levy@fisher.UUCP (Silvio Levy) (11/09/84)
The idea that phonetic spelling would make Shakespeare (or this century's literature) hard or impossible to read is ridiculous. We do not read Shakespeare today as it was written four hundred years ago; we read him in today's spelling. Similarly, if we were to have phonetic spelling, we would read Shakespeare, Thackeray, Thoreau or Maya Angelou in the new spelling. It would actually make reading easier. (Admittedly some of Ogden Nash's punch lines would lose their punch...) In Brazil and Portugal we had a spelling reform in the thirties that abolished many etymological bugaboos, especially double letters (which are not pronounced double in Portuguese). As a consequence Portuguese is a fairly phonetic language; from the spelling it is (essentially) possible to predict the pronunciation, at least in each region of Brazil or Portugal, since the pronunciation certainly varies with the region. This reform came about by common legislation to the two countries. It was certainly not too painful, except to some diehard reactionaries. Now it would be unthinkable to revert to the previous, presumable more learned, spelling. The reading of the classics was in no way harmed; people still read everything from Camoes to Machado de Assis, in the new spelling, of course. Silvio Levy
mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor) (11/18/84)
English may be the most strangely spelled language in common use, but
it could never be practical to develop a uniform phonetic spelling.
Whose phonetics would you use? If you say that it should be the sounds
of the largest single group of English speakers, you might well wind
up with the phonetics of the Indian sub-continent. Would that help
US readers? Even if you take the position of primacy, and allow the
English to determine the spelling according to their phonetics, you
will get some strange things. Not all "gh" spellings are useless in
all English dialects, for example, even though they may be silent in
most dialects. Many US books claim "o" and "a" (I don't have phonetic
symbols on my terminal) are the same sound, but you won't get most of
the English-speaking world to agree.
Secondly, it helps the reader (if not the writer) to have different
spellings for homophones, and to have similar spellings for related
words that are pronounced differently. The spellings provide just
one more, usually redundant, clue as to the meaning of the word.
The languages whose written forms have lasted longest in the world
have not been alphabetic. Current world record-holder, and still running,
is Chinese. It can be read by a wide range of people whose dialects
are even less mutually intelligible than are those of English. The
runner-up seems to be Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, which contains
clues to sound, to meaning, and to syllabification, among other clues.
The argument about phonetic spelling is based on the idea that written
language is a way to record speech. It isn't, and there is no evidence
that it ever was. Grafting spoken forms onto written language was
quite a recent idea in the history of symbolic representation (well,
perhaps not so recent, but long after its invention as a system for
keeping business records).
People don't write the way they talk, for very good reason. There
are arguments of convenience for having some reasonable degree of
phonetic representation in an alphabetic script, but unless the
language itself is very regular, a completely phonetic representation
is neither practical nor desirable.
--
Martin Taylor
{allegra,linus,ihnp4,floyd,ubc-vision}!utzoo!dciem!mmt
{uw-beaver,qucis,watmath}!utcsrgv!dciem!mmtmark@uf-csv.UUCP (mark fishman [fac]) (12/04/84)
--this is a null string -- oops --
Since the prevailing orthography actually *is* fairly phonetic (for the way
English was spoken in the 16th century), why not resort to the simpler
expedient of changing the pronunciation? And then we can keep the accumulated
detritus of English literature, just as it is. I, for one, am kind of
disenchanted with diphthongs, anyway.
Cravinge youre indulgence, I be,
Mark Fishman
akgua!uf-csv!mark
U.of Fla./CIS
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"And it must follow as the night the day,
thou canst not then be false to any amanuensis."
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