English spelt phonetically? [cf Truespel]

Tue Mar 3 11:13:41 UTC 2009

Thanks Russ,

Good points all.  A healthy skeptacism is a good thing.  Please note that truespel is merely a phonetic notaton just like any dictionary key.  It merely uses the 26 letters of the alphabet to foespel (phonetically spell) the 40 sounds of the English foenubet (English set of phonemes).  Avoiding special symbols makes this notation email and computer friendly, a huge advantage.  It's also simple enough to be learned by kids.  The phonetic spellings of the truespel.com converter represent the spoken accents of the American Heritage Talking Dictionary and m-w.com mainly, not my accent.  But as far as accents is concerned, it can be used to show accent differences and for phonemic awareness drills.

No one before has come up with such a phonetic system for English because truespel not only uses only letters of the alphabet but also shows stress and glottal stops.  Thus it is a true dictionary key pronunciation guide notation that is as English friendly as can be and that uses notation least conflicting with tradspel (traditional spelling).

The converter is not smart enough to handle all phonetic situations.  For instance "the" needs to be pronounced ~thee in front of a word beginning with a vowel and the word "for" is more often pronounced ~fer in USA.  So teacher guidance is needed for these.

Using ~fool and ~pool to foespel "full" and "pull" is a hard backward knock on tradspel which is unfortunate.  This vowel sound is historically described as "short oo" as in tradwerdz "wood, good, wool" and these are truespeld ~wood,good,wool~.  The tradstreeng (letters in sequence in tradspel) "oo" more often represents "short o" than "long o".  Thus ~ool pops up in truespel for lots of word endings (double,social,gamble = ~dubool,~soeshool,~gambool).  Some would use "l" alone here, so "social" becomes soeshl.  The problem here is "socialize" should not be ~soeshliez (2 syl) but ~soeshooliez (3 syl).

Check out IBM's Writing to Read system that was evaluated by ETS and CAL.  It was a huge experiment that showed that phonetic spelling is useful for kids in K-1 who learned to write as they learned to read (they used keyboards prior to learning cursive).  They had no trouble later reverting to tradspel, at least no more than usual considering the task of remembering all the "sight words" of tradspel.

Regarding foespeleeng "on topic" as ~aan taapik~, the letter "o" is often used for this sound.  Interestingly, it's most often used to spell the sound of short u, as in "uh" from frequency data of truespel book 4.  The letter "o" is too duplicitous in tradspel to spell a sound by itself.  If you see "o" your not sure how it's pronounced, for instance words "to,go,for,on,off".  So to avoid backward confusion with tradspel ~aa was chosen to tradspel the "ah" sound.  It has good aplication to other languages.

I've researched this area over the years and jumped in only after years of trial and error investigating all such systems in the past.  Truespel is my best shot at creating an English friendly foespel with least backward knocks to tradspel.  It's learnable by a 3rd grader in less than an hour.  I hope you can find application for it over there in China.  Considering the alternative phonetic spelling systems, it has many advantages.

Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+ 
see truespel.com

Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+ 
see truespel.com

> Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2009 17:20:24 +0800
> From: mcclay at TAOLODGE.COM
> Subject: English spelt phonetically? [cf Truespel]
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> 
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Russ McClay <mcclay at TAOLODGE.COM>
> Subject: English spelt phonetically? [cf Truespel]
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Pardon me for this somewhat off-topic post...
> 
> I've been on the ADS-L for many years. I greatly enjoy hanging
> out with such a fine group of scholars and academics discussing
> the English language and its dialects.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Within the last couple of years the list acquired a rather disruptive
> layman who's mission on the list seems to be constant promotion
> of his eccentric spelling system.
> 
> Today I decided to see what a google search would bring up on
> "Truespel". The results returned were almost all self-promotional,
> but one exception was this post to Yahoo Answers:
> 
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> 
> English spelt phonetically? ?
> -----------------------------
> Well, since long ago the debate was settled and they decided to maintain
> a system that maintained the historic spellings (regardless that words
> were no longer pronounced the same way, etc)...I was wondering if anyone
> has ever devised a system of writing English in which words were spelt
> as they were pronounced?
> 
> * 4 months ago
> 
> Additional Details
> 
> and where could i view some samples or something?
> 
> --
> 
> Best Answer - Chosen by Voters
> 
> There have been many over the years. George Bernard Shaw was prominent
> in one movement. Noah Webster, the dictionary man, is single-handedly
> responsible for most of the U.S./British differences. They and many
> others are covered in the Wikipedia article on English spelling reform
> at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_spelling_reform . That article
> also
> explains WHY the decision to not radically reform spelling has been
> effectively made.
> 
> To find more recent schemes you can Web search on
> 
> "phonetic spelling" English -ipa
> 
> (I added -ipa to reduce the hits for the linguists' official
> transcriptions as much as possible, since I didn't believe that's what
> you wanted. If you DO want those, search on "international phonetic
> alphabet" English instead.)
> 
> As one example, and only for laughs, you can check out Truespel at
> http://www.truespel.com/ , which will respell whole webpages for you.
> 
> This renders "bubble" as 'bubool', which is nonsense--in standard US and
> British English, at most there's a schwa in the second syllable, and in
> connected speech it's usually just a syllabic L.
> 
> Truespel also shows "on topic" as 'aan taapik', with the first two
> vowels identical, and "all" as 'aul,' with a different A-vowel. This is
> wrong for Utah rural speech, among many others, where all three vowels
> are the same, and wrong for my own speech, which is 'aun taapik' and
> 'aal', though it's possibly correct for the East coast. I'll have to
> listen carefully to discover what Broadcast Anchorman is. (It usually
> but NOT always matches my speech--or vice versa.)
> 
> There may be other problems with Truespel, but I noticed those in just
> about the first sentence I looked at, and stopped there.
> 
> * 4 months ago
> --
> http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081028180538AA71mPB
> 
> * * *
> 
> There is no mention of Truespel on this Wiki page about English
> spelling reform:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_spelling_reform
> 
> * * *
> 
> Incidentally, I'm an American who has been living in Taiwan for over
> twenty years. My children are native Chinese speakers, but they've also
> learned English as a second language and I shudder to think of them
> having been subjected to the absurd system Mr. Z has so "painstakenly"
> devised. Instead they used what most students of English use here: the
> Kenyon and Knott system, which, while a bit dated, is still in wide
> use on the island.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenyon_and_Knott
> 
> * * *
> 
> Sorry, Tom. This is a bit personal I'm afraid.
> 
> Russ
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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