LL-L "Orthography" 2008.08.17 (01) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 17 August 2008 - Volume 01
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From: Mark Dreyer <mrdreyer at lantic.net>
Subject: LL-L "Orthography" 2008.08.16 (02) [E]

Dear Tom



Subject: LL-L. Orthography.



"Common spelling mistakes should be accepted into everyday use, not
corrected, a lecturer has said. Ken Smith of Bucks New University says the
most common mistakes should be accepted as "variant spellings" ".



This is not a good idea. As one who came to English very young as a second
language, I learned to hate the idiocentric orthograpy with passion, until
it became clear to me this very shortcoming preserved in its ossified rules
the history of the speech & its development, which I found rather fun. None
of this has a bearing on why it's a bad idea, however I have sympathy with
those who are impatient with it, whether trying to spell or trying to
correct the same, & far be it from me to pretend I can spell well even now.



The problem is exemplified in the alphabetic system of a dictionary. As a
fundamental tool for lucid communication, the speaker is best served by a
minimum of variations in his orthography. The cruellest examples of the
contrary are those languages with prefix mutation, like the Celtic tongues,
& languages like Hebrew that modify a root verb with a small selection of
prefixes. All very well if you know them, but a learner doesn't initially:
Talk to me! I don't want to *think* of trying to learn Japanese, with
Katekana, Hiregama & the radicals of Classical Chinese all together.



True, as with English, all this is the vehicle of the culture, & if you're
stuck with it, ride with it - but don't invite it, don't tolerate it.
Inevitably such changes will occur, & your best option for a language is to
slow the changes down as much as possible.



Mark


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From: Travis Bemann <tabemann at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Orthography" 2008.08.16 (02) [E]

> From: Tom Carty <cartyweb at hotmail.com>
> Subject: Bad spelling
>
> Bad spelling 'should be accepted'

> Common spelling mistakes should be accepted into everyday use, not
> corrected, a lecturer has said. Ken Smith of Bucks New University says the
> most common mistakes should be accepted as "variant spellings".
>

> He lists the 10 most commonly misspelt words, which include "arguement"
for
> "argument" and "twelth" for "twelfth".
>
> Mr Smith says his proposal, outlined in an article in the Times Higher
> Education Supplement, follows years of correcting the same mistakes.
>
> Mr Smith, a criminology lecturer, said: "Instead of complaining about the
> state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after
> year, I've got a better idea.
>
> "University teachers should simply accept as variant spellings those words
> our students most commonly misspell.
>
> Testing the spelling of the general public
>
> "The spelling of the word 'judgement', for example, is now widely accepted
> as a variant of 'judgment', so why can't 'truely' be accepted as a variant
> spelling of 'truly'?"
>
> Mr Smith also suggested adding the word "misspelt" to the list and all
those
> that break the "i before e" rule - weird, seize, neighbour and foreign.
>
> He said he was not asking people to learn to spell words differently.
>
> "All I am suggesting is that we might well put 20 or so of the most
commonly
> misspelt words in the English language on the same footing as those other
> words that have a widely accepted variant spelling," he added.

I tend to myself favor the idea of English orthography being
essentially a black box where there is no direct correlation between
how any given word is written and how it is exactly pronounced, with
the orthography only providing general clues as to how a given word
might be pronounced. The reason for such is that by abandoning the
idea that orthography has anything to truly do with pronunciation one
also abandons the idea that orthography prescribes any "correct"
pronunciation. Hence one is left with orthographic words merely
providing written "names" for words rather than actually indicating
how those words "should" be pronounced. Also, one can thus accept the
seeming contradiction of having a truly unified literary English while
having individual Anglic dialects which may differ greatly themselves
without assuming that any given dialect is more "right" than any other
dialect.

To quote myself from another forum, for the sake of not having to rewrite
such,

----
Take the example of "lieutenant" for instance. In General American, it
is [lu(ː)ˈtʰɛnə̃nt], with there being the option of having [ɫ] instead
of [l] and or [ɨ̃] instead of [ə̃]. In Received Pronunciation, though,
it is the seemingly absurd (to an American) [lɛfˈtʰɛnə̃nt], yet
despite how different its pronunciation is from the orthography (which
would imply RP [l(j)uːˈtʰɛnə̃nt]) it is still accepted as being
perfectly standard. Hence it becomes much harder to object on
prescriptive grounds that, say, my own pronunciation of
[ɰ(ˡ)uˈtʰɜ̃ːnɨ̃ʔ] or even [ɰ(ˡ)uˈtʰɜ̃ːɨ̯̃ʔ] is somehow "not correct",
as clearly the large discrepancy between the RP pronunciation and the
pronunciation one would expect in RP from the orthography is clearly
not objected to on orthographic grounds except by more ignorant
Americans.
----

Yet if one were to change "lieutenant" to something like "lootenant",
"lutenant" or "leftenant", in the case of conservative orthographic
reform, or something like "lútènent" or "lèftènent", in the case of
radical orthographic reform, it would be much harder to make the above
argument. As in most cases there would likely be an "obviously
standard" pronunciation corresponding to the orthography, then
differing pronunciations would become "obviously nonstandard" and not
just differing but equally valid pronunciations all corresponding to
the same orthographic word.
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