american english spelling reform

Good luck!

I'm not. It's bad enough some college professors are accepting papers written in text-speak. Now you want to do that?

No thank you.

i'm not talking about using internet-slang!
i'm referring to the standardaization of spelling in the english languaj such as was done in german a few years ago.

of what function is fifteen different ways to spell the same vowel-sound?

standardization of spelling and phonetic clusters enhances the clarity and readability of the languaj.

When it takes forever to figure out what "languaj" is? And "ua" would need to be changed to something else too because it's a sound in and of itself, both letters aren't pronounced. So you're contradicting yourself even there.

LanguaGE is what it is. There is fluidity yes, but... If you want to change the languaGE, go get your doctorate in it. Don't torture the reading public.

You asked who was with you. I'm just saying I'm not. I think the languaGE is fine as it is.

i think you are on your own, mostly, yes.
i'm studying linguistics at university, actually. so in wider terms, you are in good company.

but i warn you that every previous attempt has fallen straight on its face!

But the langwich is already changing, on the sly. Just drive down a road and look at all the 4 sale and 4 rent signs, not to mention such spellings as pix, thanx, thru, et al.

But change isn't always a good thing. Look at all the examples you used. HORRIBLE.

Oh, I don't know, I support people's decisions to use language however they please, but I've always liked how difficult English is. I think of it as a persnickety old aunt. Either that, or one of those grouchy mentor figures whose respect I have to earn before he teaches me anything.

Although the phrase "stupid clusters of letters lent us by the french" made me laugh out loud and wake up my roommate.

Fluency is the result of no one being after you.
-Standard Schafer

You haven't lived until you try writing in English when it is not your native language.

I love English! Although sometime I think maybe we should get rid of "ch"s and just have the "c" make that sound, but I would never really want that.
Although stupid clusters of letters lent us by the French, and all the other weird things that make out language so impossible, are annoying, they're also what make our language so beautiful! Yes, I did it. I called English beautiful. So there. :P

Sometimes I wonder if my life isn't really just one really really extended metaphor.

I definitely agree with you Kafira Dallia! :)

If we're gonna dump all the French Imports, then I say we purge all the Latinates we've got hanging around. IF this is English, and we want to get rid of all things not English then let's start with that!

And the German words!
And the Japanese!
And the Spanish!

English only.

now, where's the sarcasm smilie?

haha.. english only! i haven't laughed so hard for a while.

there is no such thing as english, really. we are language made up of several different languages throughout time.

we started off (in england) with the celts, and celtic.
then the romans came (several times) and brought us latin.
then the saxons (later anglo-saxons, giving us the name ENGland and ENGlish), the jutes et al invaded, giving us germanic languages.
and dont' forget the vikings (again, several times - or at least two anyway) giving us old norse.

if you want to draw a proto language tree for english you will want a nice big piece of paper and plenty of patience.

i have nothing against language change and people using language in a way that they WANT to use it (as long as they don't expect people to a} LIKE it or b} UNDERSTAND it when they use it) but i definitely DO have something against people saying that our language is a bastard, mongrel of a language, of which the 'non english' constituents ought to be purged.

because, basically, it's a geo-centric, xenophobic and stupid thing to say.

the end.

One of the things that I truly love about English is looking up where words come from. I just love it. Especially words that get used everyday- like pajamma's. For us, that's sleep wear, in the original language it means pants.

Feel free to find out what that original language is.

I'm with one of the posters above, our language is beautiful. it takes a taste of the world and makes it something new.

Is there a language that ours hasn't been touched by and touched? I read once that our language is the largest in the world. I like that we have more words at our disposal than other languages.

No, I take that back, I love that. And I don't really care too much if it's true or not.

and The. I love the.

Not every language has a The, you know.

I don't get why we'd want to restrict it, to cut it down to a base level?

No, we should grow our language. We should add to it everyday. Not just slang, which is also great, but hard words and soft words, and words that sound like one thing but mean another. We should add words for the different types of snow, for different types of heat, for the different types of anything!

I demand more words! Words for whom it may concern! And all spelt differently!

They actually just did that in french too. Which is lame, because it's my major, so now I have to learn all these new spellings.
All because people don't know how to spell the 'real' way, so they're 'simplifying' it.
If that happened in English, it would be like admitting defeat.
Never surrender!

that brings up another great point, actually.
english is the current world language - more people speak english as a second or foreign language than people speak it as a native language.
isn't that amazing? and people are learning it every day, from a very young age.

to completely overhaul it, you would disillusion MILLIONS of people and kids who thought they were doing so well getting the hang of "ough" and "augh".
anyway - if they CAN get the hang of it, why are WE (the assumedly native speakers) complaining about it??

*whines* But it's not FAIR!!! I'm special and I can do anything. My mommy said so!! Here *holds out cell phone* She wants to talk to you.

:P

Sorry...I had to reenact something from 60 Minutes last night. They did a report on Millenials hitting college and the work force, and my jaw hit the floor when they talked with college professors and bosses who had been handed the phone to talk to millenial parents because the precious baby got a bad grade or not so glowing review. Seriously.

I think the sense of "it's too hard, make it easier" entitlement has gone too far. There are kids on the Upper West Side of Manhattan who are perfectly "normal" in the development range, but they are modified out the butt on tests and stuff because Mommy and Daddy figured out more time will help Baby get higher scores...and they talked someone into saying their precious needs double time on exams. Some of them are more modified than kids I work with who genuinely NEED it because of psychological anf cognitive issues.

Ok... I'm getting off track here. But you have an excellent point. If non-native English speakers can master all our blends and dipthongs and stuff, why can't we???

if you will notice that in the the word "language" you have the letter 'g' used to create two different sounds. a move towards more consistent spelling would require a 'j' to be a palatal approximant and a 'g' to be a voiced velar plosive.

if you will read closely, i think you will find that the 'ua' diphthong is indeed pronounced in the word "language."

furthermore, if such changes were undertaken it would need to be done gradually, so i don't believe i am contradicting myself. thank you, i am working on getting a phD, i appreciate the further encouragement to do so.

i love english too.

i agree with you about the letter 'c.'

'k' can represent the voiceless velar plosive
's' can represent the voiceless alveolar fricative
and 'c' could represent the voiceless palatal fricative.

skinny bee--

i'm really not complaining, you know. but many modern languages have consistency between spelling and speaking and i think we could improve the relationship between print and voice.

skinny bee--

i'm really not complaining, you know. but many modern languages have consistency between spelling and speaking and i think we could improve the relationship between print and voice.

also-- i was not suggesting that by purging some of the awkward french formations i was somehow deriving a "pure" form of the english language. i am well aware of the history of the language as so succinctly summarized by skinny bee. english is a beautiful amalgam of these various languages and it is absurd to think of anything as 'english' or 'non-english,' because we do absorb many words from other languages and i like that.

but if we were at liberty to spell things more closely to the way we spoke them instead of conforming to this very rigid system of "correct" and "incorrect" spelling, i believe the writer would ultimately achieve more clarity and readability. and clarity should be the primary directive of any writer.

i would like to point out, also, that the concept of "correct" spelling did not exist in the golden age of english literature and william shakespeare spelled his own name several different ways. so be careful not to resort to linguistic fascism as tho these conventions to which we subscribe were somehow fixed and immovable.

~peace~

http://www.phrasebase.com/blog/one-way-to-simplify-english.html

ryan started the fire.

If you want to write phonetically, you need more letters

Try surfing wikipedia etc. about written languages. I believe you'll find out that there are three types of scripts, of which my blunted recollection is:

1. Logographic like Chinese characters or Japanese kanji. Logographic scripts have 1,500 to 2,000 symbols.

2. Phonetic like Japanese kana. Phonetic scripts have 40 to 50 symbols

3. Alphabetic like English. Alphabetic scripts have 20 to 30 symbols

Also, I believe scholars now believe that there are no written languages that precede their spoken equivalents.

I'm no linguist and some of the above may be incorrect or incomplete. Nevertheless, the argument that English should be spelt as it sounds is fundamentally bogus because we do not have enough letters for that.

---
2003 Vindicta, 2004 Clown Down, 2005 Lavender Latté, 2006 Ulysses not found, 2007 The Spike Garden

2003 Vindicta, 2004 Clown Down, 2005 Lavender Latté, 2006 Ulysses not found, 2007 The Spike Garden

i agree with you-- i think ezra pound was the poet who invented a new alphabet that approximates actual english vowel sounds.

while i agree that many sounds, especially vowel sounds, in english are not matched by the alphabet we have, small, subtle changes like eliminating "ght" and other silent consonents is just a step in the direction of more uniformity and clarity. actually, i'm less concerned with phonetic approximation and more concerned with consistency. pick a method and go with it, english! i'm, ready to evolve.

interestingly, the "ough" was once pronounced with a gutteral aspirant and thus, did serve a purpose. but our speech has fast outpaced our writing.

ultimately, no system would be perfect, especially when you take into account the variance in dialect, but on the other hand, why blindly accept things as they are? no one need agree with me, but i intend to spell things my own way, thank you very much.

It's tempting to want to redo how we spell stuff, but I think it would just make everything look too clinical. The page wouldn't breath, to me.
And also, I've always kind of snickered at France with there whole language committee to keep "the purity of the French language." Always thought it was rather snooty of them. Although spelling reform would be different, it would still reek of snootiness to me.

Sometimes I wonder if my life isn't really just one really really extended metaphor.

i'm really not looking for purity or snootiness.

i'm also not looking for 'fonetik aproximashuns' because i think that looks silly.

there are certain rules such as using a silent 'e' at the end to make the primary vowel long. this is not a phonetic representation, but it is a convention which we understand. but then there are many exceptions to the rule.

why use five letters to make the same sound which one letter makes?

i don't believe my way of writing is at all clinical or uptite. read some of my excerpts and see what you think.

I love English for its bastardness, and at the same time, I love "modern" French for its lovely adherence to rules. They are what they are; one which, as a common quote mentions, holds other languages up in the alley and rifles their pockets for spare words, and another which has an entire pool of scholars devoted to keeping the language "pure" (if nothing else, the result of their devotion does make it easier for me to learn French).

Yet, the Academie Francaise slowly, slowly losing that battle, given the way English and other words continually creep into everyday French. It's taken nearly 400 years, but it is on its way.

Languages yearn to change and evolve and blend, and speech always moves faster than writing. There's no need to make arbitrary changes (and when you already have well established spellings, changing them just because you happen to prefer phonetic spellings is indeed arbitrary) on a wide scale. The changes will come as they're needed/wanted. If they didn't, we wouldn't already have spelling differences between US and UK English. Personally, I love all the random spellings of words, and the way you can almost see the etymology of some of them because we *haven't* converted them to some phonetic rule of thumb.

Besides, it would make spelling bees insanely boring (or non-existant). ;)

~L.A.

~L.A.
Auburn, Alabama ML

Did you know there is, or at least was about 25 years ago, a movement in Japan to convert the Japanese to writing in "Romaji," or "Roman" letters (that's our ABC that we use in English, French etc., of course) instead of their beautiful pictographic characters which they borrowed from the Chinese a thousand or so years ago, or the simplified phonetic/syllabary "kana" script which originated from these characters?

It's kind of a quirky little group of enthusiasts--more of an intellectual club than anything else, was the impression I got. I don't think it will ever really catch on, but if it did, it would simplify the Japanese school system wonderfully. It takes those poor kids 12 years just to learn all the characters, including the obscure ones they may never run into again. Imagine if it took you 12 years to learn how to spell!

But most Japanese love their characters, as they have more personality than our simple phonetic letters that express only sounds, instead of nuances of feeling.

"If a teacher is just a frustrated actor, is an actor also a frustrated teacher?"

If Teddy Roosevelt couldn't change spelling, you surely can't.

We are the country that refuses to go metric afterall. God bless us for not falling in line with the silly "easier to convert" argument.