LL-L "Orthography" 2006.01.15 (03) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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   L O W L A N D S - L * 15 January 2006 * Volume 03
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From: Gary Taylor <gary_taylor_98 at yahoo.com>
Subject: LL-L Orthography

Hi All

Sandy made the point

"Why? Simple enough: English isn't the mother tongue
of any of us! It
should be up to those who do have English as their
mother tongue -
whether Scottish, English, American, Australian or
whatever."

with regards changing the English orthography.

So a native speakers opinions.

I think I've mentioned before that I'm (perhaps
surprisingly) not totally in favour of reforming the
spelling system in English (although I am in favour of
accurately portraying words with their present quirky
spellings to represent current language use - as in
the recent 'would of' discussion). This has a number
of reasons.

Firstly, I think the task would be a mammoth one, it's
not half as simple as German spelling reforms changing
a few ß into ss and the like (OK - I've oversimplified
it a bit...). There would be a huge amount of words in
the English language which would be affected by
spelling reforms. OK, I guess a new generation growing
up would learn the new spellings and it would probably
make their task much easier, so let's get onto a
couple of other points.

English has more written in it than any other
language. A new generation growing up learning the
reformed spellings, will also have to learn the older
spellings to function in the real world. If a learner
has for example the word 'right' written as
'rait/rite' or whatever, they would probably struggle
to understand and read texts with the word spelt
'right'. I don't see this as something that will be
eliminated in just a couple of years - this would
stretch on for at least a century if not more. The
only way to remedy this would be to 'translate' older
books and the like into this modern English spelling,
which would be a huge expense.

The next point, which has been made already, is which
dialect? English is unfortunately not a language which
shares a common phonology everywhere you go. There
would at least have to be different spelling systems
between different countries if not different regions.
I know this exists to a certain extent already in
differences between British and American etc
spellings, however, national spelling reforms will
accentuate the differences between the countries
rather than unifying the language.

Just one point in many is spellings of words with a
final 'r'. In American there wouldn't be a problem, as
this is always pronounced as an 'r' (although even
here this is an over-generalisation), however in
England English this is not the case, and for the vast
majority of English the words 'dear' and 'idea' rhyme
(yes with intrusive 'r' when followed by a vowel). So
writing these words as say 'dir' and 'aidia' is not
representing England English. On the other hand, for a
lot of Americans there's no difference in
pronunciation between the words 'Mary' and 'merry', in
British English there is a clear difference. This is
why different nations would probably have to adopt
different reformed spelling systems. One of the 'good'
things about the current spelling system is that it
favours no current dialect, and so must be learnt by
all English speakers - none of us have it easy.

The most common vowel in English is the schwa, which
appears in a huge amount of unstressed syllables. If
this was to be represented in a reformed orthography
then the ties between certain words would be less
obvious. We'd have for derivatives of 'photo',  say,
'fëutëu', 'fëutëgraaf', 'fëtogrëfi' and 'fëtogrëfë',
or else there would have to be some way of expressing
the accentuated syllable in writing. Being able to
determine in which syllable a word is stressed is not
something that comes automatically to the majority of
English speakers, this would however have to be done
in a reformed spelling system.

Saying all this though, dialect writing to express
actual sounds made would probably be easier if there
was a lot more regularity in English spelling, and I
only have this opinion about English because I think
it's gone too long without being reformed which has
only intensified the problem leaving the language in
an irreparable state. A language which has a fairly
'phonetic' spelling system, such as German, can only
benefit by occassional updates, otherwise it will end
up taking the path of English or Danish, where the
written form no longer accurately represents the
spoken form. But then, I'd probably have a different
more emotive opinion if German was my mother tongue.

And languages such as Scots or Low Saxon which do not
at present have a universally accepted orthography,
will only benefit from adopting a phonemically based
one - albeit probably a biased one.

If there will ever be a major spelling reform in
English, then I would have to get used to it and would
probably enjoy learning it, as that's the kind of guy
I am, however, I also kind of think - what's the
point?

Gary

http://hometown.aol.com/taylor16471/myhomepage/index.html 

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