[ShepherdsDog]

What are you saying is wrong? The two tense examples given are how Americans use dived in place of dove and shined rather than shone. It's completely correct/acceptable in American English.

[Brenda]

ShepherdsDog wrote:

What are you saying is wrong? The two tense examples given are how Americans use dived in place of dove and shined rather than shone. It's completely correct/acceptable in American English.

I am glad I am not american. Its not the English I was taught. Or should it be "teached"?

[ShepherdsDog]

Like I said, everytime I see it or hear it, I think,'that's just so wrong!'

[Psudo]

Quantum_Wizard wrote:

Mr_Canada wrote:

I am opposed to the Americanization of the English Language in Canada.

Keep that ridiculous nonsense out of here.

Americanization?

Daniel Webster, US founding father, advocated for the Americanization of continental English spelling -- that is, the dropping of 'u' from such words as neighbor and color, refusing the suffix '-ise' as an acceptable alternative to '-ize', dropping digraphs, using 'er' instead of 're' in words like theater, that sort of thing. Thanks to his rejection of Latin as the ideal for English spelling rules, the UK's "colourised theatre" is the USA's "colorized theater."

Given Webster's historic example, one could consider it patriotic for US Americans to simplify the rules of English spelling. But Canada is rather caught in the crossfire. Wikipedia has more info on American spelling.

Benn wrote:

Reminds me for some Americans I knew while living overseas who instead of saying, "they don't speak English" would consistently say 'They don't speak American."

I know Americans who say that as a joke, knowing it's technically the wrong word. It's part self-derision and part derision of people who make Americans out to be stupid or unaware. Kinda like when people wear T-Shirts that say "1+1=3 for unusually large values of 1." Typically, they're the math or logic geeks that know better than most that it's ridiculous reasoning. Otherwise it wouldn't be funny.

Others, of course, are just plain wrong.

Mr_Canada wrote:

I can't remember, are you the one who is with tritium on the whole "America annexing this boring country" thing?

Nice ad hominem.

I like Canada. When I visit there, I find people who are tidy, polite, carefree, intelligent, and informed. Thus, I must conclude that you are not actually Canadian.

ShepherdsDog wrote:

What are you saying is wrong? The two tense examples given are how Americans use dived in place of dove and shined rather than shone. It's completely correct/acceptable in American English.

I'm American, public school educated, and I've never heard "dived" taken as an acceptable alternative to "dove" or "shined" to "shone." I looked it up and it's true, but that doesn't mean it's common or that Americans universally accept it's use.

I assume it's regional, but I have no way to verify that.

[martin14]

Psudo wrote:

Mr_Canada wrote:

I can't remember, are you the one who is with tritium on the whole "America annexing this boring country" thing?

Nice ad hominem.

I like Canada. When I visit there, I find people who are tidy, polite, carefree, intelligent, and informed. Thus, I must conclude that you are not actually Canadian.

I can hear him screeching from here.

[Psudo]

I would love a spelling distinction between minute (1/60th of an hour) and minute (extremely small), and between resume (return to a previously discontinued activity) and resume (list of qualifications for employment). It is rarely convenient in electronic media to include an acute accent mark over the trailing 'e'. é doesn't work in this forum, ALT+130 doesn't work on this laptop, and %E9 only works in URLs. Plus there's the awkwardness of having to memorize that. I could change my system settings to some international keyboard layout, but since I don't own a physical international keyboard I'd still be memorizing a work-around. As far as I can tell, Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for resume or minute due to this confusion. Sure, you can usually tell by context: one's a noun and one's an adjective. But sometimes it's still awkward.

[MacDonaill]

ShepherdsDog wrote:

What are you saying is wrong? The two tense examples given are how Americans use dived in place of dove and shined rather than shone. It's completely correct/acceptable in American English.

I lived almost my whole childhood in the States and I have always said 'dove'. I'm not sure I have ever heard anyone say 'dived'. In any case, it seems strange to my ears.

[JJ]

MacDonaill wrote:

So not choosing to follow the spelling conventions of the US is tantamount to being pettily anti-American?

You don't have to go out of your way to spell things correctly unless, for whatever reason, you learned US spelling exclusively in your scholarly education instead of Canadian.

That's actually not the case at all. Every so often some educational group of some sort will do a survey of elementary school classrooms across the land and release a report that declares, in shocked terms, how many non-Canadian spellings they found being used. I saw a segment about this on CTV news a couple months ago, in fact. The offending teachers all just shrugged their shoulders and were like "well, I didn't know we were supposed to be spelling 'mucus' like 'mucous," that's certainly not how I learned it..." etc.

Most Canadians are taught to use "re" as the ending to some words, and add a few extra "u's" here and there. And that's about the extent to which most of us understand "Canadian English." The market has pretty much spoken, as far as I am concerned. Canadians seem to feel that the re's and u's represent a comfortable minimum of what they need to keep in order to maintain some sort of unique "spelling nationalism" or whatever. Beyond that, "proper Canadian English" just becomes a very pointlessly elitist thing, where the vast majority have to defer to some sort of learned clique of people who write the Canadian spelling guide for the Globe and Mail, or some other thing deemed "respectable" enough, and let them decree to the rest of us how "our" language is supposed to work. That's weird and counter-intuitive and arbitrary and anti-democratic.

We live in a globalized world and English is increasingly the language of that world. It makes sense for the language to evolve in the direction of greater simplicity to enhance the ease of clear communication with the greatest number of people. Simplification of spelling is a respectable tradition (in moderation), and it's not worthless simply because it has an American stigma attached to it.

[BartSimpson]

Psudo wrote:

Mr_Canada wrote:

I can't remember, are you the one who is with tritium on the whole "America annexing this boring country" thing?

Nice ad hominem.

I like Canada. When I visit there, I find people who are tidy, polite, carefree, intelligent, and informed. Thus, I must conclude that you are not actually Canadian.

You get a +1 from me on that!

[ShepherdsDog]

He's an adolescent...what do you expect? They are the same everywhere.

[Quantum_Wizard]

Again, answers to multiple responses in one post:


Zipperfish:

Zipperfish wrote:

Quantum_Wizard wrote:

How does complexity in spelling add to its richness?

Here's an example:

"Now is the winter of my discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York"

If "son" and "sun" were spelled the same, it would lose its meaning.

There's tons in Shakespeare--little turns that depend upon a play on homynyms, or synonyms. Magic.

A reform would only eliminate puns that depend on the words being homonyms and having different spelling. Many plays on homonyms would still work in both writing and speech. Plays on synonyms would be unaffected. There would still be a lot of room to play with the language.

Besides on the matter of Shakespeare, you are not spelling like he did anyway. Or shouldn't that passage be:

"Now is the winter of our discontent.
Made glorious summer by this sonne of Yorke:
And all the cloudes that lowrd vpon our house,
In the deepe bosome of the Ocean buried."

Some more strange looking Shakespeare (from Henry VI):

"Tis vertue that makes them seeme deuine,
The want thereof makes thee abhominable.
Thou art as opposite to euerie good,
As the Antipodes are vnto vs,
Or as the south to the Septentrion."


Dayseed:

Dayseed wrote:

We think in language. The quality of our thoughts can only be as good as the quality of the language in which we express it.

I don't believe that our thought would be in most cases be limited by language. Or do you have some evidence for it?

Dayseed wrote:

By removing complexity, we reduce the available building blocks from which we can form complex thoughts.

A reform would only change the spelling of the language. It would not affect its expressive power.

Dayseed wrote:

Also, there is objective benefit in exercising the mind.

This seems an unfounded claim to me. I don't believe there's much real benefit.

Dayseed wrote:

Switching "uff" for "ough" IS dumbing things down;

Simpler does not equate to dumber. A reform would make the English orthography more logical and more elegant.

Dayseed wrote:

it's a linguistic escalator because some people are too intellectually fat to climb the stairs.

Then by that logic, aren't things like electronic calculators and automatic transmission 'escalators for the intellectually fat'? Should we cease to use these inventions in order to 'exercise our minds'?


ShepherdsDog:

ShepherdsDog wrote:

Quote:

The funny thing about these errors is that you they are generally a mark of a native speaker. Foreigner tend not to these kind of mistakes.

Don't think so Merlin. I teach EFL to university students and professionals, and these mistakes are all too common.

Well your experience is probably better than mine since my observation came mostly from reading English language forums on the Net. However it seems to me that foreigners mostly tend to make different kind of mistakes.


JJ:

JJ wrote:

But as this relates to the original premise, I think spellings should evolve naturally, and not be a top-down thing, or a sweeping, all-at-once thing.

But spelling does not evolve naturally very much, does it. We are told in school the correct way of spelling words, which doesn't change even when the pronunciation changes, as will inevitably happen. Language that doesn't occasionally reform its spelling will have its orthography and pronunciation diverge over time. The English orthography is seriously out of date.


MacDonaill:

MacDonaill wrote:

A lot of our orthographic idiosyncrasies are actually useful, especially for things like differentiation between homonyms which sound like the same word but are not at all. Think of their, they're and there. Then and than. Wood and would. These words usually sound identical in the spoken language of most native speakers, but are completely different, have different etymologies, serve different grammatical purposes and should therefore be spelt differently.

The homophones are not a significant problem in speech and I don't think they would be in writing either. The "they're" vs. "their" distinction could still easily be maintained since "they're" is short for "they are" and one could still use forms that have the apostrophes for these kind of shortcuts.

Also aren't "then" and "than" pronounced differently. I pronounce the former [ðɛn] and the latter [ðæn]. With different pronunciations, they would also be spelled differently.

I think words with same spelling but different pronunciations are much bigger problem and these would become distinct in a reform.

By the way, you spelled "spelled" incorrectly as "*spelt". Was the pronunciation throwing you off?


Psudo:

Psudo wrote:

I would love a spelling distinction between minute (1/60th of an hour) and minute (extremely small), and between resume (return to a previously discontinued activity) and resume (list of qualifications for employment). It is rarely convenient in electronic media to include an acute accent mark over the trailing 'e'. é doesn't work in this forum, ALT+130 doesn't work on this laptop, and %E9 only works in URLs. Plus there's the awkwardness of having to memorize that. I could change my system settings to some international keyboard layout, but since I don't own a physical international keyboard I'd still be memorizing a work-around. As far as I can tell, Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for resume or minute due to this confusion. Sure, you can usually tell by context: one's a noun and one's an adjective. But sometimes it's still awkward.

A spelling reform could easily make these distinct, which would be a good thing. Do you agree?

BTW Psudo, what happened to our number guessing game?

[MacDonaill]

Quantum_Wizard wrote:

Also aren't "then" and "than" pronounced differently. I pronounce the former [ðɛn] and the latter [ðæn]. With different pronunciations, they would also be spelled differently.

They ought to be pronounced differently, but in everyday speech most native speakers pronounce them exactly the same, which is why confusing the two in writing is a common spelling error.

Quote:

By the way, you spelled "spelled" incorrectly as "*spelt". Was the pronunciation throwing you off?

Check again, Shakespeare. I most certainly did not misspell 'spelt'. You are referring to the chiefly US spelling of the preterite and past participle form of the verb, and I to the chiefly British.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spell#Verb

[ShepherdsDog]

When to use then and than can easily be determined by the context in which they are being used, so they don't need to be changed anymore than to, too and two do. When you have a literate society, like Canada once had, there is little confusion over proper spelling.

Here's an old favourite:

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.

Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it’s written).
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say-said, pay-paid, laid but plaid.

Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague,
But be careful how you speak,
Say: gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak ,

Previous, precious, fuchsia, via
Recipe, pipe, studding-sail, choir;
Woven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.

Say, expecting fraud and trickery:
Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore,
Branch, ranch, measles, topsails, aisles,
Missiles, similes, reviles.

Wholly, holly, signal, signing,
Same, examining, but mining,
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far.

From “desire”: desirable-admirable from “admire”,
Lumber, plumber, bier, but brier,
Topsham, brougham, renown, but known,
Knowledge, done, lone, gone, none, tone,

One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel.
Gertrude, German, wind and wind,
Beau, kind, kindred, queue, mankind,

Tortoise, turquoise, chamois-leather,
Reading, Reading, heathen, heather.
This phonetic labyrinth
Gives moss, gross, brook, brooch, ninth, plinth.

Have you ever yet endeavoured
To pronounce revered and severed,
Demon, lemon, ghoul, foul, soul,
Peter, petrol and patrol?

Billet does not end like ballet;
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.

Banquet is not nearly parquet,
Which exactly rhymes with khaki.
Discount, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward,

Ricocheted and crocheting, croquet?
Right! Your pronunciation’s OK.
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Is your r correct in higher?
Keats asserts it rhymes Thalia.
Hugh, but hug, and hood, but hoot,
Buoyant, minute, but minute.

Say abscission with precision,
Now: position and transition;
Would it tally with my rhyme
If I mentioned paradigm?

Twopence, threepence, tease are easy,
But cease, crease, grease and greasy?
Cornice, nice, valise, revise,
Rabies, but lullabies.

Of such puzzling words as nauseous,
Rhyming well with cautious, tortious,
You’ll envelop lists, I hope,
In a linen envelope.

Would you like some more? You’ll have it!
Affidavit, David, davit.
To abjure, to perjure. Sheik
Does not sound like Czech but ache.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, loch, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed but vowed.

Mark the difference, moreover,
Between mover, plover, Dover.
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice,

Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, penal, and canal,
Wait, surmise, plait, promise, pal,

Suit, suite, ruin. Circuit, conduit
Rhyme with “shirk it” and “beyond it”,
But it is not hard to tell
Why it’s pall, mall, but Pall Mall.

Muscle, muscular, gaol, iron,
Timber, climber, bullion, lion,
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor,

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
Has the a of drachm and hammer.
Pussy, hussy and possess,
Desert, but desert, address.

Golf, wolf, countenance, lieutenants
Hoist in lieu of flags left pennants.
Courier, courtier, tomb, bomb, comb,
Cow, but Cowper, some and home.

“Solder, soldier! Blood is thicker”,
Quoth he, “than liqueur or liquor”,
Making, it is sad but true,
In bravado, much ado.

Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Pilot, pivot, gaunt, but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand and grant.

Arsenic, specific, scenic,
Relic, rhetoric, hygienic.
Gooseberry, goose, and close, but close,
Paradise, rise, rose, and dose.

Say inveigh, neigh, but inveigle,
Make the latter rhyme with eagle.
Mind! Meandering but mean,
Valentine and magazine.

And I bet you, dear, a penny,
You say mani-(fold) like many,
Which is wrong. Say rapier, pier,
Tier (one who ties), but tier.

Arch, archangel; pray, does erring
Rhyme with herring or with stirring?
Prison, bison, treasure trove,
Treason, hover, cover, cove,

Perseverance, severance. Ribald
Rhymes (but piebald doesn’t) with nibbled.
Phaeton, paean, gnat, ghat, gnaw,
Lien, psychic, shone, bone, pshaw.

Don’t be down, my own, but rough it,
And distinguish buffet, buffet;
Brood, stood, roof, rook, school, wool, boon,
Worcester, Boleyn, to impugn.

Say in sounds correct and sterling
Hearse, hear, hearken, year and yearling.
Evil, devil, mezzotint,
Mind the z! (A gentle hint.)

Now you need not pay attention
To such sounds as I don’t mention,
Sounds like pores, pause, pours and paws,
Rhyming with the pronoun yours;

Nor are proper names included,
Though I often heard, as you did,
Funny rhymes to unicorn,
Yes, you know them, Vaughan and Strachan.

No, my maiden, coy and comely,
I don’t want to speak of Cholmondeley.
No. Yet Froude compared with proud
Is no better than McLeod.

But mind trivial and vial,
Tripod, menial, denial,
Troll and trolley, realm and ream,
Schedule, mischief, schism, and scheme.

Argil, gill, Argyll, gill. Surely
May be made to rhyme with Raleigh,
But you’re not supposed to say
Piquet rhymes with sobriquet.

Had this invalid invalid
Worthless documents? How pallid,
How uncouth he, couchant, looked,
When for Portsmouth I had booked!

Zeus, Thebes, Thales, Aphrodite,
Paramour, enamoured, flighty,
Episodes, antipodes,
Acquiesce, and obsequies.

Please don’t monkey with the geyser,
Don’t peel ‘taters with my razor,
Rather say in accents pure:
Nature, stature and mature.

Pious, impious, limb, climb, glumly,
Worsted, worsted, crumbly, dumbly,
Conquer, conquest, vase, phase, fan,
Wan, sedan and artisan.

The th will surely trouble you
More than r, ch or w.
Say then these phonetic gems:
Thomas, thyme, Theresa, Thames.

Thompson, Chatham, Waltham, Streatham,
There are more but I forget ‘em-
Wait! I’ve got it: Anthony,
Lighten your anxiety.

The archaic word albeit
Does not rhyme with eight-you see it;
With and forthwith, one has voice,
One has not, you make your choice.

Shoes, goes, does *. Now first say: finger;
Then say: singer, ginger, linger.
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, age,

Hero, heron, query, very,
Parry, tarry fury, bury,
Dost, lost, post, and doth, cloth, loth,
Job, Job, blossom, bosom, oath.

Faugh, oppugnant, keen oppugners,
Bowing, bowing, banjo-tuners
Holm you know, but noes, canoes,
Puisne, truism, use, to use?

Though the difference seems little,
We say actual, but victual,
Seat, sweat, chaste, caste, Leigh, eight, height,
Put, nut, granite, and unite.

Reefer does not rhyme with deafer,
Feoffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Dull, bull, Geoffrey, George, ate, late,
Hint, pint, senate, but sedate.

Gaelic, Arabic, pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific;
Tour, but our, dour, succour, four,
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.

Say manoeuvre, yacht and vomit,
Next omit, which differs from it
Bona fide, alibi
Gyrate, dowry and awry.

Sea, idea, guinea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean,
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion with battalion,
Rally with ally; yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, key, quay!

Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, receiver.
Never guess-it is not safe,
We say calves, valves, half, but Ralf.

Starry, granary, canary,
Crevice, but device, and eyrie,
Face, but preface, then grimace,
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.

Bass, large, target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, oust, joust, and scour, but scourging;
Ear, but earn; and ere and tear
Do not rhyme with here but heir.

Mind the o of off and often
Which may be pronounced as orphan,
With the sound of saw and sauce;
Also soft, lost, cloth and cross.

Pudding, puddle, putting. Putting?
Yes: at golf it rhymes with shutting.
Respite, spite, consent, resent.
Liable, but Parliament.

Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew, Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, clerk and jerk,
Asp, grasp, wasp, demesne, cork, work.

A of valour, vapid vapour,
S of news (compare newspaper),
G of gibbet, gibbon, gist,
I of antichrist and grist,

Differ like diverse and divers,
Rivers, strivers, shivers, fivers.
Once, but nonce, toll, doll, but roll,
Polish, Polish, poll and poll.

Pronunciation-think of Psyche!-
Is a paling, stout and spiky.
Won’t it make you lose your wits
Writing groats and saying “grits”?

It’s a dark abyss or tunnel
Strewn with stones like rowlock, gunwale,
Islington, and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Don’t you think so, reader, rather,
Saying lather, bather, father?
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, bough, cough, hough, sough, tough??

Hiccough has the sound of sup…
My advice is: GIVE IT UP!

[Quantum_Wizard]

MacDonaill wrote:

Check again, Shakespeare. I most certainly did not misspell 'spelt'. You are referring to the chiefly US spelling of the preterite and past participle form of the verb, and I to the chiefly British.

Okay, I'm sorry. It seems the automatic checking of spelling in my browser is apparently US English only and I wasn't aware of that.

[MacDonaill]

I don't really think that the occasional spelling error is a big enough deal to warrant all the rigmarole that would be necessary for a spelling reform.

On top of that, English (unlike other European languages) has no central governing body. There is no English Academy. The standards are ever-evolving and do not need regulation by some committee. English is a free-market language, and in due time the spellings, grammar, syntax and vocabulary preferred by a majority of literate people will prevail as they always have.