Merkins

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:56 PM -0500 10/19/06, Matthew Gordon wrote:
>The trouble is that many of the pronunciation phenomena that Tom is
>concerned by are learned well before children enter the school system. So, I
>propose we establish baby farms where infants can be shipped soon after
>birth and be raised in a phonologically sterile environment, being exposed
>only to pronunciations consistent with tradspel. The only difficulty with
>this, as far as I can tell, is that we'd have to eliminate all social
>divisions as well just to make sure our work didn't get undone later in
>life, since pronunciation (like other components of language) is often
>employed as a social symbol marking broad categories like class and gender
>as well as local categories like jocks, burnouts, etc.

And if we keep them in those sterile environments (with lots of
security fences to make sure they don't stray), that will assure the
postulated reduction in crime, thereby supporting the correlation
between the alphabetic principle and law-abiding behavior.

L

>
>On 10/19/06 11:40 AM, "Tom Zurinskas" <truespel at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:
>
>>  I don't think changing traditional spelling (tradspel) is doable.  Ted
>>  Roosevelt in consort with Andrew Carnegie tried and couldn't change a word,
>>  even through an executive order.  Webster was the last success, at least in
>>  USA.
>>
>>  So the only thing possible to influence is pronunciation, keeping it
>>  consistent with tradspel to help learners by maintaining letter sound
>>  correspondance.  But I see no mechanism to do that except for our schools.
>>  Now that "phonemic awareness" (Stanovich) is seen to be the "single most
>>  important attribute exhibited by successful readers" (to paraphrase), there
>>  may be more action in that area.  I think the trend away from phonics in the
>>  past for early reading teachers has fostered disparate pronunciations.  I
>>  advocate for USA English the Writing to Read approach by IBM of the 80's,
>>  only using truespel, which has no special symbols.
>>
>>  "Merkins".  Is that an Ausy term?
>>
>>  Tom Z
>>
>
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org