[Quantum_Wizard]

ShepherdsDog wrote:

Try speaking Mandarin. It has only 4 tones, yet the rising, falling, neutral and falling then rising tone changes the word meaning all together. Lan can mean blue or shitty and tang can be soup or sugar. /Shway jow/(this is phonetic) can mean either sleep or dumpling. /Mah/ can mean four different things, depending on the tone used(one can mean mother and another means horse). Some nimrods here think that Chinese will replace English as the world language. For some reason they get insulted when I laugh.

Cantonese is even harder.

Historically lingua francas have usually been adopted due to reasons like political domination by some entity. The easiness of the language has typically been quite irrelevant.

While English is not tonal like Chinese, it is actually not very easy to pronounce. It has a larger set of phonemes and allows for more consonant clustering than many other languages. But when has this hampered its status as the world's lingua franca?

[Psudo]

MacDonaill wrote:

Not only that, and this is one thing we haven't mentioned while discussing other languages, but what about spoken accents and dialects? A phonetic spelling in French, for example, would render the word for mother (mère) mère in France and maère in Canada, which would incidentally be written the same as the word for the sea (mer) and for the mayor of a town (maire).

We actually did mention that. In English, the British drop the final 'r' sound in words like worker, butter, finger, etc. whereas Americans pronounce the 'r'. Thus, the language should retain the 'r' sound, pronounced by various accents in exactly the same way as now, in order to allow for the various accents since it'd be wrong to require any specific accent.

It was also discussed by the link included in the very first post. A very good read, I must say.

Brenda wrote:

European French is apparently different from Quebec French.

Famously true. I have been told that French nationals mock Quebec French in much the same way that Britons mock American English. I take pride in ruining European languages. =]

Personally, I've always found Singlish (Singapore English) to be an amusing dialect. English with bits of Chinese grammar and vocabulary. Big, confusing mess, but reminiscent of Firefly in some ways.

[ShepherdsDog]

Quote:

the British drop the final 'r' sound in words like worker, butter, finger, etc. whereas Americans pronounce the 'r'.

Nobody and I mean nobody enunciates like Canadian anglophones(properly educated ones that is).

Britons also pronounce the tt spellings with a /t/ sound while most North Americans tend to pronounce them and as a /d/ sound or not at all. We often pronounce words with single t spellings as a /d/ sound as well. Cases in point: butter, batter, bitter, matter, water, daughter, slaughter, cauter, cater, etc. We also pronounce ss spellings with a /sh/ sound rather than an /s/ sound, as Britons and other English speakers do.

[MacDonaill]

Brenda wrote:

Hmmmm, European French is apparently different from Quebec French. I was taught a light differens. Not much, like Then and than...

The rest, I knew

It has nothing to do with European vs. Quebec. It's the same in this case. These are the phonetic transcriptions you will find in Le Petit Robert (with Larousse, one of the most trusted and used French dictionaries in the world, published in Paris).

And in any case, I speak European French (if only just to annoy the Quebeckers) .

[MacDonaill]

Psudo wrote:

MacDonaill wrote:

Not only that, and this is one thing we haven't mentioned while discussing other languages, but what about spoken accents and dialects? A phonetic spelling in French, for example, would render the word for mother (mère) mère in France and maère in Canada, which would incidentally be written the same as the word for the sea (mer) and for the mayor of a town (maire).

We actually did mention that. In English, the British drop the final 'r' sound in words like worker, butter, finger, etc. whereas Americans pronounce the 'r'. Thus, the language should retain the 'r' sound, pronounced by various accents in exactly the same way as now, in order to allow for the various accents since it'd be wrong to require any specific accent.

Even the solution you have suggested could't work in French, because in the examples I gave, we're not talking about one accent dropping a consonant while others keep it, but about one accent diphthongising a vowel and *adding* an extra phoneme where it originally wasn't there. In either case, you will have a segment of the population for whom the language won't be truly phonetic, thus maybe solving a few problems whilst at the same time creating others.

[Psudo]

MacDonaill wrote:

In either case, you will have a segment of the population for whom the language won't be truly phonetic

Exactly as "worker" is not truly phonetic for Britons but is for Americans because we pronounce the 'er'.

The idea is not to enforce a specific pronunciation, nor to have accents spell words differently to match their varied pronunciations. The idea is that spelling reflects all the sounds available to pronounce and, thus, is consistent across all accents. Different letters (or letter combinations) should be pronounced consistently within any given accent, but need not be across all accents.

Perhaps you'd prefer "beauty" as an example. The 'eau' could be pronounced a variety of ways depending on accent, potentially even separating into two syllables for some (be-UTE-ee or BEU-tee), but the spelling is the same across all English.

[MacDonaill]

Psudo wrote:

MacDonaill wrote:

In either case, you will have a segment of the population for whom the language won't be truly phonetic

Exactly as "worker" is not truly phonetic for Britons but is for Americans because we pronounce the 'er'.

The idea is not to enforce a specific pronunciation, nor to have accents spell words differently to match their varied pronunciations. The idea is that spelling reflects all the sounds available to pronounce and, thus, is consistent across all accents.

I understand entirely what you're proposing, there's no need to re-explain it because it doesn't really make a difference. The points I have raised are still true: That in French, this cannot work for the reasons stated previously.

There is no way that 95% of the world's francophones will, for example, adopt maère as the official spelling for the word mère just because that's how Canadians might be inclined to say it. Adding or subtracting optionally pronounceable letters to or from standardised spellings for the benefit of only some of a language's speakers results in a situation where the perceived problem is not solved, but only reversed.

The idea is not to enforce a specific pronunciation... Precisely. But an orthographic reform that calls itself 'phonetic' pretends to do just that. They aim to render the written language more accessible to more people by creating an orthography they say reflects the actual pronunciation of the word. This has the perverse effect of creating a prescriptive orthography, one meant to tell the reader how the written word ought to be pronounced rather than one meant to tell the speaker how to write.

[MacDonaill]

In any case, the debate on whether there should be a formal reform of English is quite useless, as there is no institution with the authority to do so.

Schoolteachers may mark certain things wrong, but in English it is pretty clear that if enough educated people choose to spell a word a certain way and if they publish using that spelling, then there is no authority who can honestly say that that spelling is 'wrong'.

I have my own spelling system. It's a mix of British and North American that differs from the Canadian standard. For example, I spell all -ize words with -ise, unlike most Canadians. No one can tell me it's wrong.

[Quantum_Wizard]

MacDonaill, when dialectal variations can't be accommodated easily, there are in my opinion two options:

1. Choose a 'standard' dialect, which the spelling should conform to. For other dialects the spelling is not as phonemic as it could be, but this is in my opinion not as bad as totally unjustified deviations from pronunciation. From your explanation it appears that this is what is currently the case with French, with European French being the standard.

2. Give different spellings for different dialects. Even if this creates homonyms, it's not a problem in my opinion if the words in case really also have identical pronunciations. That is, if them being homophones doesn't cause problems in speech, then them being homographs would be unlikely to cause problems in writing. When dialects diverge enough to become different languages, different spellings seem unavoidable unless one is using a logographic script like Chinese.

In any case, spelling needn't be perfectly phonemic. Minor deviations are tolerable. But in English the deviations are anything but minor.

[Quantum_Wizard]

MacDonaill wrote:

I have my own spelling system. It's a mix of British and North American that differs from the Canadian standard. For example, I spell all -ize words with -ise, unlike most Canadians. No one can tell me it's wrong.

Does that mean that if I started spelling "laugh" as "laff", no one could tell me it's wrong either? Can I happily spell "Leicester" as "Lester" and ignore all British critics?

[Quantum_Wizard]

MacDonaill wrote:

The idea is not to enforce a specific pronunciation... Precisely. But an orthographic reform that calls itself 'phonetic' pretends to do just that. They aim to render the written language more accessible to more people by creating an orthography they say reflects the actual pronunciation of the word. This has the perverse effect of creating a prescriptive orthography, one meant to tell the reader how the written word ought to be pronounced rather than one meant to tell the speaker how to write.

Far from it. A phonemic orthography would follow pronunciation, not the other way around. It would be descriptive not prescriptive. And minor deviations can be allowed.

[MacDonaill]

Quantum_Wizard wrote:

MacDonaill wrote:

I have my own spelling system. It's a mix of British and North American that differs from the Canadian standard. For example, I spell all -ize words with -ise, unlike most Canadians. No one can tell me it's wrong.

Does that mean that if I started spelling "laugh" as "laff", no one could tell me it's wrong either? Can I happily spell "Leicester" as "Lester" and ignore all British critics?

Absolutely. Besides a few privately published dictionaries and centuries of published materials all spelling the word 'laugh', there's no reason why you can't go on spelling it that way out of principle. You are fully aware of the standard spelling, but you choose to spell it differently for your own reasons. Nothing wrong with that.

The day when others start following you in great enough numbers, the new spelling will enter the dictionary. That's English. We have no centralised linguistic authority telling us what to do. It's free.

In other words, spell however the hell you want to. Just don't try to force it on everyone else by using some authority, government or otherwise, to enforce your spelling.

[MacDonaill]

Quantum_Wizard wrote:

MacDonaill wrote:

The idea is not to enforce a specific pronunciation... Precisely. But an orthographic reform that calls itself 'phonetic' pretends to do just that. They aim to render the written language more accessible to more people by creating an orthography they say reflects the actual pronunciation of the word. This has the perverse effect of creating a prescriptive orthography, one meant to tell the reader how the written word ought to be pronounced rather than one meant to tell the speaker how to write.

Far from it. A phonemic orthography would follow pronunciation, not the other way around. It would be descriptive not prescriptive. And minor deviations can be allowed.

That's what a phonetic orthography aims to do. That does not mean that that's what it does or will end up doing. It is more than plausible to suggest that there would be an effet pervers of the phonetic spelling, over time, becoming the authoritative guide for pronunciation.

The word 'lieutenant'... would be phonetically spelt leftenant in the Commonwealth and lootenant in the USA... which spelling should prevail in the international 'standard' you propose? If the British one prevailed, Americans would be left scratching their heads; if the US one prevailed, Commonwealthers would probably either be really pissed off OR over time just start pronouncing it the American way because, as the teacher will tell them, English spelling is phonetic.

[wildrosegirl]

ShepherdsDog wrote:

When I was in school, kids were expected to know how to spell. Rather than dumbing everything down, for the 'tards, how about we get today's students to relearn some academic discipline.

You can't do that. It damages their fragile little egos.

Quote:

There are too many teachers out there nowadays, who can't spell themselves, most of them products of Whole Language programs.

True story. Pretty sad when your son is in Grade 4 and corrects the spelling word list for the teacher before the class copies it out to take home. (True story)

[Tomz]

A phonetically spelled language is so much easier to learn. The Finns learn how to spell theirs in first grade. There are no spelling bees because the language spells itself.

I studied phonetics for English. There are many dictionary pronunciation guides, all of which involve special symbols. I developed truespel phonetics to be English-baed and avoid special symbols so it's keyboard and computer friendly. Truespel is a scientific approach going by the data in my books on the most common spellings for English sounds, with compromises to the spelling most compatible to English when spellings conflict.

So if one is interested in a maximally English friendly phonetc spelling, truespel is it for USA English. See the free converter at truespel.com.