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From: cjh@petsd.UUCP (Chris Henrich)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Credibility
Message-ID: <544@petsd.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 14-Jun-85 16:52:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: petsd.544
Posted: Fri Jun 14 16:52:53 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 15-Jun-85 08:43:17 EDT
References: <267@sri-arpa.ARPA>
Reply-To: cjh@petsd.UUCP (PUT YOUR NAME HERE)
Organization: Perkin-Elmer DSG, Tinton Falls, N.J.
Lines: 57
Summary: 

[]
	James Parker, writing in net.physics, raises this
question:

>why Why WHY can't we switch to spelling everything phonetically ???
>it's so simple.

	This seems more appropriate for net.nlang, so I am
switching the newsgroup.
	There are several reasons why we don't, can't, and
(maybe) shouldn't switch to spelling English phonetically.

(1) The enormous cost of cutting over to a new system.

(2) The delayed effect of having old documents become
unreadable except by a few specialists.  As it is, you can
read Shakespeare without learning a new language, and you can
read Chaucer with a little help and guesswork.  If you had
learned only to read a phonetic spelling of English, you could
not read Dickens or the Declaration of Independence, in the
original.

(3) The difficulty of deciding what is "phonetic" in a
language which, like English, has many regional varieties.
A Londoner, a Canadian, and a Texan would phonetically spell
things differently.  I live in New Jersey, but if I travel to
Texas I can read the street signs without a phrase book.
(This has a side effect on the political cohesiveness of the
United States.)

(4) The loss of the non-phonetic information that our present
spellings convey.  I am not a linguist, so I shall probably
stumble in explaining what I mean.  (Sources include the
introductory material in the _American_Heritage_Dictionary_.)
The word "national" is derived from the word "nation" by
adding a suffix  a n d  changing the first vowel.  English
speakers are competent to apply this rule (so we all "know" it
in a practical sense, even if we have never thought about
making a general statement of it), so when we encode speech by
marks on paper, we use the same mark for the two vowels,
trusting to the decoder to apply the rule.  Our gain is that
the relation between the two words is preserved in the
encoding.  Also, the spelling reminds us of the  historical
connection with words such as "natural" and "native", and this
connection elucidates shades of meaning in all these words.

	It appears that there are often reasons for the way we
do things, that are cogent even if we are unaware of them.

Regards,
Chris

--
Full-Name:  Christopher J. Henrich
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