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.