Spelling Reform
To a much greater extent than other language, the United States suffers from confusing spelling. A point that’s well-illustrated by this video:
And all this is to say nothing of the fact that the same word is often spelled differently (”colour” vs “color”) depending on which country you’re in. This all makes it more difficult for immigrants to English-speaking countries to become literate and, in general, it’s an extra disadvantage for children whose family background puts them at a relative disadvantage. And as English has increasingly become the international language, it’s particularly problematic for the world to be operating with one of the languages in which it’s hardest to communicate.
Obviously, you wouldn’t want to organize some kind of totalitarian effort to force everyone to adopt a new, more logical spelling system. But spelling conventions have changed over the years, and other languages are easier to spell in part because there’s more deliberate effort by leading institutions to play a custodial role and implement periodic reforms. Something similar for English could be very useful.
107 Responses to “Spelling Reform”
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April 29th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
To a much greater extent than other language, the United States suffers from confusing spelling.
The hell?
April 29th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
You’ve got balls posting this, I’ll give you that.
April 29th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Now he’s just trolling his own blog.
April 29th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Hey, Matt:
Fred Hiatt is at it again. See TPM.
Apparently, there are no facts and lying is impossible. People just … hate George Will.
April 29th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
I think this should become a standard definition of chutzpa.
April 29th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
English is just pidgin lower German with French vocabulary, and pidgin dialects _are_ simplified versions of their mother tongue, so Matt is kinda full of it.
April 29th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
How could we get this far down our hierarchy of needs without having already converted to the metric system?
April 29th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Oh sure, then before you know it, we’re all embracing IngSoc, waiting for job numbers from MiniPlenty while living in terror of MiniLuv. Thanks, but no thanks.
Just kidding, but that’s what you’d hear from the more literate wing-nuts out there. The rest would just scream “fascism.” (or “socialism,” the right can’t seem to keep them straight these days.)
It’s a good idea, though, and one that I’ve personally advocated for a long time amongst my friends. A language is meant to communicate clearly and efficiently. As someone who speaks four languages, I can definitely say that English is the toughest to spell of the bunch.
April 29th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
There was an article about this, in the Journal of Irreproducible Results collection published in the 1970s, which I think was titled (after one of the articles) “Stress Analysis of a Topless Evening Gown.” I can’t remember any more details but I’m sure someone here will come through.
April 29th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
“To a much greater extent than other language, the United States suffers from confusing spelling.”
等一下。。。什么？
April 29th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Eeglaeseeus.
Pronunciation changes too.
April 29th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
The idea that a word must be spelled in only one way is a relatively recent innovation, no more than a few centuries old, I think. The best way is to let diverse spellings continue, and be less dogmatic about spelling (and grammar). Matt can’t support this because it would look self-interested, but it’s still probably the best policy.
April 29th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
I was under the same impression as Matt on this issue so I mentioned to some English as a Second Language speakers that I was impressed that they had learned such a difficult language so well. Without exception, they (3 people of various ethnic backgrounds) laughed and said that English was a very easy language despite the spelling issues. They specifically pointed out the very simple grammar. For example “walk” can only be conjugated 4 ways (walks, walk, walked, walking) whereas in most languages there are dozens of different conjugations depending on tense, person, plural, and case.
April 29th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Now he’s just trolling his own blog.
I don’t mind that; I mind the obviousness of it.
April 29th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Teddy Roosevelt already tried to impose a simplified spelling system. He was not encouraged.
http://www.johnreilly.info/trlist.htm
April 29th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
We could just stop complaining about mispelling and ask whether the basic meaning got across. For instance we would all be better off if we stopped pretending effect and affect were different words.
April 29th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
This idea is almost as good as Esperanto.
Then again, English extremely difficult to spell for Ivy League educated bloggers, making English appear more difficult to spell than it actually is.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
I presume the difficulty referred to is in literacy, not fluency.
Spelling reform becomes the pet project of a public intellectual pretty regularly; alphabet reform less so. I saw an interesting museum exhibit a while back with some Shaw manuscripts in his personal, “improved” alphabet, for example.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
Re: To a much greater extent than other language, the United States suffers from confusing spelling.
The United States is not a language, and to the extent that the English language suffers from confusing spelling the United States shares that woe with Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and quite a few more nations.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
“And all this is to say nothing of the fact that the same word is often spelled differently (”colour” vs “color”) depending on which country you’re in.”
Actually this is quite common. Even within China, various dialects are difficult for people speaking other dialects to understand. Ditto Arabic. Argentine Spanish is quite different from Spanish Spanish, and ditto Brazilian and Portuguese Portuguese, both in written and spoken forms.
As some have pointed out, English has a lot of simplifications. We have all the tenses that other languages have, but ours don’t usually involve a different word ending for every tense. We don’t assign gender to our nouns. We don’t have a different “you” for someone we don’t know well as distinct from the “you” who is someone we know well. We don’t have two different verb versions of “is” depending on whether something permanently “is” or temporarily “is”.
On the other hand, what a luxury it must be to have a language without silent letters, or where every letter is always pronounced the same way no matter what.
In the end, all languages have their complex and seemingly irrational features, and much of those in English have to do with spelling.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
lol. i have a hard time when people speak to me in “mexican.”
April 29th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Don’t even get me started with why bomb, comb, and tomb do not rhyme.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Good luck with a “logically” (read: phonetically?) spelled English.
Phonetically spelling according to your regional accent will rile people from other regions. Just imagine a GOP platform plank that insists that “tater” is correct spelling according to Real Americans, and “potato” is something eaten by left-coast, French-loving elitists.
Don’t even try to come up with a logical spelling that Americans and Indians can agree upon.
In that sense, Egyptian hieroglyphics or Chinese pictograms have a certain appeal, since they would be equally foreign to all Anglophones.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
http://www.answersthatwork.com/Download_Area/Fun_Page/euroenglish.txt
April 29th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Very bad idea. There was a mandated spelling reform here in Germany a few years ago, and it was one of the worst demonstrations of tomfoolery I’ve ever seen. Well-meaning attempts to “improve” language by committee inevitably lead to confusion and controversy, and only make matters worse.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
I like the implication at the end of the video that illiteracy rates are so high because our language is confusing. By that logic, Australia, Canada, and the UK must be doing equally badly…and Basque speakers are presumably all illiterate.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
As much as Matt is obsessed with policy (as he should be), this is a pretty silly post.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
GB Shaw tried (and failed). His example
ghoti – fish
(gh like tough, o like women, ti like nation).
April 29th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Chinese is not written in “pictograms”! The simplest characters, such as the word for person or the number 1 may properly be called ideograms, but most characters represent morphemes and usually have a phonological component as well (although in some cases, that phonological component may be archaic). DeFrancis’ “The Chinese Language, Fact and Fantasy” is a really good place to start if you want to learn about Chinese Linguistics.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
I agree with live – this coming from you, Matt, is a joke.
Unfortunately for you, a not every funny joke.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
txtspk alrdy mking ur dum spell rulz anchent hstry
kthnkxbai
April 29th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Too late. English is already the lingua franca, so there’s a whole lot of legacy literature that would need transcription. Until that’s done we’d all have to be fluent in both olde spelling and nu speling, which wouldn’t simplify anything at all.
If you want to do the impossible, better to start with ending global warming.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
There are, as many others have pointed out, a lot of highly debatable propositions underlying this post:
1.) “To much greater extent than other language, the United States suffers from confusing spelling.”
At a minimum, you can make a very compelling argument that Chinese (all dialects), Vietnamese, Russian and Japanese are much harder spelling-wise. Plus, the bonus implication – that spelling is the primary determinant of language difficulty – is pretty silly. This is a strawman, “people say” style argument without any evidence.
2.) This all makes it more difficult for immigrants to English-speaking countries to become literate and, in general, it’s an extra disadvantage for children whose family background puts them at a relative disadvantage.
There’s no actual evidence for the first sentence, leaving alone the fact that it rests on the highly questionable first premise. The second part of this sentence is generally true for anyone learning anything, let alone a language or English specifically and is thus irrelevant.
3.) And as English has increasingly become the international language, it’s particularly problematic for the world to be operating with one of the languages in which it’s hardest to communicate.
The fact that English is a lingua franca is a pretty compelling empirical argument that it isn’t too tough to pick up. And it’s not even debatable that English is one of the languages in which it’s hardest to communicate – plenty of others are *much* more difficult. Just Google “difficult languages to learn.”
4.) Other languages are easier to spell in part because there’s more deliberate effort by leading institutions to play a custodial role and implement periodic reforms. Something similar for English could be very useful.
I’ll buy the first half, but any time you have a lot of geographically-dispersed people speaking something, the language is going to be practically impossible to control. France manages pretty well just because, well, not that many people speak French.
I assume this post is troll-bait, but it would be nice to up the quality.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Matt, the scientific research on reading data does not back up your assertion that English’s irregularities have, on the whole, have a negative impact on learning.
The cons for English’s irregularity: The harder mapping between sound and spelling (or phonology and orthography, as it gets called in the biz).
There are actually many pros, but here is a big one:
Irregularities make learning the meanings of words easier. This is because a lot of the irregularities are in meaningful units like prefixes and suffixes. For example, consider the word ending “-cede”. It is irregularly spelled (in a perfectly regular system it would likely be spelled “-seed”). But spelled the way it is, it can be a marker that words that contain it are related to the meaning “to go, or to yield” instead of “a ripened plant ovule”. So irregular spellings hurt learning spelling, but they help learning vocabulary.
Now, there are plenty of words that this doesn’t apply to. But for many of those there are equally good reasons. But the general point is that, by and large, English spelling is the way it is for a reason. Going in and mucking with it would be another place where the law of unintended consequences would apply.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Noah Webster had some, limited success at this back in the late 18th century. He really wanted to go much farther in regularizing the spelling than he was able to achieve. E.g., “Thus greef should be substituted for grief; kee for key; beleev for believe; laf for laugh; dawter for daughter; plow for plough; tuf for tough; proov for prove; blud for blood; and draft for draught.” (Plow and draft made it, obviously.)
With the advantage of writing the dictionary, he still couldn’t get his changes implemented.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
English has lots of homonyms, and silent letters make it easier to distinguish them — through and threw, bare and bear, flew and flue. This makes it difficult to spell correctly, but it makes the language easier to read. Since a given text is written once but read many times, arguably the irregularity of English spelling is at worst a push, at best a net gain.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
Mark Twain’s Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling comes to mind.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
I thought this post would be about Matt deciding to mend his ways.
Now add some hiragana and stir.
srsly
Reforming spelling will only go so far anyhow; you still have rampant grammatical irregularity to deal with.
Perhaps a better idea is to just make Spanish the international language. Its spelling is already about as phonetic as you can get for a natural language, and it’s pretty widely spoken, though not as widely as English.
April 29th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Re: The best way is to let diverse spellings continue, and be less dogmatic about spelling (and grammar).
Just so. The politically correct, multiculturalists hipsters of course think that people should be able to spell words however they choose. Spelling conventions are just an outmoded, patriarchal, authoritarian conceit. Free to be you and me, man.
April 29th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
You all did a nice job of stomping on that. Let me just say that English’s relatively simple grammar makes it pretty easy to learn and start using right away. Oh, and it isn’t as though French isn’t difficult to spell too. Actually. In any case, foreigners usually talk about how easy English is to learn. It is only native speakers who blather on about how “difficult” it is. It isn’t.
April 29th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
To get beyond the desirability of spelling reform (which I am highly dubious of, for reasons already articulated by a lot of people above, especially Jameson and JWill), there’s the question of how this could possibly occur.
Who exactly has the authority to order spelling reform? Who is the authority on the English language? Even the US government doesn’t really have the authority to do such a thing – hell, it hasn’t been able to switch us over to the metric system, the advantages of which are much clearer than the supposed advantages of spelling reform.
Basically, this is just conceptually impossible. It’s not only that it isn’t going to happen, but that it can’t happen, and an annoying mash-up of “ABC” and “Paradise City” isn’t going to convince anyone who isn’t already convinced.
At any rate, if you want a language with consistent spelling that is easy to learn, you should become an Esperantist. Turning Esperanto into a universal language seems eminently more achievable than reforming English spelling. (Note: turning Esperanto into a universal language is virtually inachievable, but not conceptually inachievable like English spelling reform).
April 29th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Let me guess, Hector—if people misspell, they should be shipped to Russia for a session with the cat o’nine tails.
April 29th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
“Who exactly has the authority to order spelling reform? Who is the authority on the English language?”
Why, the English Grammar Guild, of course.
“The U.S. Grammar Guild Monday announced that no more will traditional grammar rules English follow. Instead there will a new form of organizing sentences be.”
April 29th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Maybe a bit long, but oh so relevant!
Gerard Nolst Trenité
The Chaos
Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.
Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it’s written).
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say—said, pay—paid, laid but plaid.
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague,
But be careful how you speak,
Say: gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak,
Previous, precious, fuchsia, via
Recipe, pipe, studding-sail, choir;
Woven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.
Say, expecting fraud and trickery:
Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore,
Branch, ranch, measles, topsails, aisles,
Missiles, similes, reviles.
Wholly, holly, signal, signing,
Same, examining, but mining,
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far.
From “desire”: desirable—admirable from “admire”,
Lumber, plumber, bier, but brier,
Topsham, brougham, renown, but known,
Knowledge, done, lone, gone, none, tone,
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel.
Gertrude, German, wind and wind,
Beau, kind, kindred, queue, mankind,
Tortoise, turquoise, chamois-leather,
Reading, Reading, heathen, heather.
This phonetic labyrinth
Gives moss, gross, brook, brooch, ninth, plinth.
Have you ever yet endeavoured
To pronounce revered and severed,
Demon, lemon, ghoul, foul, soul,
Peter, petrol and patrol?
Billet does not end like ballet;
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Banquet is not nearly parquet,
Which exactly rhymes with khaki.
Discount, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward,
Ricocheted and crocheting, croquet?
Right! Your pronunciation’s OK.
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Is your r correct in higher?
Keats asserts it rhymes Thalia.
Hugh, but hug, and hood, but hoot,
Buoyant, minute, but minute.
Say abscission with precision,
Now: position and transition;
Would it tally with my rhyme
If I mentioned paradigm?
Twopence, threepence, tease are easy,
But cease, crease, grease and greasy?
Cornice, nice, valise, revise,
Rabies, but lullabies.
Of such puzzling words as nauseous,
Rhyming well with cautious, tortious,
You’ll envelop lists, I hope,
In a linen envelope.
Would you like some more? You’ll have it!
Affidavit, David, davit.
To abjure, to perjure. Sheik
Does not sound like Czech but ache.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, loch, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed but vowed.
Mark the difference, moreover,
Between mover, plover, Dover.
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice,
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, penal, and canal,
Wait, surmise, plait, promise, pal,
Suit, suite, ruin. Circuit, conduit
Rhyme with “shirk it” and “beyond it”,
But it is not hard to tell
Why it’s pall, mall, but Pall Mall.
Muscle, muscular, gaol, iron,
Timber, climber, bullion, lion,
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor,
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
Has the a of drachm and hammer.
Pussy, hussy and possess,
Desert, but desert, address.
Golf, wolf, countenance, lieutenants
Hoist in lieu of flags left pennants.
Courier, courtier, tomb, bomb, comb,
Cow, but Cowper, some and home.
“Solder, soldier! Blood is thicker”,
Quoth he, “than liqueur or liquor”,
Making, it is sad but true,
In bravado, much ado.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Pilot, pivot, gaunt, but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand and grant.
Arsenic, specific, scenic,
Relic, rhetoric, hygienic.
Gooseberry, goose, and close, but close,
Paradise, rise, rose, and dose.
Say inveigh, neigh, but inveigle,
Make the latter rhyme with eagle.
Mind! Meandering but mean,
Valentine and magazine.
And I bet you, dear, a penny,
You say mani-(fold) like many,
Which is wrong. Say rapier, pier,
Tier (one who ties), but tier.
Arch, archangel; pray, does erring
Rhyme with herring or with stirring?
Prison, bison, treasure trove,
Treason, hover, cover, cove,
Perseverance, severance. Ribald
Rhymes (but piebald doesn’t) with nibbled.
Phaeton, paean, gnat, ghat, gnaw,
Lien, psychic, shone, bone, pshaw.
Don’t be down, my own, but rough it,
And distinguish buffet, buffet;
Brood, stood, roof, rook, school, wool, boon,
Worcester, Boleyn, to impugn.
Say in sounds correct and sterling
Hearse, hear, hearken, year and yearling.
Evil, devil, mezzotint,
Mind the z! (A gentle hint.)
Now you need not pay attention
To such sounds as I don’t mention,
Sounds like pores, pause, pours and paws,
Rhyming with the pronoun yours;
Nor are proper names included,
Though I often heard, as you did,
Funny rhymes to unicorn,
Yes, you know them, Vaughan and Strachan.
No, my maiden, coy and comely,
I don’t want to speak of Cholmondeley.
No. Yet Froude compared with proud
Is no better than McLeod.
But mind trivial and vial,
Tripod, menial, denial,
Troll and trolley, realm and ream,
Schedule, mischief, schism, and scheme.
Argil, gill, Argyll, gill. Surely
May be made to rhyme with Raleigh,
But you’re not supposed to say
Piquet rhymes with sobriquet.
Had this invalid invalid
Worthless documents? How pallid,
How uncouth he, couchant, looked,
When for Portsmouth I had booked!
Zeus, Thebes, Thales, Aphrodite,
Paramour, enamoured, flighty,
Episodes, antipodes,
Acquiesce, and obsequies.
Please don’t monkey with the geyser,
Don’t peel ‘taters with my razor,
Rather say in accents pure:
Nature, stature and mature.
Pious, impious, limb, climb, glumly,
Worsted, worsted, crumbly, dumbly,
Conquer, conquest, vase, phase, fan,
Wan, sedan and artisan.
The th will surely trouble you
More than r, ch or w.
Say then these phonetic gems:
Thomas, thyme, Theresa, Thames.
Thompson, Chatham, Waltham, Streatham,
There are more but I forget ‘em—
Wait! I’ve got it: Anthony,
Lighten your anxiety.
The archaic word albeit
Does not rhyme with eight—you see it;
With and forthwith, one has voice,
One has not, you make your choice.
Shoes, goes, does *. Now first say: finger;
Then say: singer, ginger, linger.
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, age,
Hero, heron, query, very,
Parry, tarry fury, bury,
Dost, lost, post, and doth, cloth, loth,
Job, Job, blossom, bosom, oath.
Faugh, oppugnant, keen oppugners,
Bowing, bowing, banjo-tuners
Holm you know, but noes, canoes,
Puisne, truism, use, to use?
Though the difference seems little,
We say actual, but victual,
Seat, sweat, chaste, caste, Leigh, eight, height,
Put, nut, granite, and unite.
Reefer does not rhyme with deafer,
Feoffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Dull, bull, Geoffrey, George, ate, late,
Hint, pint, senate, but sedate.
Gaelic, Arabic, pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific;
Tour, but our, dour, succour, four,
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Say manoeuvre, yacht and vomit,
Next omit, which differs from it
Bona fide, alibi
Gyrate, dowry and awry.
Sea, idea, guinea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean,
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion with battalion, Rally with ally; yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, key, quay!
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, receiver.
Never guess—it is not safe,
We say calves, valves, half, but Ralf.
Starry, granary, canary,
Crevice, but device, and eyrie,
Face, but preface, then grimace,
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Bass, large, target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, oust, joust, and scour, but scourging;
Ear, but earn; and ere and tear
Do not rhyme with here but heir.
Mind the o of off and often
Which may be pronounced as orphan,
With the sound of saw and sauce;
Also soft, lost, cloth and cross.
Pudding, puddle, putting. Putting?
Yes: at golf it rhymes with shutting.
Respite, spite, consent, resent.
Liable, but Parliament.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew, Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, clerk and jerk,
Asp, grasp, wasp, demesne, cork, work.
A of valour, vapid vapour,
S of news (compare newspaper),
G of gibbet, gibbon, gist,
I of antichrist and grist,
Differ like diverse and divers,
Rivers, strivers, shivers, fivers.
Once, but nonce, toll, doll, but roll,
Polish, Polish, poll and poll.
Pronunciation—think of Psyche!—
Is a paling, stout and spiky.
Won’t it make you lose your wits
Writing groats and saying ‘grits’?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel
Strewn with stones like rowlock, gunwale,
Islington, and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Don’t you think so, reader, rather,
Saying lather, bather, father?
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, bough, cough, hough, sough, tough??
Hiccough has the sound of sup…
My advice is: GIVE IT UP!
April 29th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
Withawt ahl the rixnis of speling, wut wud Jayms Saffiyr hav ritin abawt?
April 29th, 2009 at 7:54 pm
To expand on #22:
I’m from Indiana, and I pronounce Mary, marry, and merry the same. I also pronounce Barry, bury, and berry the same. But my friend from Philly pronounces the 3 words in each set 3 different ways.
Getting any sort of standardized spelling would involve alienating the other 99.5% of English speakers. So while it would be nice to have a standardized spelling, I’m afraid this genie’s been let out of the bottle and isn’t going back in.
As for #16: ‘affect’ and ‘effect’ are completely different words in meaning and stress, and in many places are pronounced differently. You’d have a stronger case for arguing ‘their’, ‘they’re’, and ‘there’ as being the same, or ‘its’ and ‘it’s’.
April 29th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
#31:
Agried, n so iz da lolcats, lulz!1
April 29th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
I agree that all other languages have other difficulties — homonyms (French), tones (Chinese), idioms (Spanish), dearth of written accents (Italian, Russian).
English has etymological spelling which, at least in reading, has the advantage that it makes it easier to tell one word from another. The Germans tried a “reform” to get rid of this feature and the result was a disaster, so they restored it.
You have just have to accept the necessity of learning English spelling word by word. There are no shortcuts. But once you understand that, it can be done. Though it also means that those of us who were not blessed with a visual memory have to painfully endeavor to develop one remedially. This, too, can be done, however, and it’s a good mental exercise for those, who, like me, started out as terrible spellers for one reason or another. We may never be crack spellers, but it is possible to improve greatly.
I understand that people are still finding spelling mistakes in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald that his editors failed to catch and correct.
April 29th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
English spelling is confusing, but it’s also very flexible. It’s quite easy to come up with accurate romanization systems for every language. This is in stark contrast to the languages I study, Japanese and Korean, which do a terrible job of rendering other languages. I think it’s quite telling how widely adopted the Roman alphabet has been even among people who do not speak Romance or Germanic languages. Its only competitors are cyrillic and Arabic and they are far behind. Despite its cultural dominance in Asia, Chinese characters were eventually discarded by Vietnam and Korea and had to make room for hiragana and katakana in Japan.
April 29th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
“At a minimum, you can make a very compelling argument that Chinese (all dialects), Vietnamese, Russian and Japanese are much harder spelling-wise.”
That’s not the case with Vietnamese. Vietnamese has some strange spelling rules, but they are applied consistently. Once you learn a few rules and what the accent marks mean, it’s actually very easy to spell. I learned it in two days, and I’m not a linguist and I wasn’t trying very hard. I actually found the Cyrillic alphabet to be harder.
April 29th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Baby steps, let’s stop capitalizing days of the week. Wednesday is not a proper noun any more than the weekend is, or noon (I guess Wednesday the 29th of April 2009, arguably is).
Proper nouns are to clarify Penny the person from penny the currency (that we should also get rid of).
April 29th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
I really, really don’t know why people are beating up on MY. Spelling is clearly difficult for Matt, yet–as his traffic testifies–he has enough strength in other areas to make it quite irrelevant. However he is clearly in a far better position to appreciate the frustration and difficulties that our irregular orthography inflicts on those that aren’t so fortunate. There is nothing remotely surprising about any of this.
April 29th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Just as a lot of people who assert that “English is the most difficult language” happen to be native English speakers (and how many of them actually speak another language?), it seems to be the native speakers who have the most trouble with spelling.
I live in Tokyo and have traveled a lot in Asia. Fractured English is a reliable source of entertainment for the expat community, but spelling in signs and public notices is rarely a problem. At any rate, for truly appalling public displays of grammar and spelling incompetence, the US and Canada are hard to beat.
April 29th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
“It’s quite easy to come up with accurate romanization systems for every language.”
Well, if it works for Vietnamese and Turkish, I guess it could work for any language. It’s a little tricky with a tonal language like Thai, but some accent marks could denote the tones. In fact, you could use the same marks that the Thai alphabet uses. But it’s hard to get people to change. In Turkey, it took an extremely bold and radical leader like Kemal Attaturk to pull it off. A lesser man would surely have failed. In Vietnam, I suspect the Vietnamese weren’t very attached to the Chinese characters. They hate the Chinese with a passion that you rarely see. They were probably happy to give up the Chinese characters.
April 29th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
I really, really don’t know why people are beating up on MY. Spelling is clearly difficult for Matt, yet–as his traffic testifies–he has enough strength in other areas to make it quite irrelevant. However he is clearly in a far better position to appreciate the frustration and difficulties that our irregular orthography inflicts on those that aren’t so fortunate.
All true. And it would have been fine if Matt hadn’t asserted that old canard about English being so difficult to learn. It simply isn’t true, and it was lazy of him to repeat it.
April 29th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
English is very easy to speak, and very easy to read, even with the spelling problems.
April 29th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
I had no problems learning english,
April 29th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
In “The Adventure of English,” Melvyn Bragg traces the history and evolution of the English language and to call it a mongrel is being kind.
Words and grammar from Dutch/German/French/Greek/Latin have all been adopted, mutated and mis-pronounced (or adapted for English) over the years. As a result, the pronunciation and spelling of many words are often only loosely connected.
The episode on American English describes how American teachers attempted to simplify English by making its spelling closer to its pronunciation, hence “color” vs “colour”. And it’s a battle that’s been waged for centuries so I don’t see it ending any time soon.
April 29th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
At a minimum, you can make a very compelling argument that Chinese (all dialects), Vietnamese, Russian and Japanese are much harder spelling-wise.
Russian? Russian?!?!? Jameson, you’re talking out your ass, aren’t you? Russian is reasonably phonetic, it’s much easier than English or French – probably on a par with German or Spanish spelling-wise (but harder than Italian I’ll grant). And as another poster pointed out Vietnamese is actually pretty easy to spell, if not pronounce. Also in Chinese you don’t “spell”, hence the difficulty. Japanese is also very easy to “spell” if you write everything in kana, the problem is they still use 1000s of Chinese characters.
Anyone complaining about English should try their hand at Irish.
April 29th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
I know others have already knocked it, and it’s extremely low-handing fruit, but…still, COME ON:
To a much greater extent than other language, the United States suffers from confusing spelling.
April 29th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
I used to think this, but then I got myself edumucated on English (language) history, and especially relative to other languages histories (Romance in particular, but it doesn’t really matter).
For interesting spelling, the curious reader should look into French and Japanese. And I fully support both these languages spelling choices.
With a couple of small nits, English spelling should be left alone. There are good reasons to be able to distinguish between knight and night and nite without the addition of accents or macrons to the language.
Spelling reform serves no really education goal. English grammar is simple enough relative to other languages that often foreign learners are glad to know they can ignore case and gender that is so ingrained in their native tongue. (It would be a temporary boon for publishers as they get to reprint everything all over again, but they don’t really seem itching to actually follow through on that.)
But high literacy rates mean that the spelling (if not the pronunciation) will remain more static. THIS IS A GOOD THING. Don’t tinker with what ain’t broken.
April 29th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
What are you talking about? Hiragana is phonetic. Of course, Japanese treatment of 漢字 is much more confusing than Chinese, so since adding hiragana would imply Japanese rather than the quoted Chinese, I guess it would be more confusing.
April 29th, 2009 at 10:48 pm
What’s a “logical spelling system”? English words are pronounced differently in the U.S. and the U.K., so are there going to be separate spelling systems for the two countries? What about for the south vs the northeast vs the midwest vs the southwest? How about Baltimore vs Philadelphia vs New York vs Boston; do they all get their own variants? Anyone who learns one spelling system is going to be a bit confused when they find themselves in a region with a different accent (not to mention dialect).
Not to say that English spelling is fine as is, but it’s nowhere near as easy as the phrase “logical spelling system” makes it out to be.
April 29th, 2009 at 11:00 pm
Hector, for Christ’s sake learn what a damn hipster is. You call everyone hipsters and have no idea what the word means.
April 29th, 2009 at 11:00 pm
Re: I really, really don’t know why people are beating up on MY. Spelling is clearly difficult for Matt, yet–as his traffic testifies–he has enough strength in other areas to make it quite irrelevant. However he is clearly in a far better position to appreciate the frustration and difficulties that our irregular orthography inflicts on those that aren’t so fortunate.
What nonsense. I read Mr. Yglesias specifically because his style of ditzy airheadedness perfectly exemplifies the intellectual degeneration of late-capitalist America, and provides a near perfect insight into the deficiencies of modern liberal thought. I see little reason why the tongue of Shakespeare, Blake and Milton should be bastardized to make things easier for Mr. Yglesias.
April 29th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
“Vietnamese is actually pretty easy to spell, if not pronounce.”
Well, I never said it was easy to pronounce. The ‘ng’ sound ties the tongues of most Westerners. For reasons I can’t explain, I can actually say it, along with all the other Vietnamese sounds. That’s just dumb luck, but that counts too. But Thai still throws me for a loop. I just can’t get the tones right.
“For interesting spelling, the curious reader should look into French and Japanese. And I fully support both these languages spelling choices.”
Now that’s just crazy. I can’t speak about Japanese, but French spelling is absurd. I won’t even try to say a French word because the spelling is way too hard to figure out. And then they throw in randomly defined gender to confuse you even more. I’ve managed to learn that t’s are silent except when they’re not. It makes no sense at all. I’ll stick with easy languages like Turkish.
April 29th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
Re: Well, if it works for Vietnamese and Turkish, I guess it could work for any language.
Fostert,
If you figure out a good way to transliterate the sound usually spelled ‘Zh’ or ‘L’ by Tamil speakers, please let me know. I think the linguists call it a ‘retroflex approximant’, and no one has yet figured out a good way to transliterate it in English (it sounds nothing like a ZH or an L).
It’s true, however, that the Roman alphabet is pretty good at transliterating foreign languages in general, given enough accent marks and diacritics, at least compared with Cyrillic. Hell, Cyrillic languages still have trouble transliterating the letter ‘H’, they usually have to substitute a ‘G’ or a ‘KH’.
April 30th, 2009 at 12:01 am
I have overcome my habitual condescending aloofness to ask why Hector thinks that anyone to the left of Torqemada is part of my women’s-jeans-wearing, ironic-beard-sporting and bad-music-loving sub-culture.
April 30th, 2009 at 1:16 am
This was paid for by Obama for America? The Specter switch must have someone thinking that health care reform is now a slam dunk.
I’ve never heard ‘number’ used in the sense of ‘one who numbs’.
Re: japanese. The phonetic alphabets are pretty straight up: there’s exactly one phonetic reading of every kana (which is an entire syllable*). There’s two kana** for every phoneme, one hiragana one katakana (the latter for foreign words or to write the equivalent of italicized words, the former for everything else.) The kanji though is much more complex. Some 2000 characters required for high school level literacy which map onto 40 some odd phenomes (like kana, each character generally represents one syllable) and where each character has a different pronuciation depending if it’s a onyomi or kunyomi reading (which -roughly – has to do whether the character was grafted onto a japanese word or the word more precisely the pronunciation itself was borrowed from china)
*with some exceptions
** with some other exceptions
April 30th, 2009 at 1:27 am
I see little reason why the tongue of Shakespeare, Blake and Milton should be bastardized to make things easier for Mr. Yglesias.
Hee hee.
Iglesias Iglesias burning bright/ In the forests of the night/ What immortal hand or eye/ Messed up thy orthographic symmetry?
April 30th, 2009 at 1:37 am
Hector,
A good transliteration system need not be immediately clear to the average native speaker. All Korean romanization systems will leave most English speakers tongue-tied. But it takes very little ability in Korean to reproduce the original Korean with perfect accuracy. I would imagine the same is true of romanized Tamil.
April 30th, 2009 at 6:25 am
Re: It’s true, however, that the Roman alphabet is pretty good at transliterating foreign languages in general, given enough accent marks and diacritics
The Roman alphabet had to be adapted early on for languages like German that weren’t Latin-based. This was achieved by inventing a couple of new letters (w and j) and by the use of double letters (sh, ch, th…) for other sounds not found in Latin. Then eventually, accent mark, tildes, and other such devices.
April 30th, 2009 at 7:49 am
Re: This was achieved by inventing a couple of new letters (w and j) and by the use of double letters (sh, ch, th…) for other sounds not found in Latin.
They did this in 1982 for African languages, hence the African reference alphabet which is a Romanized alphabet with a few additional letters, such as for the ‘ng’ sound in ’sing’.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_reference_alphabet
April 30th, 2009 at 9:02 am
fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too
Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.
i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The
phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde
Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the
olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.
The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs
is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod
as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!
Matt’s ideas are to valuable to trifle about spelling!
April 30th, 2009 at 9:03 am
In reference to Hector about African languages, I think Swahili was the one that someone managed to fit the Roman alphabet to perfectly. Somehow there are the exact same number of consonants and vowels.
Anyway, what I’d like to hear from the people pushing simplification is, how are we going to mark vowels, exactly? There are 12ish vowel sounds in spoken English, yet we’ve only 5 to write with. Come up with a system for marking the a’s in ‘abate’ differently, and I’ll listen.
April 30th, 2009 at 9:11 am
It’s kind of shocking to have a post about having the government (or someone) change the language to make it easier to use, and no one has mentioned the Turkish language reform.
April 30th, 2009 at 9:27 am
I’ve always been interested in English spelling reform, but consider this: in the Chinese language, there is virtually *no* correspondence between the written and spoken languages, and their literacy rate is quite high. So I’d support some minor, incremental reforms addressing the worst offenses, but if the Chinese can learn their writing system, we can learn ours.
April 30th, 2009 at 9:54 am
QWERTY
April 30th, 2009 at 9:59 am
Re: In reference to Hector about African languages, I think Swahili was the one that someone managed to fit the Roman alphabet to perfectly.
Which is very odd, since Swahili developed largely under Arabic influence, and the Arabic language sounds are very different from most European languages.
I was thinking more about the adaptations I’ve heard about for Hausa and other west African languages.
April 30th, 2009 at 10:24 am
The crazy spelling of French has some advantages. Mostly the same ones that crazy spelling in English has – it makes words more recognizable on the page. This is especially true for native English-speakers, since so many of our words are taken directly from French.
April 30th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Anyway, what I’d like to hear from the people pushing simplification is, how are we going to mark vowels, exactly? There are 12ish vowel sounds in spoken English, yet we’ve only 5 to write with. Come up with a system for marking the a’s in ‘abate’ differently, and I’ll listen.
IPA has been seriously proposed, I think. It has a lot more vowel glyphs than the Roman alphabet (and a few more consonants, too), although I think it does also use some digraphs. IIRC IPA is included in Unicode, so it would be fairly easy to include computers in an IPA-based reform (just push for more widespread Unicode support).
Like all phonetic systems, though, it has the disadvantage that when you change the pronunciation (including for regional dialects), you change the spelling. Pen is spelled pen even by people who pronounce it pin, but in a true phonetic system any dialect that made them homophones would perforce also make them homographs.
April 30th, 2009 at 11:00 am
Hector @67
It’s true, however, that the Roman alphabet is pretty good at transliterating foreign languages in general, given enough accent marks and diacritics, at least compared with Cyrillic. Hell, Cyrillic languages still have trouble transliterating the letter ‘H’, they usually have to substitute a ‘G’ or a ‘KH’.
You got the “KH” thing backward: the poet Хлебников is transliterated as KHlebnikov.
More importantly, just as transliteration is a game with arbitrary rules (cf. Beijing vs Pekin), so is any alphabet. After all, you’re trying to capture a sound with arbitrary signs. The very existence of “accents and diacritics” points to the difficulty of doing that.
There is no more point to your complaint that “zh” doesn’t sound obvious to you is Thai, than if you were complaining that ‘P’ stands for different sounds in Roman and Cyrillic script.
April 30th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Letters do not equal sounds. They are always approximations, historical conventions that get the job done for native speakers (alphabets aren’t created to help outsiders learn the language). If you want to precisely represent phonemes in any language, you can use the International Phonetic Alphabet, which has a symbol for every linguistically meaningful human sound discovered.
The whole “English is easy/hard” debate is focused on the wrong thing (text). The biggest reason it’s hard is because the vocabulary is so huge, much larger than most languages, and we speak to a large extent in idioms. Thus if someone says–
“Way to go, big guy! You really hit that one out of the park!”
if you don’t know the idioms, it becomes really confusing. Reading/writing/comprehending basic English texts isn’t the hardest thing in the world, but speaking the language with any agility is much harder than many other languages. Spelling reform is a minor issue.
April 30th, 2009 at 11:23 am
km, what you are saying would make sense if only English speakers spoke in idioms. However, I’m pretty sure that’s not the case.
The relevant point you make is that “Reading/writing/comprehending basic English” is easy, and so it is. Getting to the point of being able to construct a grammatically correct sentence in English is easier than, say, in any language with arbitrary gender assigned to nouns. Beating Shakespeare at his game is a different story, but very few people taking up a foreign language aim (or succeed) in becoming major literary figures in it.
April 30th, 2009 at 11:24 am
There is a nice article on the term “hipster” in wikipedia:
I like jazz myself, so don’t get why “hipster” is supposed to be the ultimate insult. I do get the impression that the among the worst disasters threatening the continuity of traditional culture are its soi-disant “defenders.” Please save it and us from them.
April 30th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Speakers of many languages speak in idioms, of course. The thing is different languages place the burden of meaning in different linguistic features. For instance English and Chinese have huge lexicons, but relatively simple syntax. Other languages, Finnish and Russian for example, have much more complicated inflection, etc. Latin, too, had a very flexible word order because inflectional agreement between nouns and adjectives, verbs and person, etc. allowed easy comprehension independent of the word order.
The idea that some language is “harder” than another is a myth. There are always tradeoffs in translation — one feature (spelling, pronunciation, syntax, vocabularies, regular rules, etc.) may be easy in one language but difficult in another. And all languages have innumerable features. So in the end, judgments about difficulty aren’t about the language itself, but some aspect of the language.
All of which is by means of preface — English isn’t unique in using idioms, but combine their relatively high frequency in everyday speech with the extremely large vocabulary — a vocabulary whose pronunciation rules are not regular, as we’ve discussed — and like I said, it makes acquiring agility in speaking difficult. One can of course speak like they do in the textbooks and be perfectly understood, but it’s a steep uphill fight towards conversational (not phonetic) fluency.
April 30th, 2009 at 11:59 am
One can of course speak like they do in the textbooks and be perfectly understood
Yes, and getting to that point is easier in English than in Arabic or Chinese. And that’s important for a lingua franca.
April 30th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Re: You got the “KH” thing backward: the poet Хлебников is transliterated as KHlebnikov.
Perhaps that was unclear. What I meant was that Russians aren’t able to transliterate a world like ‘Hamlet’ particularly well, they end up (if I remember right) spelling it either “Khamlet’ or “Gamlet”, neither of which corresponds (in Russian) to the English pronunciation of the word. (”Kh” corresponding to the X symbol). The Russians could solve the problem, I suppose, if they borrowed or invented a new letter or placed some diacritic over the G or Kh, but as far as I know they haven’t done that yet.
Re: There is no more point to your complaint that “zh” doesn’t sound obvious to you is Thai, than if you were complaining that ‘P’ stands for different sounds in Roman and Cyrillic script.
Your analogy is not a good one- in both English and Russian, the letter ‘P’ stands for a single, (relatively) unambigous sound (or at best, a couple related sounds). The retroflex approximant in Tamil sounds NOTHING like the sound that English normally represents with “ZH” in words like “Zhou Enlai”, “Zhukov”, and the like. Let me rephrase that. How do you propose transliterating the retroflex approximant from Tamil into English such that English speakers don’t get it confused with any other sound?
April 30th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Hector, why do you insist that there be a way to do that? It is not necessary and may not even be desirable. You’re talking about transliteration of a completely foreign tongue; there is no way to ensure the average native speaker will be able to reproduce the sounds of that tongue accurately. We can’t even accurately reproduce the sounds of languages natively written in Roman letters.
All I’m saying is, you’re setting the bar impossibly high. IPA is the universal transliteration system, capable of virtually every sound, yet it requires real expertise to reproduce those sounds. That doesn’t make it a failure.
April 30th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Hector, get a grip. Shakespeare didn’t even bother spelling his own name consistently, and you think Matt’s typos are an affront to the tongue of Shackspere/Shakespeare/Shakspere?
Also, Blake’s most famous poem begins Tygre! Tygre! Burning bright”, and Milton was blind so he couldn’t have seen Matt’s typos anyway.
April 30th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Pesto,
“Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi”. Or, what is permitted to God is not permitted to the cow. When Mr. Yglesias can write something of the quality of “The Tiger”, I’ll agree that he has the right to misspell the English language.
April 30th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Re: Hector, why do you insist that there be a way to do that?
Well, at least in part because if I ever have a daughter I want to give her a name (it means “Eyes like Flowers”) with a retroflex approximant in it, and I don’t want a bunch of yahoo teachers at her elementary school butchering the name.
April 30th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Andrew Carnegie was a big advocate of simplified spelling and used it in at least some of his correspondence.
http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j26/carnegie.php
He was a fairly influential person, but obviously his efforts in this area went nowhere…
April 30th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Hector,
“Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi”. Or, what is permitted to God is not permitted to the cow. When Mr. Yglesias can write something of the quality of “The Tiger”, I’ll agree that he has the right to misspell the English language.
Matt isn’t using alternate spellings for artistic effect (I assume that’s some of what Blake was up to, but it’s also possible he just wasn’t always consistent — I’m not any kind of expert on Blake), he’s just making mistakes.
And WRT Shakespeare, of course, the reality (you’ve heard of that, right?) is that virtually no one in Elizabethan or Jacobean England cared about spelling. Shakespeare wasn’t some ee cummings predecessor (he was a modernist, BTW, the opposite of a post-modernist, just in case another rant is brewing in there) deliberately flouting convention to make an artistic point. He genuinely just didn’t care much about how words were spelled in English. Nobody really cared much. I’m sure you’ll be shocked to find out that elitist, Christian aristocrats didn’t care much about spelling back then.
Honestly, Hector, the kneejerk ranting against “politically-correct, multiculturalist hipsters” as the reason for every wrong in the world from women’s rights to blog typos is not only repetitive, it’s totally unhinged from reality. Accusing post-modernists of throwing out authorial intent from literary criticism last week was bad enough, but asserting that bad spelling is an affront to Shakespeare — it’s as if you don’t actually know anything about or value any of the works produced by the divines you refer to, you just really love the idea of someone up there who can smite arrogant sinners.
April 30th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
“Yes, and getting to that point is easier in English than in Arabic or Chinese. And that’s important for a lingua franca.”
Um, easier for whom? There’s no denying that English -is- a lingua franca, but it has absolutely zero to do with ease of learning and practically everything to do with colonialism, media saturation, and economic domination.
Esperanto is easy to learn. Did it succeed?
There are cases in which “easy” languages are used in linguistic engineering projects (see Malay > Indonesian), but there are always plenty of other political reasons attached.
April 30th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
First of all, standard language is always being revised according to usage. Personally, as an English teacher, my job would be infinitely easier if all homophones had one spelling, and we’d just let context imply meaning. Also, let’s eschew apostrophes–lets do–half the populace don’t know when to use them and when not, and contextual usage can sort it all out easily. However, there are reasons for most punctuation that allow the writer to communicate the structure of his or her thinking to a reader, to shape and nuance the substance of communication. Insofar as the difficulty of spelling in English–we don’t have regular vowel phonetics in our speech, and there is nothing a grammarian can do about that. Tuff gong!
From one of the best English speaking writers to ever lift a pen, in the words of one of her minor characters: “…correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.” George Elliot, Middlemarch
April 30th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Just making excuses aren’t you.
April 30th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Perhaps that was unclear. What I meant was that Russians aren’t able to transliterate a world like ‘Hamlet’ particularly well, they end up (if I remember right) spelling it either “Khamlet’ or “Gamlet”, neither of which corresponds (in Russian) to the English pronunciation of the word.
So what? It’s not a deficiency of the Cyrillic alphabet – it’s a Russian cultural tradition to transliterate English “H” with “G” for old historical reasons. English speakers aren’t able to accurately transliterate a simple Russian word like ‘Lenin’. Is that supposed to represent ‘Ленин, ‘лэнин’, ‘лэнын’ or ‘Ленын’?
April 30th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Hector, @88
Re: You got the “KH” thing backward: the poet Хлебников is transliterated as KHlebnikov.
Perhaps that was unclear. What I meant was that Russians aren’t able to transliterate a world like ‘Hamlet’ particularly well, they end up (if I remember right) spelling it either “Khamlet’ or “Gamlet”, neither of which corresponds (in Russian) to the English pronunciation of the word. (”Kh” corresponding to the X symbol).
Well, ‘x’ in Хлебников happens to be the same sound as when Kenneth Branagh says ‘Hamlet’ (but not when he says ‘whale’). But let’s say it’s not; I think you are missing the main point, even as you make it yourself:
The Russians could solve the problem, I suppose, if they borrowed or invented a new letter or placed some diacritic over the G or Kh, but as far as I know they haven’t done that yet.
I dunno, perhaps they don’t see it as a problem?
But the thing is, how can one arbitrarily extensible (through diacritical marks and such) alphabet system be “better” than another? They are, by definition, precisely the same. It’s like arguing that unless you use Times New Roman for numbers, you wouldn’t be able to covey the notion of ‘three’.
Anyway, if your concern is that your hypothetical daughter’s name is pronounced correctly by her primary school teacher, name her Jane, or Britney. Newscasters consistently butcher Medvedev’s last name. And God forbid if you have a Hungarian name. It’s a constant source of hilarity to hear educated Americans have a go at ‘Nagy’ (a common surname).
a minor point:
Cyrillic script != Russian character set (nor was it created for the purpose of capturing contemporary Russian language). So when people saw a problem, they — drum roll, please! — used diacritical marks and all that (e.g., to capture the ‘Q’ as in Qur’an for the purposes of, say, Uzbek Cyrillic-based script. This sound has much more ‘K’ in its ‘Kh’, if you know what I mean).
April 30th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Um, easier for whom? There’s no denying that English -is- a lingua franca, but it has absolutely zero to do with ease of learning and practically everything to do with colonialism, media saturation, and economic domination.
Agreed. But that said, it -is- easier for a 20-year old student in China to get to textbook English than to textbook French or textbook Arabic. There are just many things that don’t need to be remembered at all.
April 30th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Worromot,
Alphabets may be arbitrarily extensible in theory, but some are easier to extend in practice than in others, and some are just better suited to a particular set of sounds than others. You could write English in the Tamil alphabet, I suppose, but it would be very difficult- they have many sounds we have, and we have many sounds they don’t.
Re: Well, ‘x’ in Хлебников happens to be the same sound as when Kenneth Branagh says ‘Hamlet’ (but not when he says ‘whale’).
While there may be dialects in the U.K. (I assume Branagh is Scottish?) that pronounce it that way, the standard dictionary pronounciation is definitely not that.
Re: I dunno, perhaps they don’t see it as a problem?
I’m sure the Russians do have bigger national concerns than how to transliterate the English letter H. However, there is a serious concern here. Russian is losing ground to English, all over the world, and this is helping to undermine Russia’s status as a great power. Part of this, I think, is due to the fact that people- rightly or wrongly- see the English language as more flexible and adaptable to foreign sounds and words. Several countries have abandones Cyrillic script in the last two decades. If Russia is to regain her status as a great power, with Russian spoken from Caracas to Kamchatka, she needs to ensure that Russian is seen as a flexible, easy to learn language that can accomodate foreign sounds.
April 30th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Just out of curiosity, how do you pronounce ‘Medvedev”? I know that the “e” in the middle is palatalized, “ye”, but are there other differences as well?
April 30th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
how do you pronounce ‘Medvedev”?
here at 0:12 ; Wikipedia is also good
Just out of curiosity, how do you pronounce “Nagy”?
I think you have mixed Russian and English language with Roman and Cyrillic scripts. Consider the fact that the scripts predate the respective languages by quite a bit. If Trotsky went on with his plans to move Russian into Roman script, Russian language speakers would still have exactly the same accent in English. Conversely, the fact that French writing is Roman-based did not prevent Harry Potter turning into ‘Arry (speaking of aitches
The script can be whatever. Indeed, the very same Uzbek went in the last 100 years from Arabic script, to Cyrillic-based, to Roman-based. I assure you, your accent in Uzbek would sound equally badly (or well) no matter what script was being used.
April 30th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
Dire Moster Iglooseeass, Aye um rightinh to cumplane abawt yur blok witch iz ay tirruble iksomple uv grammatticul erroars. Pliiz tchek yur spilling before poesting. Randum spilling is a bad fing, ispeshally for toes neer yu.
May 1st, 2009 at 4:02 am
yeah… on the one hand, yes a more logical and consistent language would be a blessing to english language learners worldwide. on the other hand, teaching esl in china and moving around asia, i’m pretty convinced that flexible, perhaps maddeningly so, languages adapt and are adopted more easily than overly strict ones.
were english more inherently consistent, great! attempting in any sense to change it via institutional organization, boo!
May 1st, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Oh, Matt. You didn’t really just post that, did you?
One more reason that I’m glad a)I learned the alphabet, phonics, spelling exception rules, and spelling mnemonics* in that order; b) I do not gratuitously throw around Latin phrases when English will do just as well; c)I don’t use text-to-speech, nor rely on spell-check; and d)I know how to proofread.
Sometimes, your posts are incisive. Sometimes, they piss me off. Sometimes, they crack me up. Sometimes, like now, they make me shake my head in disbelief. It’s a great variety. Keep it up!
(*look for the lie in believe. the villain lives in a villa.)
May 5th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Concerning the comment about Esperanto.
It’s unfortunate that only a few people know that Esperanto has become a living language.
During a short period of 121 years Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide, according to the CIA World factbook. It is the 17th most used language in Wikipedia, and in use by Skype, Firefox and Facebook.
Native Esperanto speakers,(people who have used the language from birth), include George Soros, World Chess Champion Susan Polger, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to NATO and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet. According to the CIA Factbook the language is within the top 100 languages, out of all languages, worldwide.
Confirmation of this can be seen at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670 A glimpse of the language can be seen at http://www.lernu.net