English Spelling Reform

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Wut arr yer thots on Inglish speling reform?

i would have phrased it as:

Wût är jyr thotz än inglış spelin riform?

Nah

if we ever ended up reforming english it would be interesting, yet a a lot tougher to implement a completely new writing system like Deseret than to rely on the inflexible latin plus diacritics and digraphs. it would be cool but it likely wouldn't really be convenient. I could make one.

yes, there are myriads of obstacles, imagine having to completely overhaul english curriculums and to re-write thousands of texts, and even the mindsets unwilling to let go of their letters. i know i would take forever to change, even without fancy new writing systems.

and standardization tends to favor one dialect over all others, for English, a global language, which one is that?

Wut or yohr Thots on Inglish speling reefohrm?

I’d like someþing in ðis spirit. My preferences are a bit different, ðough, and everybody can be expected to have ðeir own.

like Icelandic? ^^ a little while back, i got into the habit of using Theta θ to represent it's respective IPA symbol, instead of writing down "th".
i did wonder if it was in fact, a shortcut at all, and i wasn't just spending the same amount of time, or even more to write down θ than "th". time conservation was the whole point, as i'm rather slow to take notes in class and catch up.

i don't think it was necessary to distinguish in writing between [ð] and [θ] so i used theta for both. ð, if written in a shorter amount of time than th would probably just look like a d. and a thorn would look like a p.

eh. some people cross their zeroes and that could confuse. i'm just glad these were notes and i wasn't actually turning these in.

Frankly I'm going to have to agree with Kiprobalhato. It'd be a lot of work to make an alphabet and writing system that works for most of the most popular English dialects/accents. But I still love the idea of English spelling reform
Okay, here's my go at a reform:

Wat r ur thots on nglish spllng refrm ?

Okay, I'll admit it, I ripped off of internet speak a little bit

An IPA-like or completely phonetic alphabet wouldn't be the best in terms of being phonetic, albeit it would still be a massive improvement. You would need something with a bit more rules (rules which accommodate the major pattern of pronunciation differences). For example, instead of having only ⟨s⟩ represent the sound /s/, we might have ⟨sz⟩ which might represent /s/ in one dialect and /z/ in another and ⟨aa⟩ which represents /ɑː/ in one and /eɪ/ in another. So the word "vase" would be uniformly spelled ⟨vaasz⟩ and correctly pronounced as /vɑːz/ or /veɪs/, depending on the dialect.

Equally important is ensuring the written language looks nice, and accounting for sound mutations within the language. Some palatalization examples: ⟨fuse⟩→⟨fusion⟩, ⟨submit⟩→⟨submission⟩; vowel reduction examples: ⟨photograph⟩ pronounced FOH-tuh-graf (-toh-), and ⟨photography⟩ pronounced fuh-TAH-gruh-fee (-gra-). A lot of vowels like to reduce to /ə/ (uh) when not stressed. I suppose in the case of the vowel reduction we would not have to worry too much, because it is just that -- a reduction (when articulated, the vowels return to their normal sounds).

The palatalization examples I gave reduce to voiced and unvoiced /ʒ/ and /ʃ/ (the "sh" sound). So we could have ⟨oe⟩ for /ʌ/ and ⟨uo⟩ for /ju/ and consonant+⟨jj⟩ being ⟨consonant⟩ and consonant+⟨jj⟩ followed by a letter being either /ʒ/ or /ʃ/ followed by the letter, giving us the pairs ⟨soebmitjj⟩ and ⟨soebmitjjoen⟩ and ⟨fuozjj⟩ and ⟨fuozjjoen⟩. Note that we had /ʒ/ and /ʃ/ represented by the same symbol: I propose that we remove the distinction between /ʒ/ and /ʃ/, much like we have going for /ð/ and /θ/.

As for making sure the language looks nice, I suggest taking influences from Polish, Old English, French, Latin, German, Old Norse, & friends. The Gaelic languages' writing systems have something almost similar in the sense that they have a complex system with rules which make letter/letter-combinations change what they represent. Google's phonetic system is also pretty good now that I think about it.

Going back to vowels again, they would be fairly tricky. Germanic languages, such as English, like their vowels changes! Maybe those would simply be a thing to memorize. It would, however, be just substituting memorization of pronunciation with memorization of spelling. If the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis/linguistic relativity is true ("language shapes the way you think") then I suppose that it would be better to memorize pronunciation, because that would perhaps allow us to mentally "separate" the written language from the spoken one (which might be true of English how it is right now).

i'm a bit confused by your first sentence...an alphabet in which every single little sound is written down wouldn't be convenient for a language with so many dialects, and hence many different accents? if so then i agree completely. it would likely be convenient for a very isolated, homogenous language, like one belonging to amazon natives or such. (then again there are some of those that don't have a writing system at all) more regular rules, but still accommodating the huge variety in spelling. yep.
and also, lots of older computers can't 'handle' the IPA symbols, showing up as unidentified squares.



interesting... you've already proposed eliminating a distinction between /ʃ/ and voiced /ʒ/, any others? i'm not sure how this would work out in the short run, and it may be a little crazy, hah, but how about reducing the amount of characters and making only one for both VOICED and UNVOICED variants of a phone? like, say, one character for voiced /v/ and unvoiced /f/ ? unvoiced /k/ and voiced /g/?

i know that hebrew does something similar with פ, כ, and ב that represent both the fricative and plosive (stop) sounds and often distinguished with a dagesh for the latter, maybe this could be an idea, i don't know. using some sort of diacritic or other mark to distinguish it of course.

That’s what SAMPA and X-SAMPA were devised for

Haha as a language freak I love the idea of a reform, even though I know it could never happen. I would love to see an entirely phonetic writing system with EACH dialect written differently. Global English could however continue to be written the same way as it is now so that we have a global language.

I've come up with many reforms over the years, I'll post two examples here with the sentences "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" and "Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?". The most extreme and most moderate of my reforms (for my dialect of American english):

most extreme:
Đŭ kwīk bräu̩wn faks ǧŭmpt ŭ́u̩wvř ðŭ léījzij dag.
Mí̴rř mí̴rř an ðŭ waɫ, hīu̩w īz ðŭ fē̃́rīst ŭv ðēm aɫ?
(don't really remember this reform 100% as it has been a while since I used it.. it also has diacritics marking aspiration but I can't be bothered including them here)
(fun fact: my very first reform had the <o> of my dialect represented with the character <w̩̆>... in the above example <o> is represented by the triphthong <ŭu̩w> with an acute accent marking stress)

most moderate:
Đë kwik brauwn faks ǰëmpt ouwvř đë leijzij dag.
Mirř mirř an đë wal, huw iz đë ferist ëv đem al?
(Some of these diacritics are however kinda rare and I'd be OK with replacing some of them with doubled letters, e.g. [dʒ͡]= <jj> instead of <ǰ>, [ɚ]= <rr> instead of <ř>, [ð]= <dd> instead of <đ>, etc. Even though I have a huge fetish for diacritics and would prefer for English to have a million of them like Vietnamese

first of all, i see your own username has a diacritic in it! neat. when i first joined this site, i tried to join under "Kipróbálható" ("tryable" in hungarian) but the old WP software would not allow diacritics in usernames...

yes, we need a global variety! but, where do we draw the line between dialects, with regards to which one gets its own orthography? isoglosses perhaps?



here is my own go at those two phrases..

> Θê kwık braun fäx djêmpt ouvêr θê lejzi däg.

> Mirɾ mirɾ än θê wäɫ, hu ız θê ferıst êv θem äɫ?

diacritics are a wonderful little invention and distinguish between multiple pronunciations of one letter better than pretty much any other orthographic device, but personally they are a bit hard on my eyes and tiny which is why i like to mix in digraphs as well, and, greek letter theta for 'th' (no distinction between [ð] and [θ]) .

while i could throw out 'c' and 'q' since most of the time they are just alternate ways to spell [k] (with exceptions when 'c' spells [s] like in cell), maybe i could use something like 'q' to write [tʃ]?

i'll keep x as a way to write [ks].

I'm fine with the English language the way it is.

There have been many attempts at spelling reform since at least the 19th century.

None have worked too well.

We did clear up an anarchic spelling situation by about the 18th century. Before then, especially before the 17th century, the spelling was absolutely anarchic. You might have ten different spellings of one word within a few pages of text!

mother of god.