From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npoiv!npois!ucbvax!ARPAVAX:arnold
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Title: Rational Pronunciation
Article-I.D.: ucbarpa.1810
Posted: Thu Jul 29 18:06:07 1982
Received: Sat Jul 31 08:19:52 1982
Reply-To: d

Now, of all ideas in this debate about rational spelling, Michael Robinson's
suggestion of changing pronunciation rather than spelling is the most
interesting by far.

Changing either pronunciation or spelling is a major hassle from an
individual's point of view.  Either reduces comprehension greatly
at first until one becomes accustomed to the new system.  So what
other costs are there?

Well, changing the spelling system makes all the old English books
obselete.  Someone who grew up with the new system couldn't read
old-system books unless they were translated.  This means that either
every book must be translated, or someone must decide which is most
important to translate, and many works with as-yet-unrecognized
potential may be lost (many discoveries and insights are achieved
because someone happened upon an old, unread work which, when read
with current knowledge, became significant (or at least interesting)).
Now THAT is a huge expense.  And how do you tranlate older poetry
which is chock full of older words that aren't used anymore?

If you modify pronunciation, however, little capital outlay is required.
Retraining is an expense in either system.  The only technology which
depends on current pronunciation patterns are (s/technology/technologies)
speech recognition and poetry[1].  There isn't much that currently
operates on speech recognition besides other humans, and they all must
be retrained in any case.  The only major loss is currently written
poetry.  Since you loose some poetry in either case, this is a regrettable
but necessary loss.

Besides, with rational spelling, how do you treat dialect?  Much of
the richness of certain works (Mark Twain's stories come to mind) is
due to a generous use of dialect.  In a rational spelling system (no,
I don't assume rational == phonetic) how do you deal with variants?

		Ken