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English is the world's first global lingua franca, and has so much momentum it's likely to stay that way for centuries.
There's a lot to recommend English: a huge vocabulary, simple grammar, and expressive flexibility.
And then there's spelling.
Should we reform English spelling to make it phonetically consistent? That means as long as you can pronounce a word, you can spell it once you know the rules. No exceptions to memorize.
For those who would say this is impossible, Chinese provided an example of an undertaking of similar scope when it simplified its characters.
There are only two downsides to this I can see, the first being that English's loose phonetics currently allow for more verbal diversity than, say, German. English dialects and pidgins all use the same spelling, with some minor differences, yet are pronounced differently. A stricter phonetical system would privilege a single dialect.
The second downside is that many historical written works would be inaccessible to those who did not also have some familiarity with traditional English spelling. These could be translated however.
As to the upsides, they are almost too numerous to list. The main one I see is that it would make English even easier to learn as a second language and cement its status as the language of humanity for centuries if not millennia.
We can look to children's toy companies for assistance. PLAYSKOOL
I thought that this word had been in use for a while now.
Anyway, here's a thought exercise: how do you pronounce through? How do you pronounce trough? These two words differ by only one letter, yet they are pronounced rather differently. The first one would be phonetically closer to thru. The second one would be phonetically closer to troff. We already see thru used on road signs, to the extent that I believe it is considered an acceptable variant now. I'd like to see something like the second one develop, because it would be much more intuitively obvious to a non-native speaker of English. The gh letter combination could still be used for the sound as in ghost.
You could also say that "FISH" could be spelled as "GHOTI"..... GH as in rough, tough, cough, laugh.....O as in women (plural)......TI as in nation, notion, vacation, vocation.
No no! Bury doesn't rhyme with worry, what gave you that idea?
Hahaha, too funny. Tawking for 62 years gave me that idea (OK, maybe I didn't say much the first year or so.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by saibot
We've got two vowel sounds here, "air" and "er."
Furry, worry, hurry, Murray have the "er" sound.
Barry, berry, bury, Mary, merry, marry, Harry, hairy, very, etc., have the "air" sound. All of these rhyme for most people in the West.
And despite it all we who have these mergers never get the words mixed up because they are all used in different ways in sentences. "Mary married Barry" could not possibly be construed as referring to berries or being merry.
Yes, exactly.
Another one that used to throw me reading City-Data posts was people using "Since" for "Sense" and vice-versa. I could not understand how people could mix up those two words that are spelled differently and pronounced differently, and then one day it dawned on me that some people DO pronounce them the same because of the pin/pen merger. Which drives me nuts personally, although there is nothing I can do about it, obviously. But every time I hear a supposedly trained journalist say "More to come on the Tin O'Clock News!" I grit my teeth.
Yep, context is everything and how we manage to understand one another...but it's also why phonetic English spelling will never work.
Hahaha, too funny. Tawking for 62 years gave me that idea (OK, maybe I didn't say much the first year or so.)
Another one that used to throw me reading City-Data posts was people using "Since" for "Sense" and vice-versa. I could not understand how people could mix up those two words that are spelled differently and pronounced differently, and then one day it dawned on me that some people DO pronounce them the same because of the pin/pen merger. Which drives me nuts personally, although there is nothing I can do about it, obviously. But every time I hear a supposedly trained journalist say "More to come on the Tin O'Clock News!" I grit my teeth.
Yep, context is everything and how we manage to understand one another...but it's also why phonetic English spelling will never work.
Oh, the pin/pen merger drives me crazy too. I had a cousin from Indiana who spoke like that, and it's worse than other mergers because it's so easy to mix words up. "Hand me a pin." "No, not that pin, a writing pin."
No no! Bury doesn't rhyme with worry, what gave you that idea?
We've got two vowel sounds here, "air" and "er."
Furry, worry, hurry, Murray have the "er" sound.
Barry, berry, bury, Mary, merry, marry, Harry, hairy, very, etc., have the "air" sound. All of these rhyme for most people in the West.
And despite it all we who have these mergers never get the words mixed up because they are all used in different ways in sentences. "Mary married Barry" could not possibly be construed as referring to berries or being merry.
Yes, exactly.
Wow! You listed nine words that you claim all rhyme with "airy" when only two do. What "west" are you talking about where they all have the same sound?
Berry, bury, very and merry have an "eh-ree" pronunciation (although bury is actually somewhere in between that and burry). Marry is pronounced "mah-ree" and rhymes with Barry and Harry. There's a reason these words are spelled differently and a lot of that has to do with pronunciation. Adding another "r" to very might help some, but obviously not all.
Wow! You listed nine words that you claim all rhyme with "airy" when only two do. What "west" are you talking about where they all have the same sound?
Berry, bury, very and merry have an "eh-ree" pronunciation (although bury is actually somewhere in between that and burry). Marry is pronounced "mah-ree" and rhymes with Barry and Harry. There's a reason these words are spelled differently and a lot of that has to do with pronunciation. Adding another "r" to very might help some, but obviously not all.
West Coast, USA. It's called the "Mary-merry-marry" merger. Did you know that only about 17% of Americans pronounce all three words differently, and over 50% pronounce them all the same?
Statistically speaking, if they are all different for you, you are probably either from the New York/New Jersey area, possibly Boston, or not from the US at all.
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Tawking for 62 years gave me that idea (OK, maybe I didn't say much the first year or so.)
