with other languages, so Have you ever thought about that? for foreigners? or even for yourselves?
> 
> Please If you understand me and you can explain it better, feel free for correcting it


 
I really wish that the English language would undergo reform. I mean, half of the words we come up with are weird. I know that knife used to actually be pronounced with a 'K' sound but we don't actually pronounce the K anymore so it's stupid and confusing to keep an extra letter in the word.And what about 'hamburger', 'pineapple', 'eggplant', and 'English muffins'?
There's no ham in hamburger, pine and apple have nothing to do with pineapple, eggplant doesn't even look like an egg and English muffins weren't invented in England.
There are also plenty of paradoxes that can be contributed to the English language-
*quicksand takes you down slowly
*A guinea pig is not from guinea and is no relative of the pig family
*the shape of a boxing ring is a square
*a teacher taught her students but a preacher didn't praught his sermon.
*plural of tooth is teeth then why isn't the plural of phone booth 'phone beeth'?
*A humanitarian doesn't eat humans so why do we call vegetable eaters vegetarians?
*And has anyone noticed that if you mix up the words in a sentence a bit you can make a sentence that makes perfect sense but has all the wrong connotations?
e.g. For sale: an antique desk suitable for lady with thick legs and large drawers. 

These are just some of the thing that the lunacy of the English language has created. Definitely makes me wonder what we could do to improve  it.


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## Hakro

sound shift said:


> That's a reflection of the level of literacy of the writer, not of the language itself. All languages possess grammar; it's just that some people don't know how to use it or that they write as they speak.


That's right, of course, but I haven't met a similar "non-sentences" in any other language as often as in English (I translate regularly also from Swedish, German and French).



> I don't agree with *usually *here. In my experience, native speakers from the same country understand each other in the great majority of cases.


I meant the cases where I didn't understand the phrases and had to ask help from natives. Usually they didn't understand either.


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## janecito

Jigoku no Tenshi said:


> All of the vowel in Spanish are always pronounced just the same way, but consonants not, you can find "C","S","Z" which sound the same or not depending of the location, as well as "B" and "V" which always sound the same, no matter where you are, so Why don't we fuse all those letters in one?, Haven't anyone propose that?


Sure there have been prepositions. Here is one.


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## Outsider

Well, in Portuguese (which, all in all, has a more phonetic orthography than English) I read as many if not more misspellings than in English. I think it's a matter of literacy. Our schools should be doing a better job than they currently are.


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## Josita

I agree with Outsider.Portuguese is a language a little hard to learn  (I'm portuguese-speaker...so I know what happens with my classmates,and with me.)For foreigners this situation must be very umconfortable.


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## Athaulf

Outsider said:


> Athaulf said:
> 
> 
> 
> I know very well how it is to use a regular, phonetic spelling system -- I grew up using one with my native language. Because of this, I am well aware of the difficulties that such a system presents in practice, and they are much greater than most proponents of English spelling reform believe.
> 
> [...] We have a very similar situation in Croatian: despite the almost unprecedented regularity and simplicity of its spelling system, if your native dialect happens to have somewhat different pronunciation than the standard, it's extremely hard to learn to write without constant spelling mistakes.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> To be honest, I'm surprised by that statement. Is it all because of pronunciation differences between dialects?
Click to expand...


The worst difficulties are due to phonological differences between dialects, but of course, they are not the only ones. There are also many problems that affect pretty much everyone -- for example, certain coined words don't follow the sound change rules of the spoken language, and thus soon end up pronounced differently from the way they're written (e.g. it's shamefully substandard to spell the word _pre*ds*jednik_ the way it's actually pronounced -- _pre*c*jednik_). Then there is the issue of various clitics that could be reasonably spelled either together with the host word or separate from it -- there's just no way to end up with anything other than a bunch of arbitrary rules there. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that because of regional variations in stress, people have different intuitions for what looks more reasonable if written separately.

A wholly different problems are various issues that have to be resolved by arbitrary conventions, such as capitalization and punctuation. They're certainly very hard -- I make more punctuation than spelling mistakes even when writing in English without a spelling checker. In Croatian, most of the punctuation and capitalization rules are so tangled and obscure that they are incomprehensible to anyone but a handful of "experts" on language, although of course they could be made simpler, as they are in e.g. English or German -- but these are still pretty hard to master, too. 

At the end of the day, even the simplest possible spelling system will still require an immense effort to master, and people will still end up writing with pretty much the same error rate in practice.


----------



## Athaulf

Hakro said:


> I agree 100%. I do translations both from English and from French, and it's hard to say which one is more difficult because of this "nonsense". In the French text I find every day mistakes of plural/singular as they never pronounce the plural -s (but the text is written by educated people). Now the translator has to know which one is right, singular on plural!



And if the singular and plural were spelled the same, as they are pronounced, how would the translator know which one is right then?


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## MarX

Hello!

I don't think Indonesian could be simplified any further.

What I could think of is distinguishing schwa e and open è in writing. But I personally don't think it's that necessary, since: 
1. there are variations in the pronounciation of e amongst Indonesians themselves. 
2. Moreover, the way it is right now is easier since we can use English keyboards without diacritics.

F could also be merged with V, since it's pronounced the same way, but if we would only follow the way people speak, then F and V would be written as P since many people pronounce them as P.

Otherwise Indonesian orthography is already as simple as it gets.


As for other languages, I wuldn't mind if in Persian, the two T, three S, and four Z letters be merged as one each.

Salam.


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## Orpington

How does this sound-

It was on the ferst dae of the nue yeer the anounsment was maed, allmoest siemultaeniusly frum three obzervatorys, that the moeshun of the planet Neptune, the outermoest of all planets that wheel about the Sun, had becum verry erratic. A retardaeshun in its velosity had bin suspected in Desember. Then a faent, remoet spek of liet was discuverd in the reejon of the perterbd planet. At ferst this did not cauz eny verry graet exsietment. Sieentific peepl, however, found the intelijens remarkabl enuf, eeven befor it becaem noen that the nue body was rapidly groeing larjer and brieter, and that its moeshun was qiet different frum the orderly progres of the planets.

It's a proposed spelling reform for English. I don't like it very much, it just seems like it was written by a 5 year old!


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## sokol

Orpington said:


> How does this sound-
> 
> It was on the ferst dae of the nue yeer the anounsment was maed, allmoest siemultaeniusly frum three obzervatorys, that the moeshun of the planet Neptune, the outermoest of all planets that wheel about the Sun, had becum verry erratic. A retardaeshun in its velosity had bin suspected in Desember. Then a faent, remoet spek of liet was discuverd in the reejon of the perterbd planet. At ferst this did not cauz eny verry graet exsietment. Sieentific peepl, however, found the intelijens remarkabl enuf, eeven befor it becaem noen that the nue body was rapidly groeing larjer and brieter, and that its moeshun was qiet different frum the orderly progres of the planets.
> 
> It's a proposed spelling reform for English. I don't like it very much, it just seems like it was written by a 5 year old!



Honestly?
I don't like it.
I would prefer:
It wos ón the ferst dei of the nu yia the anaunsment wos meid, almóst simultaeniasli fram thri (... and so on 
 So, a more phonological script.

However, in my opinion language reforms are a *real pain.*
I know what I'm speaking of, we now had several spelling reforms for German in the last years which were full of inconsequencies again and didn't make matters easier for foreigners, if you take a closer look.

*If *to reform a language, then, please, *radical.* Make it worth the trouble, is my motto. It would still be a *real *pain, but one you'd get over the reform it really would help.


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## Pedro y La Torre

Orpington said:


> How does this sound-
> 
> It was on the ferst dae of the nue yeer the anounsment was maed, allmoest siemultaeniusly frum three obzervatorys, that the moeshun of the planet Neptune, the outermoest of all planets that wheel about the Sun, had becum verry erratic. A retardaeshun in its velosity had bin suspected in Desember. Then a faent, remoet spek of liet was discuverd in the reejon of the perterbd planet. At ferst this did not cauz eny verry graet exsietment. Sieentific peepl, however, found the intelijens remarkabl enuf, eeven befor it becaem noen that the nue body was rapidly groeing larjer and brieter, and that its moeshun was qiet different frum the orderly progres of the planets.



Looks like Scots to me.



sokol said:


> Honestly?
> I don't like it.
> I would prefer:
> It wos ón the ferst dei of the nu yia the anaunsment wos meid, almóst simultaeniasli fram thri (... and so on



Irish people would not pronounce the majority of those words like that (for instance _ferst_ would sound more like _furst_), so how to come up with a reform which works for all English speakers? Impossible.


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## sokol

Pedro y La Torre said:


> Irish people would not pronounce the majority of those words like that (for instance _ferst_ would sound more like _furst_), so how to come up with a reform which works for all English speakers? Impossible.



You're right, of course.
An English spelling reform might as well result in splitting the English language clearly into several national standard languages (that is, at least - this to a degree is already the case but would become much more obvious if English were written phonologically).

And even though the Irish might just accept that 'reformed' English would be written 'the British ways' (because Gaelic might just be enough of a national marker that they wouldn't mind very much), this certainly would not be the case for British and American English: Americans surely would not accept a script orientated on British pronunciation, nor would the Brits.

As for the German language, a radical spelling reform could very well result in splitting the German language into three idioms (Austrian and Swiss German and the 'German' German variety).

Maybe this is the reason for the not-even-half-hearted attempts on spelling reforms for German.
The reformed principles on writing in German really don't make matters any easier for foreigners.


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## james.

As I read the numerous posts by non-native English speakers in this thread suggesting that spelling is an almost insurmountable and unparalleled obstacle to the acquisition of native-like proficiency in the English language, I can't help but notice that the frequent (and often rather egregious) errors in grammar and syntax (particularly regarding choice of prepositions, articles, conjunctions, and other 'structural' words [don't worry, Athaulf, your mastery of the language is thoroughly admirable]) committed by these posters are far more noticeable and obfuscatory than any occasional, minor accidents in spelling that may occur. I don't mean to offend or unnecessarily criticize these forum members, whose accomplishments in English I certainly admire, I merely want to point out that spelling does not seem to be a primary issue. 

    As for decoding, or pronouncing a word based on its spelling, I agree with Athaulf that a key element here is exposure to the spoken language, and also, in my experience, the degree to which a speaker's mother tongue is related to English. I have found that in European countries where a Germanic language is spoken and a vast majority of television is in English (e.g. Scandinavia), English pronunciation, whether in casual conversation or when reading aloud, tends to be excellent. In areas where such languages are spoken but where entertainment is in the native language or is dubbed (my experience with Germany, for the most part), pronunciation may be less consistently good. And in a country like Italy or Spain, where a distantly-related language is spoken and less English media are available, the pronunciation is generally much worse (no offense meant; Italians are still far better at English than most native English speakers are at any other language [yeah, we suck]). This comparison combines these two factors (aural exposure and language relation) haphazardly and is in no way scientific, of course, but is rather based on simple observations I have made over time. It is hard to control for the many factors involved with learning any aspect of a language, including decoding. 

         In addition to the above, I am opposed to any massive spelling reform simply because I believe that English orthography's relative faithfulness to its etymology should be something to value and cherish, rather than condemn and swiftly destroy. It may be a hassle for non-native speakers that the orthography is not equally faithful to its pronunciation, but as pronunciation is incredibly variable (far more so than a non-native speaker could initially grasp, and perhaps ever grasp) there's no way to systematically reform the spelling in a more phonological direction while making a significant improvement for more than a minority of native speakers, never mind foreign learners. So we're either stuck with spelling representing etymology often and pronunciation inconsistently, or, in the case of proposed reforms, condemned to an orthography that relates to neither historical nor contemporary language usage in any meaningful way. 
      English is in many ways a bizarre language, in which things have been thrown together from myriad sources and words have often taken a rather circuitous route in arriving at their modern forms. Altering any aspect of this could easily offset the precarious balance we've maintained, and turn the whole thing into an (even more) unintelligible mess. And despite all its irregularities, English seems to be doing fairly well; it's the most-learned second language in the world, has a wealth of important classic literature, and, for better or for worse, is generally accepted as the international lingua franca in most fields. I'd say there is no urgent need for any reform given the state of the language. It should be noted, however, that I am currently extremely fascinated by Old English (Englisc, or Anglo-Saxon), which has led me to fantasize about a movement in the opposite direction, toward a more faithful pronunciation of our language as it is written (pre-vowel shift style), and perhaps to an eventual return to and enrichment of original Germanic vocabulary and grammar. I realize this is even more impossible and impractical than a spelling reform, but this bias toward conservative, etymologically authentic forms of the language certainly shapes my opinion on the current question. As it stands, I, as a modern English speaker, enjoy the vagaries of pronunciation and spelling almost as much as I relish reading Shakespeare, Dryden, Chaucer, and the King James Bible, and I wouldn't give all that up just to make learning the language a littler easier for some frustrated Italians. 




[A quick final note regarding literacy: a cursory glance at a thematic map of worldwide literacy rates proves that this phenomenon (i.e. literacy) is completely independent of the individual language in question, and is governed entirely by educational infrastructure and economic circumstances. Such a map can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy

Orwell noted in his Homage to Catalonia that the literacy rates among the Spaniards he met at the time of the Spanish Civil War were strikingly low (I can't remember the figure exactly), despite the consistent phonetic spelling of the language. And illiteracy rates in several Latin American countries hover around 15%, compared to three percent in the United States and other 'developed' countries (however condescending and Jingoistic that term may be). If there are minute, inherent differences in the challenge of obtaining literacy between languages, which I'm not willing to allow without further scientific proof (controlling for the manifold variables), these are obviously completely overshadowed by these greater societal disparities that seem to actually determine literacy rates.]


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## aleCcowaN

james. said:


> ...
> 
> I have found that in European countries where a Germanic language is spoken and a vast majority of television is in English (e.g. Scandinavia), English pronunciation, whether in casual conversation or when reading aloud, tends to be excellent. In areas where such languages are spoken but where entertainment is in the native language or is dubbed (my experience with Germany, for the most part), pronunciation may be less consistently good. And in a country like Italy or Spain, where a distantly-related language is spoken and less English media are available, the pronunciation is generally much worse (no offense meant; Italians are still far better at English than most native English speakers are at any other language [yeah, we suck]). ...


Regarding the thread's subject, I think the keywords here are language, sounds and alphabet. Both Japanese hiragana and Latin alphabet match quite well the sounds their languages use. Italian and Spanish, as heirs of Latin, kept the simple sounds of it (probably the "official" languages even cast some sounds to the alphabet and end up something started by imperial times) and that's why Italian and Spanish are so "phonetic". Many other languages (including dialects and other Neolatin  languages, even in Spain and Italy) kept more sounds than those symbolize by Latin (or Greek) letters and used tricks, like grouping letters (French ou and u for two different vowels, taken from Greek), or adapted the alphabet to their language (like Russian). The other issue is the historical integration of a language departing from regional varieties or by cultural layers with different sounds and writing standards.

Particularly, the Anglo-Saxon kept area in England, the "Danelaw", and the old French brought by Normans, resulted in some extraordinary developments that make English a language having a verbal system almost without a trace of conjugations, but with people who say "apples" and write "bananas", as the joke tells.

In the same way that almost everybody here using the Latin alphabet have the basic Qwerty keyboard and are not switching to the more efficient Dvorak keyboard, just because Qwerty was there and we have already learnt how to use it, trying to change a language like English to another alphabet with its 12 vowels, or adopt a new standardized spelling using the Latin alphabet, isn't practical at all, as "spelling does not seem to be a primary issue."

Anyway, in the years I was looking for a language which let it to be learnt by me -later I discovered that it's me who couldn't learn a language-, I studied Japanese a few months and I thought that I would never learn to write in hiragana. Two weeks later I was reading and writing quite slow yet, but I was doing it. Learning English spelling is far more difficult.

In a similar fashion, it was quite simple to my Spanish tongue to get used to Japanese sounds, as there were only 2 or 3 sounds new to me. The syllabic rhythm of both languages also helped.

It's no wonder that speakers of Germanic languages which share many sounds and a rhythm beaten by the stressed syllable have less struggle to pronounce English, while Spanish and Italian speakers continue to say "good-a-books" and cursing and insulting by means of pieces of fabric for beds, pieces of paper or suggesting others to read the frequently asked questions, alone or with their mothers.


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## cherine

*After 134 posts, we have to close this interesting thread because it doesn't follow the current forum's guidelines.*

*Thank you all for and interesting discussion, and for you understanding.*

*Cherine.*


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