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[leeroy]

For a 2,000 word university essay due in March...

Why is the relationship between spelling and speaking in English (often) so tenuous?

What efforts have been made to "simplify" English spelling - and how effective have they been?

Any thoughts welcome

[Lanza-Armonia]

I thought you had to do essays on yer own. Well, at least you did when I went!!!

LA

[johnslat]

Dear leeroy,
Here are some links that might prove useful:

http://www.usu.edu/anthro/origins_of_writing/invented_alphabets/

http://www.spellingsociety.org/pubs/leaflets/tough.html

http://www.completetranslation.com/spelling.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_reform

http://www.basic-english.org/21/spelling.html

http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/spell/index.html

Regards,
John

[Ka-CHING!]

Lots of attempts have been made over the years. Not that there's been much success. :p

Some links for you:
http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/spell/
http://www.spellingsociety.org/index.html
http://www.bartleby.com/68/46/5646.html

There's a discussion on Linguistist List about German spelling reform that may be useful:
http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/9/9-1518.html#dir

Yes, I am a word geek. I love this kind of stuff.

[Stephen Jones]

George Bernard Shaw, the playwright who made the quite fatuous and incorrect comment, that you could spell 'fish' 'ghoti' was also a leading member of the Fabian Society, and persuaded them to advocate legislation to 'reform' English spelling. As they were the driving force behind much of the labour Party, when this came into power in the UK after World War II, it was felt that the promise would have to be honoured. Luckily for all of us a certain degree of sanity prevailed, and a compromise was reached whereby government kept its clumsy fingers out of the dictionary, but was allowed to interfere with budding young children through the development of a phonetic learning alphabet for primary schools.

This took a good fifteen years to get through all the appropriate committees but in the 1960's, when Fabianism, George Bernard Shaw and the Attlee government were all well-nigh forgotten, the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA) was introduced into primary schools. This monstrosity caused a catastrophic drop in reading standards wherever it was introduced, and kept secondary remedial reading teachers in employment for a decade and a half until it was allowed to die a natural death.

In 'Banananas' Woody Allen becomes dictator of an unamed Central American Country, and his first act was to declare the national language to be Swedish. For some reason this laudable attempt causes great mirth, whilst other forms of government interference in language, history and education are treated seriously.

[leeroy]

Thanks everyone

[FGT]

How about drawing a comparison between UK and US spelling? By and large, US spelling is more logical/phonetic.

I have a colleague who was brought up with ITA (initial teaching alphabet) and he's still trying to deal with it - his mis-spellings are notorious, thank God, the rest of us look good in comparison!

I use "ghoti" (fish) as an example when I first introduce students to the phonemic alphabet, to circumnavigate illogical spelling.

History comes into it. Pronunciation changes but, by and large, spelling is fossilised. Do you want to go into the Saxon origin of words and how they USED to be pronounced? Sometimes the spelling reflects the origin of a word, even though its pronunciation changed many years before the spelling was fixed.

[mb2086]

[quote]By and large, US spelling is more logical/phonetic.

Are you sure about that? Us Brits get rather angry when our language is put in the recycler by our American cousins, after all English comes from England and there's nothing worse than seeing a squirmy Z when there should be an S, or letters left out as in colour/color or two words made into one like 'downtown' which is a grammatical non-starter. No wonder students get confused. English as it was first invented i.e. in England, can hardly be illogical or half the world would not be speaking it now .

[veiledsentiments]

Anyone who makes the claim that any language is 'logical' has obviously never studied any language - including/especially his or her own.

VS

[Roger]

Stephen Jones,
thanks for your contribution! It made my day a brighter one!

But I have to take issue with the claim made by FGT, that American pronunciation is "more logical".
Logic in language?

I have one hell of a time telling my students that no, the letter 'Z' is pronounced as 'zett', not as some blurred 's'.
And, when I firstheard from a friend who had been to the USA how they pronounce Yosemite, my reaction was: why do they always pronounce English in such an outlandish way?

[FGT]

Just to clarify what I meant in my earlier post:

I meant that American spelling is more logical as in most cases it's closer to the pronunciation, eg theatER, prioritiZe.
Ididn't mean that American pronunciation was more logical though perhaps you could argue that pronouncing the R in, eg, farm is more logical than the RP British /fa:m/.

I'm British, I use British spelling, I prefer British pronunciation (though I'm not picky about what my students use so long as they can be understood and are consistent) and I say/fa:m/.

Hope that clarifies things.

[Snoopy]

The -ize suffix is not American and should be applied to verbs of Greek origin, such as apologize, whereas the -ise ending is applicable to words which have come into English through French.

[mb2086]

Nevertheless Americans do use ...ize. Maybe the Greeks had more influence than we thought.

[Capergirl]

I'd always thought Americans used the -ise suffix. No? In Canada, I'd say we tend to use the suffix -ize more, but then, we use a lot of "British" spellings anyway. For example: colour, honour, harbour, neighbour, grey, centre, litre, etc. The pronunciations are closer to "American" English, although like most Canadians I know, I say "zed" (not "zee").


So Leeroy, do we get to see the final result?

[lajzar]

www.zompist.com has an excellent article demonstrating how to derive the pronunciation from spelling. There are about 100 or so rules apparently, which, if applied systematically, can provide the correct pronunciation. the site only lists about 50 or so. However, some of the rules would require an awareness of grammatical role or historical origin; the site does not deal with those.