alt Hacker NewsA problem with all English spelling reform is that it is often intended to be phonetic and usually favours the pronunciation of the person proposing the change another is that it makes homophones also homonyms.
Where I come from in the South West of England bath has a long a and so does castle but in the North East they both have short a. Which one should the orthography reflect? What about house? Pronounced almost to rhyme with mice in some quarters and moose in others.
What do you do about Shrewsbury when even the locals don't all agree on how it is pronounced? Will Scots get to spell the name of a large aquatic mammal as hwale to more closely match the pronunciation? One positive change might be that in England the word wales would be reserved for the animals and we would all start referring to the country as Cymru.
If spelling reformers want to spell words differently then they should just do it the way that English has done for centuries, just do it. If you prefer to write labor rather than labour then do so. If you would rather write jeeny than genie go ahead. After all as mentioned in the article there is no English Academy to tell you not to. If others agree then the written language will adjust.
My Norwegian teacher was adamant that Norwegian is pronounced as written despite knowing perfectly well that almost every valley here has a different accent or even dialect. Norway gets away with it only by declaring that the two official forms are merely standardised written Norwegian; no one actually speaks bokmål or nynorsk.
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This is a non-argument. There are no spelling system in the world that takes into account every variation in the spoken language. Heck, even the current English spelling is based on the specific pronunciation of some part of England a few hundred years ago.
What all spelling system do, is just pick one dialect as the reference dialect, and build the spelling based on that. Is it perfect? No. Does it work? Yes, if the dialect that you pick is the most widely spoken and the most prestigious.
> Will Scots get to spell the name of a large aquatic mammal as hwale to more closely match the pronunciation?
I vote we spell everything with Scottish pronunciation. Puts native and non-native speakers on level terms.
Controversial hot take:
Simplify the orthography to make it phonic, and then people spell words however they are pronounced in their local dialect.
The article’s example of “mis(c)e(l)lany” is one example that stood out to me like this - perhaps in some dialects it’s pronounced with a single S sound, but it’s definitely two for me. (And on the flip side, I wouldn’t retain the second I in “suficient”.)
Shouldn't it be laybuh, anyway?
It's pretty normal to have a somewhat deficient but still mostly phonetic script. So you _can_ read it purely phonetically, but you would sound robotic and/or unnatural. It also might miss some information that is obvious to native speakers.
Most Slavic languages belong to that category. E.g. Russian and Ukrainian texts usually don't mark the stressed syllables. Russian tends to reduce vowels so they are pronounced ambiguously. Czech had some vowel shifts so that some letters are now pronounced identically, etc.
It's still much better than English, where you often need to _know_ how a word is pronounced (e.g. "put" but "putty").
This is a problem that other languages have already dealt with. Spelling doesn't have to represent the exact pronunciation of every word; it can represent phonemes, leaving some variation in pronunciation to dialect.
For example Vietnamese has considerable regional variation, some of which is reflected in the spelling system. The letter d represents /z/ in standard Northern Vietnamese but /j/ in standard Southern Vietnamese.
English already does something similar, as you've pointed out. In dialects that distinguish wh from w, the former can represent /hw/, whereas in most of England the distinction has disappeared and both are pronounced /w/. We don't need to respell whale because it already accommodates either pronunciation (although let's please get rid of "magic e" and spell it `wheil` to at least match the vowel).
Any linguist knows that a perfectly phonetic spelling system is not desirable. As well as what I've already discussed, pronunciation changes over time too. But I don't think that rules out spelling reform because currently English has many ways of spelling the same phoneme.