Merkins

[Matthew Gordon]

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.


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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