Bee Season: The annual spelling bee brings out protesters as well as nerds

Thu May 31 17:13:31 UTC 2007

Perhaps the words are spelled correctly and
phonetically, and we just mispronounce them.

--- Tom Zurinskas <truespel at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:

> Some languages don't have spelling bees, because
> theirs is spelled so
> phonetically consistently.
>
> I’ve been a member of the Simplified Spelling
> Society for 10 years now.
> It’s a group of a few hundred mostly UK members
> based in London.  It’s been
> in business for 99 years, with a treasury of over
> $600,000 to spend.  Its
> chief benefactor was Andrew Carnegie, who at the
> turn of the century was the
> world’s richest man.  However, he in consort with
> Theodore Roosevelt, who
> actually wrote and rescinded an executive order on
> spelling simplification
> for gov documents, didn’t manage to change anything.
>
> Yet, the SSS keeps trying and has come up with
> various plans - for good
> reason.  It’s been shown that English has twice the
> dyslexics as a
> phonetically consistently spelled languages such as
> Italian, Paulescu 2001.
> Paulescu thinks that English spelling is the cause.
> But is it the cause or
> is it caused by teachers leaving phonetics behind in
> initial reading
> instruction favoring “whole language” instruction,
> which forbids saying that
> letters stand for sounds (the alphabetical
> principle)?  Perhaps more the
> latter than the former.
>
> My creation is a simple English friendly phonetic
> system with a way to show
> stress in a word.  This makes it the first English
> “pronunciation guide
> writing system”.  (It follows present rules of
> punctuation and
> capitalization for sentence structure).  Having
> joined the SSS I found
> others had the same spellings for phonemes that I
> “postinvented”.  So I was
> happy that I had a reasonable system designed with
> minimal conflict with
> traditional spelling (tradspel) and thus proceeded
> to rewrite the English
> language (60 k words) over a couple years in
> truespel.  It’s in spreadsheet
> form, enabling various database analyses such as are
> in my books, and the
> free converters at truespel.com for text and URL
> sites.
>
> The pronunciation for the USA English accent comes
> mainly from the “American
> Heritage Talking Dictionary” – Softkey CD, with
> occasional input from
> m-w.com, a great free web resource.  The biggest
> issue was spelling out all
> the schwas (no special symbols).
>
> This differs from most SSS efforts.  The focus is a
> simple integration of
> phonetics that can be used for children and adults
> for education, ESL,
> accent reduction, translation guides, dictionary
> keys, and analysis tools.
> The Linguistic Assoc. of Great Britain is apparently
> doing this as well.
> See their simplified phonetic notation at
>
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/ec/correspondences.htm
>
> So the SSS struggles on with respelling.  They are
> taking on the issue of
> texting and the question of “is shorter better?”  I
> personally think that
> spelling is too engrained to change.  Better to
> change or at least fight to
> maintain pronunciation that holds to the
> alphabetical principle.  If
> pronunciation can change capriciously, why not
> influence it to change for
> consistency?   Meanwhile, anyone interested in using
> the truespel database
> can drop me a line.
>
>
>
>
> Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
> See truespel.com - and the 4  truespel books plus
> "Occasional Poems" at
> authorhouse.com.
>
>
>
>
>
> >From: Dennis Baron <debaron at UIUC.EDU>
> >Reply-To: American Dialect Society
> <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> >Subject: Bee Season:  The annual spelling bee
> brings out protesters as
> >         well as nerds
> >Date: Wed, 30 May 2007 22:50:13 -0500
> >
> >---------------------- Information from the mail
> header
> >-----------------------
> >Sender:       American Dialect Society
> <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >Poster:       Dennis Baron <debaron at UIUC.EDU>
> >Subject:      Bee Season:  The annual spelling bee
> brings out protesters as
> >               well as nerds
>
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> >There's a new post on the Web of Language:
> >
> >Bee Season:  The annual spelling bee brings out
> protesters as well as =20=
> >
> >nerds
> >
> >This week protesters from the American Literacy
> Society and London=92s =20=
> >
> >Simplified Spelling Society picketed outside
> Washington D. C.=92s Grand
> >=20=
> >
> >Hyatt Hotel, while inside, 286 students in grades 5
> through 8 =20
> >competed in the 80th annual Scripps Spelling Bee.
> >
> >Protesters carried signs reading =93Let=92s End the
> I in Friend=94 and =20=
> >
> >=93Enuf is Enuf,=94 hoping to draw attention to
> their cause, the reform
> >=20=
> >
> >of English spelling.
> >
> >
> >
> >It=92s a good cause, though hopeless.  The history
> of the spelling-=20
> >reform movement is long, distinguished, and totally
> ineffectual.  =20
> >Reforms popped up as early as the 12th century and
> they=92ve continued =20=
> >
> >through the present, though until recently spelling
> reformers didn=92t =20=
> >
> >take to the streets to get their point across.
> >
> >read the rest at
> >
> >the Web of Language
> >www.uiuc.edu/goto/weboflanguage
> >
> >
> >Dennis Baron
> >Professor of English and Linguistics
> >Department of English
> >University of Illinois
> >608 S. Wright St.
> >Urbana, IL 61801
> >
> >office: 217-244-0568
> >fax: 217-333-4321
> >
> >www.uiuc.edu/goto/debaron
> >
> >read the Web of Language:
> >www.uiuc.edu/goto/weboflanguage
> >
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
> >The American Dialect Society -
> http://www.americandialect.org
>
>
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> The American Dialect Society -
> http://www.americandialect.org
>

James D. SMITH                 |If history teaches anything
South SLC, UT                  |it is that we will be sued
jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com     |whether we act quickly and decisively
                               |or slowly and cautiously.

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