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Spelling Reform Proposal
We should get rid of the ambiguous "gh" spelling at the end of words. Here is what I propose.
laugh = laff laughter = laffter cough = coff though = thru though = tho trough = troff slough = slew What do you think?
Slough -> slew trades a phonetic ambiguity for a semantic one, since it's the past tense of "slay". (There's also the phrase "a slew of", which means "a bunch of" or "a ton of", but there's little chance for confusion there.)
Anyway, it's a nice idea, but it'd never work. Aside from "through -> thru", since it's common enough in certain cirumstances (especially "drive-thru"), all of them look funny. Of course, they only look funny because I'm used to the "old" spellings, but nobody likes writing words that look funny, so things like this never catch on. - Kef
plough -> plow
draught -> draft BTW, "laffter" should probably be "lafter", in the first post.
I аlso pгopose тhe use of 'ch' insтead of 't+ some vowel' (I'м not sure of the exacт rule, but you will understand мy intentions).
Laughter = Lafchur stupid = schupid puncture = puncchure Are you in favouг of my suggеsтioп?
I'm against any spelling reforms. I think that they are useless and would bring more confussion to those who are already used to the current spelling of the English language.
That is the thing - as English really has no single fixed standard that an orthography can be arbitrarily based off of, the only real option is to try to create a true crossdialectal orthography which tries to represent distinctions across dialects (even if a bit of knowledge about English diachronics is needed upon the part of a reader or writer). To use Guest's examples, I would probably actually treat them as:
"laughter" : /"l{ft@r/ > "lafter" "stupid" : /"stiu)pId/ > "stiupid" "puncture" : /"pVNktiu)r/ > "punktiur" Mind you, here, though that: In "lafter", the "e" is a "weak" due to being in an unstressed syllable and not being otherwise doubled or marked with a diacritic. Mind you that stress is assumed to be initial unless marked with a diacritic. In "lafter", the use of /f/ is just an arbitrary choice based on the outcome of Middle English /x/ in "laughter" as the outcome of such is not very predictable overall. In "stiupid" and "puncture", "iu" is a digraph the historical diphthong /iu/, which has become /ju/ in most but not all English dialects. In "punktiur", the first "u" indicates /V/ (with /U/ being marked with a diacritic) as it is undoubled and in an orthographically closed syllable. The matter is that it is necessary to mark the split between /V/ and /U/ orthographically, as a large portion of modern English dialects have it, but as the primary fate of Middle English /U/ is /V/ in English dialects today, closed/undoubled "u" is assigned to /V/ rather than /U/. In "punktiur", the "iu" only indicates historical /iu/, as in reality in most dialects it has palatalized and affricates the /t/ before it, and then, due to being unstressed, has been subsequently reduced so as to being equivalent with historical /@r/ or /j@r/. However, i would not mark such reduction orthographically, as the intention here is to mark historical forms from a diachronic standpoint, so it is still "iu".
One other note:
In "stiupid", the "iu" represents historical /iu/, with may or may not palatalize/affricate the preceding historical /t/ depending on the dialect in question, and furthermore historical /iu/ is merged with historical /u:/ in this position in many North American English dialects and non-NAE dialects which lose prevocalic /j/ in the process of palatalization/affrication.
The matter, though, is that if we truly wanted to represent etymology, we would effectively need a cleaner representation of Middle English phonology - and if we went that route, we would probably be better going off the Icelandic route here. The matter is that while modern English orthography does contain a good amount of etymological information, at the same time it is not necessarily a reasonable representation of Middle English phonology either.
>>English spelling is fine now. Don't change it if it already works.<<
It only "works" in that there are no better solutions that are: 1) Politically acceptable and 2) Sufficiently crossdialectal so as to not favor a particular branch of English, and even then probably just the standard variety associated with such Unfortunately, most attempts at such do not get anywhere close to even one of those two; they generally either are: 1) A strict, pedantic codification of some single standard without any regard to linguistic realities OR diachronics or 2) The particular dialect that the creator of the orthography speaks, with all its quirks and weirdness, even when they completely go against how a (very) large portion of extant English dialects do things On that note, case 2) is generally the result of naivete, arrogance, or stupidity on the part of the person attempting to create such, and case 1) is going to be completely politically unacceptable one way or another.
Aside from the perennial attempts of amateurs and crackpots to create new homemade orthographies fro English, though, the fundamental problem here is that English is highly pluricentric in a nontrivial fashion, such that it is difficult to create a single orthography that really truly encompasses all standards, but at the same time the English standards are far too close together to just officially divorce orthographically either as the continental North Germanic standards (Standard Danish, Bokmål, Nynorsk, and Standard written Swedish) have.
This is also complicated by the fact that the British are too attached to Received Pronunciation and the Americans are too attached to General American. As a result, it would be difficult to impossible to create a new common orthography acceptable to both unless it is so sufficiently different from both so as to defuse the perception that it is somehow favoring the other group. And if that were the case, it would then be very likely to be considered unacceptable for other reasons due to just being to radical or weird. Hence, even creating a single unified standard for even just General American and Received Pronunciation is not going to happen, and at the same time separate orthographies cannot be established for even just those two. |