From: utzoo!watmath!rvpalliende Newsgroups: net.nlang Title: Rational spelling Article-I.D.: watmath.3085 Posted: Fri Jul 23 13:45:26 1982 Received: Fri Jul 23 23:45:13 1982 Why do people think that changing spelling means having phonetic spelling? English phonetics is far from rational (people who drop their r's, others who don't; people who rime "father" and "bother", and others who don't; thousands ov homonyms, etc) therefore, a rational spelling can't and shouldn't be phonetic. Anyway, all people who object phonetic spelling because ov the problems that homonyms would generate never complain about homographs, like read (reed, red), tear (tir, ter), record (rekerd, rikurd), etc. On the other hand, although there are some reasons not to have a (completely) phonetic spelling, there is no reason not to make spelling more rational. The following variants are in current use today: catalogue catalog centre center defence defense colour color sceptical skeptical None ov the spellings in the right hand side is "phonetic", but they are better than the ones in the left hand side. Why can't more variants ov this form be in effect? Note that backwards compatibility isn't the source ov all spelling difficulties. Johnson and other no too learned scholars are responsible for respelling: ache It was thought that "ake" derived from Greek. island It was thought that "iland" derived from "insula". This word was actually respelled, to make it more "etymological". Actually the spelling ILAND is correct (although not socially accepted) sovereign People thought that it had something to do with Latin "regnus". Therefore, the etymological argument is unsound as a reason to leave spelling the way it is now. Note also that many other difficulties are due to phonetic reasons: Double consonants were introduced in a frustrated attempt ov indicating the length ov a vowel. "Latter" and "later" are good examples where this works. But the rule isn't used in all English words. If we had the pair ov words "finite" and "infinnit" probably nobody would pronounce in-fie-nite (Webster records the latter pronunciation as a variant, which I'm certain, was developed due to the spelling) "ch" instead ov "k", "ph" instead ov "f", and "y" instead ov "i" were introduced in Latin for phonetic reasons. "ch" attempted to represent a hard "h" sound (as "Kh" in Khomeini or "J" in La Jolla) "ph" was the Greek "f" which used both lips instead ov only the upper lip and the lower teeth (I can't hear the difference, but it seems that Romans could) Finally, "y" represented a sound similar to French "u". Why are the phonetic reasons the Romans had, more important than the ones that people ov today may have? To finish this a simple statistic: children taught to read in a phonetic alphabet acquire 5th grade proficiency (by English standards) by the middle ov grade 2. If a rational (and international) spelling were adopted, this could be worsened, but probably not too much.