I almost feel like English should start from scratch with spelling, There are basically no consistent rules at all. I think we should assign spelling to kindergartners who actually follow the rules of English and spell things like they should be spelled.
Quinoa -> Keen-wa
Ballet -> Baal-Eh
Design -> De-zine
etc.
The last major successful attempt was done by Noah Webster, which is where the difference between American and British spelling comes from. American spelling is ever more slightly consistent than British spelling:
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There’s basically no consistency in what gets spelled with “-or” vs “-our.” “Honor” is spelled as “honour,” but “horror” is still “horror.” Webster just dropped the “-our.” The same thing is true for “-er” vs “re.” Why “centre” but not “entre?”
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Webster changed “-ise” to “-ize,” which is more phonetically consistent with how Americans say it.
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Baffling or confusing spelling like “mould” or “cheque” or “gaol” or “draught” got changed based on what words rhymed with them. “Mould” became “mold” because “mold/mould” rhymes with “cold,” not “could.”
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Ligatures aren’t used in American English, so no bullshit like “foetus” or “paedophile.”
English spelling reform is not going to happen anytime soon since Webster used nationalism at a very opportune time to get Americans to change English spelling to be slightly less terrible. And even then, a lot of his proposals got shot down. For example, he wanted to change the spelling of “tongue” to “tung,” but that (unfortunately) didn’t happen.
I still can’t spell tongue properly a lot of the time
Baffling or confusing spelling like “mould” or “cheque” or “gaol” or “draught” got changed based on what words rhymed with them. “Mould” became “mold” because “mold/mould” rhymes with “cold,” not “could.”
I don’t agree these were fixed, just smeared the shit around a bit differently. Mould rhymes with the first part of shoulder or boulder, for example.
Cheque is not confusing, but if you decided it was the you ought to turn antique into antick, opaque into opak, plaque into plack, etc.
Logic did used to be logique, incidentally.
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Prescribed languages are so boring. English is a glorious chaotic fun practical mutt of a language. It’s a language that gleefully creates, adopts, adapts, mutates, and discards words and grammar and spelling and sentence structure to fit the speaker/writer’s needs. A language whose most-loved authors tend to be the ones who break grammatical rules on a whim. A language whose most revered poet, the Bard himself, damn near invented half the modern English lexicon. (It’s my firm belief that Shakespeare would have loved modern rap music. It’s right up his alley, it’s his kind of word play.)
How the hell such a fun and flexible language came from class-obsessed tradition-obsessed bureaucracy-obsessed England of all countries is the real mystery.
I am once again calling for death to the academie francaise.
Are you saying that changing spelling is a good idea or a bad idea? I can’t tell.
I think it’s a great idea, if the type of work in question calls for that sort of creativity.
The actual answer is 1906. It was so poorly received that nobody has bothered to try since.
If anyone’s curious what arguments there might be against spelling reform. I would lament the erasure of orthographic etymological cues.
Spelling standardization was invented by the dictionary companies to sell more dictionaries. I am 100% serious.
Chinese went through simplification, Japanese has kanji but they also have hiragana with consistent rules, etc. Why can’t English simplify?
Simplified Chinese was neither a massive reform nor is it a modern reform. Most of the simplified forms are pre-Qin from before 200BC and predate the Classical Latin Alphabet. The sum total of differences between traditional and simplified is literally only one page long. The current reforms were only accepted because they were based off of shorthand that people were already using. When the government tried to do a 2nd round of artificial simplification people just ignored them. Most people in the mainland still know traditional just from encountering it day to day or in historical documents.
The sort of phoneticization you want to do for English is closer to the reforms applied to the writing systems of minority languages like Yi and Zhuang and the result is that literacy rates for those languages are super low and those who do know how to read and write still use the old logographic orthography.
There’s currently a small movement of people who want to bring back traditional chinese in the mainland since the whole premise of it being harder to learn is objectively wrong since everyone already knows it. The only real opposition is just that HK/TW are so annoying that people associate seeing traditional online with liberal/chud opinions.
Also phonetically regular spelling reforms for English do exist and they usually require using a new alphabet and like 100 different edge cases. They usually aren’t compatible between American and British English and I doubt the type of nerd who comes up with these things have tried applying it to AAVE or Scots.
Chinese, afaik, was simplified because the thousands and thousands of ideograms were far too much and too unwieldy for many people and made both writing and printing difficult.
English would be extremely difficult to simplify. For one, it’s already a more or less phonetic alphabet language. You mostly don’t need to know how to spell something as long as you can stick the right phonemes together. People might make fun of you but they’ll usually figure out what you’re trying to say.
For two, English has more exceptions than rules. As an unholy bastard stapled together from a dozen different languages the “rules” of English are full of contradictions, bits of grammar from other languages, deliberate choices made by the speaker, and deliberate subversion and breaking of rules for effect. I’m told English is a nightmare to learn because the rules are so bizarre and inconsistent. Trying to create any kind of consistent or coherent system out of it would be a fool’s errand, you’d be much better off just trying to get everyone to speak another language or build a conglang.
Simplification merged 73 characters out of tens of thousands. Simplification was just the codification of shorthands people have been using for thousands of years, some predating the Latin alphabet. It was mostly a nothingburger especially since people don’t handwrite much in the modern era and obviously Taiwanese people can still read and write fine.
Oh, I didn’t know that. I thought there was a lot more too it. Thank you.
can we switch to Hangul while we’re at it
I don’t pronounce those words the way you’ve spelt it and I suspect if you paid close attention you don’t either. There are 20 vowel sounds in English and 5 vowel letters. Anyone who insists you can achieve phonetic regularity with the garbage writing system that is the latin alphabet should get their ears checked. Next time you hear some European brag about how their writing systems are “phonetically regular” just remember that Italians spell “gabagool” as “capicola”. Phonetic spelling is less about actually spelling things how people pronounce them and more about gaslighting people into believing that they’re pronouncing it wrong if they don’t match the spelling. Continental Europeans, being particularly weak willed and provincial, are more easily gaslit into this. The one good thing about the British is that they managed to jurry-rig a facsimile of logography with the shit orthographic hand they’ve been dealt.
Italians spell “gabagool” as “capicola”.
this is a feature of Sopranese
I’d love to witness the chaos if English switched to IPA for spelling because of all the differences in accent and regional pronunciation.
I feel like it would fragment written English into something that is borderline mutually-unintelligible between different regions.
If you’ve ever read any old English writing that hasn’t been edited to reflect modernised spelling but instead it’s a wild mess lacking standardisation that you sorta have to read aloud as you sound out the words to make sense of them, like a kid learning to read, I think that’s what it would devolve into.
It would be super neat to have someone whose native written script is the IPA too - it would be fascinating to see how that shapes the way they see the world.
as an Italian I have to remind you that “gabagool” and “capicola” are not Italian words. I had to look them on internet. There are definite rules for reading Italian; I can understand the pronunciation from the written text with little ambiguity. Spelling contests are not a thing here.
OK apparently the standard italian spelling is “capocollo”. I’ve only ever seen it spelled capicola or gabagool in the US. Wiktionary also lists capicollo, capicolla, and cappicola. Honestly just highlights my point. There’s what, 70mil Italian speakers? Imagine having to deal with this for the Billions of English speakers.
I’m not an Italian speaker but from what I remember. Italian Americans pronounce it “gabagool” because that’s how 19th c. Neopolitan pronounces that word, and presumably the “proper” spelling of “capicola” also comes from that region/era. c —> g, p —> b, and dropping word final vowels are apparently the phonemic rules for that dialect. Little subtleties like that exist for basically every phonetic writing system, even ones artificially constructed to be phonetically regular like Pinyin or Hangul. I’m sure if you asked Tony Soprano he would also think “capicola” is a perfectly phonetically regular way to spell it the same way French people don’t think the extra consonants at the end of french words are extraneous.
Geoduck
Colonel
Yacht
The whole ought/bough/dough/thorough/slough mess
Debt/receipt/island and associated re-Latinisation of spellingI think ballet gets a pass, being a loanword. Design isn’t so bad either because it’s just de+sign with a bit of a shift in the consonant, although it gets messy when you dee-zine something but you give something a dez-zig-nashun - are we going long or short on the Dee part? Are we going to say the G or are we going silent on it? Can we please aim for a little bit of consistency?
