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From: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Spelling reform does *not* discourage reading literature
Message-ID: <1211@dciem.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 18-Nov-84 15:52:01 EST
Article-I.D.: dciem.1211
Posted: Sun Nov 18 15:52:01 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 18-Nov-84 18:23:58 EST
References: <388@fisher.UUCP>
Organization: D.C.I.E.M., Toronto, Canada
Lines: 41

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
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