LL-L "Orthography" 2006.01.08 (02) [E]

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A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) N=Northumbrian
S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic V=(West) Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeeuws)
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   L O W L A N D S - L * 08 January 2006 * Volume 02
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Orthography" 2006.01.07 (03) [E]

> From: Henry Pijffers <henry at saxnot.com>
> Subject: LL-L "Orthography" 2006.01.07 (02) [E]
>
> Sandy wrote:
>
>> I think the "ghoti" people are arguing from the position that a good 
>> spelling system is merely a matter of phonemics: the closer the 
>> spelling comes to the sound of the language, the better.

No, I mean phonemics.

>> But I think there are many examples in real languages that show that 
>> less phonemic, more grammatically-derived features often make sense
>
> <snip/>
>
>> An example from English is the spelling of plurals, where <s> is 
>> written for both /s/ and /z/ without confusion.
>>
> Is this really a grammar rule? Isn't it just phonemics at work? I 
> mean, /s/ and /z/ are really just one phoneme in English (or at least 
> in plural endings), right? (Please correct me if I'm wrong)

No, it's two phonemes, but one morpheme.

>> Another way for spellings to be irregular in a useful way is to make 
>> them more economical. For example, in English we write "be", "we", 
>> "he" "she" rather than the more regular "bee" "wee" "hee" "shee".
>
> I have a feeling that the reason is not economics, but history. 
> However, I have no data at hand to support this, so feel free to 
> ignore my remark.
>
Yes, it's historical. If the rule was consciously derived as an economic 
measure then "see" would probably also be written as "se".

In older documents in English (actually, I've probably read more in 
Scots, so it's maybe that), many words were spelled inconsistently and 
we could have "se" or "see" and so on (though at first doubling of 
letters was rare). Possibly experienced copyists decided they'd rather 
use fewer letters than more, so a tendency towards economy came in for 
frequently-used words.

>> I also think that irregularities aren't important in rare words. 
>> There is no point in regularising exotic and unusual borrowings from 
>> other languages, for example, if most English speakers would be so 
>> unaccustomed to them that they'd more likely be copying them over 
>> from somewhere than using them from their active vocabulary.
>>
> Sandy, would you please go talk to the Taalunie? They don't seem to 
> have gotten that. ;)

I've just obtained a copy of Henry Rogers' "Writing Systems: A 
Linguistic Approach" (Blackwell, 2005, ISBN 0-631-23464-0). When it 
comes to discussing spelling reform, he contrasts the possibility of 
English spelling reform with Dutch, saying that while in Dutch it was 
practical, in English it isn't (he also discusses why character 
simplification in Chinese was practical).

Reasons he gives for spelling reform in English being impractical 
(though some of them apply to other languages) are:

    o    most people are put off by unusual spellings;
    o    we've no sense of people in English-speaking
         countries being held back in science, arts
         or commerce due to extra time spent learning
         to read and write;
    o    dialect differences even amongst those who
         consider themselves to be speaking a standard
         form of the language are many and significant:
             - <ka> or <kar> for car?
             - <soder> or <solder> for solder?
    o    evidence from psychology suggest that many
         of the irregularities in English spelling make
         reading easier: for example, when homophones
         are spelled differently the information is
         processed slightly faster by the reader;
    o    there's so much literature in English that
         students and many others would have to be
         able to read both systems for many decades;
    o    English is spread over so many countries that
         there's a danger that political factors would
         result in a hodgepodge of new standards.

His conclusion is that there's a danger of fragmenting a stable system, 
and that at present there's no viable movement to reform English spelling.

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

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