The Dumbing Down of America continues

[Nimrod's Son]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060705/.../simpl_wurdz_1

Push for simpler spelling persists By DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press Writer
Wed Jul 5, 3:11 AM ET



WASHINGTON - When "say," "they" and "weigh" rhyme, but "bomb," "comb" and "tomb" don't, wuudn't it maek mor sens to spel wurdz the wae thae sound?


Those in favor of simplified spelling say children would learn faster and illiteracy rates would drop. Opponents say a new system would make spelling even more confusing.

Eether wae, the consept has yet to capcher th publix imajinaeshun.

It's been 100 years since Andrew Carnegie helped create the Simplified Spelling Board to promote a retooling of written English and President Theodore Roosevelt tried to force the government to use simplified spelling in its publications. But advocates aren't giving up.

They even picket the national spelling bee finals, held every year in Washington, costumed as bumble bees and hoisting signs that say "Enuf is enuf but enough is too much" or "I'm thru with through."

Thae sae th bee selebraets th ability of a fue stoodents to master a dificult sistem that stumps meny utherz hoo cuud do just as wel if speling were simpler.

"It's a very difficult thing to get something accepted like this," acknowledges Alan Mole, president of the American Literacy Council, which favors an end to "illogical spelling." The group says English has 42 sounds spelled in a bewildering 400 ways.

Americans doen't aulwaez go for whut's eezy — witnes th faeluer of th metric sistem to cach on. But propoenents of simpler speling noet that a smatering of aulterd spelingz hav maed th leep into evrydae ues.

Doughnut also is donut; colour, honour and labour long ago lost the British "u" and the similarly derived theatre and centre have been replaced by the easier-to-sound-out theater and center.

"The kinds of progress that we're seeing are that someone will spell night 'nite' and someone will spell through 'thru,'" Mole said. "We try to show where these spellings are used and to show dictionary makers that they are used so they will ******* them as alternate spellings."

Lurning English reqierz roet memory rather than lojic, he sed.

In languages with phonetically spelled words, like German or Spanish, children learn to spell in weeks instead of months or years as is sometimes the case with English, Mole said.

But education professor Donald Bear said to simplify spelling would probably make it more difficult because words get meaning from their prefixes, suffixes and roots.

"Students come to understand how meaning is preserved in the way words are spelled," said Bear, director of the E.L. Cord Foundation Center for Learning and Literacy at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Th cuntry's larjest teecherz uennyon, wuns a suporter, aulso objects.

Michael Marks, a member of the National Education Association's executive committee, said learning would be disrupted if children had to switch to a different spelling system. "It may be more trouble than it's worth," said Marks, a debate and theater teacher at Hattiesburg High School in Mississippi.

E-mail and text messages are exerting a similar tug on the language, sharing some elements with the simplified spelling movement while differing in other ways. Electronic communications stress shortcuts like "u" more than phonetics. Simplified spelling is not always shorter than regular spelling — sistem instead of system, hoep instead of hope.

Carnegie tried to moov thingz along in 1906 when he helpt establish and fund th speling bord. He aulso uezd simplified speling in his correspondens, and askt enywun hoo reported to him to do the saem.

A filanthropist, he becaem pashunet about th ishoo after speeking with Melvil Dewey, a speling reform activist and Dewey Desimal sistem inventor hoo simplified his furst naem bi droping "le" frum Melville.

Roosevelt tried to get the government to adopt simpler spellings for 300 words but Congress blocked him. He used simple spellings in all White House memos, pressing forward his effort to "make our spelling a little less foolish and fantastic."

The Chicago Tribune aulso got into th act, uezing simpler spelingz in th nuezpaeper for about 40 years, ending in 1975. Plae-riet George Bernard Shaw, hoo roet moest of his mateerial in shorthand, left muny in his wil for th development of a nue English alfabet.

Carnegie, Dewey, Roosevelt and Shaw's work followed attempts by Benjamin Franklin, Daniel Webster and Mark Twain to advance simpler spelling. Twain lobbied The Associated Press at its 1906 annual meeting to "adopt and use our simplified forms and spread them to the ends of the earth." AP declined.

But for aul th hi-proefiel and skolarly eforts, the iedeea of funy-luuking but simpler spelingz didn't captivaet the masez then — or now.

"I think that the average person simply did not see this as a needed change or a necessary change or something that was ... going to change their lives for the better," said Marilyn Cocchiola Holt, manager of the Pennsylvania department of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

Carnegie, hoo embraest teknolojy, died in in 1919, wel befor sel foenz went maenstreem. Had he livd, he probably wuud hav bin pleezd to no that milyonz of peepl send text and instant mesejez evry dae uezing thair oen formz of simplified speling: "Hav a gr8 day!"

___

On the Net:

American Literacy Council: http://www.americanliteracy.com

Simplified Spelling Society: http://www.spellingsociety.org

National Education Association: http://www.nea.org

[JokeyLoki]

I swear if that happens here I'm fucking leaving.

I can barely stand that shit on the internet... I can't imagine what I'd do if they taught my child that bullshit.

[DeviousJ]

Heh, from that website:

In the interests of etymology we ought to spell as we pronounce. To spell words as they used to be pronounced is not etymological but antiquarian.
- Professor W. W. SKEAT.

Yeah thanks SKEAT, that makes no sense at all

[benjamin619]

if that happens i'll start shooting.

[redbreegull]

Please aim at my head first.

[transluscent]

....wow.

[JPK]

Originally Posted by Roosevelt

"make our spelling a little less foolish and fantastic."

yup, a little less fantastic.

I think it is one of the many signs of what I like to call the dictatorship of the dumb. I agree that some spellings are totally out there, but I actually love it, it makes things interesting.

I think simplifying grammar could actually be more useful. Though in english grammar doesn't seem too hard in comparison to other languages. I'm a native french speaker and I'm sure fellow french-speakers here will agree that our grammar doesn't always make sense! I'm sure it's the same with other languages, and that English has its own particularities that I'm not familiar/thinking about now, though!

but don't touch spelling

[topleybird]

Tiu ĉi interparolado be senutila; l'estonteco aparteni por esperanto

This conversation is pointless; the future belongs to Esperanto

Also there really needs to be an Esperanto Babelfish, because that sucked to do one word at a time

[Ol' Couch Ass]

Reeding that artucul maid my hed hert reely bad.

[Mayfuck]

English words have inconsistent spellings usually because the spelling reflects how the word used to be pronounced historically, e.g. "knight" pronounced "kenixt" as it was in Old English. A series of sound changes, namely the loss of the "kn" consonant cluster and the unvoiced velar fricative (gh) produced the word we know today, but the spelling has fossilized. Other languages, such as Spanish or Japanese (kana), have consistent phonetic orthographies--they are spelled as the are pronounced. English happens to have a diverse source of word origins--French and Anglo-Saxon, mainly, but also Greek (e.g. pneumonia or chronology), Norse (e.g. fjord), Sanskrit, many Native American languages, and many others. The inconsistencies are mostly interesting only to historical linguists who can trace the histories of the spellings. If the English language had an academy to issue revisions, then it might simplify the spelling, but since it doesn't, the spellings largely stay the same over time, even as the language has changed, ever since it was first written down in the Middle Ages. There's nothing wrong with regularizing the spelling, since the inconsistencies don't mean anything to most modern speakers, for the most part, it is done in other languages and nothing is lost, and preserving the spelling will not halt changes in the language. My only problem with the article is that I would suggest using IPA instead.

[wally]

thank you Mr. Linguistics. Stephen Pinker in the house!

[DeviousJ]

Originally Posted by Mayfuck

English words have inconsistent spellings usually because the spelling reflects how the word used to be pronounced historically, e.g. "knight" pronounced "kenixt" as it was in Old English. A series of sound changes, namely the loss of the "kn" consonant cluster and the unvoiced velar fricative (gh) produced the word we know today, but the spelling has fossilized. Other languages, such as Spanish or Japanese (kana), have consistent phonetic orthographies--they are spelled as the are pronounced. English happens to have a diverse source of word origins--French and Anglo-Saxon, mainly, but also Greek (e.g. pneumonia or chronology), Norse (e.g. fjord), Sanskrit, many Native American languages, and many others. The inconsistencies are mostly interesting only to historical linguists who can trace the histories of the spellings. If the English language had an academy to issue revisions, then it might simplify the spelling, but since it doesn't, the spellings largely stay the same over time, even as the language has changed, ever since it was first written down in the Middle Ages. There's nothing wrong with regularizing the spelling, since the inconsistencies don't mean anything to most modern speakers, for the most part, it is done in other languages and nothing is lost, and preserving the spelling will not halt changes in the language. My only problem with the article is that I would suggest using IPA instead.

I disagree with pretty much all of this - variations in spelling tend to make it easier to identify the original word(s) a particular word evolved from, and the more etymology you're familiar with the easier it becomes to infer the meaning of an unfamiliar word. Something starting with psy- is easily recognizable as being to do with the mind, unlike si- (which sounds exactly the same), and so on. It would be near impossible to enforce any attempts to radically change the 'official' spellings given the number of countries where English is spoken as a first language - and are you kidding about Middle English? Spelling has changed immensely since then.

IPA used to codify the written language would be horrible. There are so many variations in pronunciation that standardization would be difficult, and would be irrelevant to the majority of people. Like the word 'here' - simple, one spelling. In Received Pronunciation that would be transcribed /hɪə/, I pronounce it more like /hɪɪ/, the queen says /heə/, Californians (I guess) say /hi:r/, 'It's gettin' hot in ' /hʊr/, southern gents are more like /hjɑː/, and that's only a few of the accents out there without even getting into people who always drop the /h/. There's no standard IPA transcription for English words, because there's no standard pronunciation. Which do you pick, and what do you tell the majority of people whose pronunciation doesn't match the phonetic spelling? Plus it corrupts the whole point of the IPA. There's no way that's a better solution than the spelling we use now

[Mayfuck]

Devious James has a point, transcribing English in IPA and using that would make the spelling inconsistent. On the other hand, English itself has so many dialects today that differ so much that and one dialect may be incomprehensible to a speaker of another dialect, making the two dialects technically different languages, since mutual comprehensibility is the only way to determine whether two dialects belong to the same language. But for the sake of this discussion we'll assume that English is one language. It seems that it would be impossible to make a strictly phonetic spelling and keep the spelling consistent for all dialects of English at the same time. On the other hand, I would say that most words in common usage have spellings that reflect how the word used to be pronounced, but is not anymore, and that most speakers do not gain any understanding of the language from these irregular spellings. You could reform the spelling a whole lot without running into problems or losing anything informative. "psy-" is an exception because it comes from a Greek root that happens to be used in a lot of scientific words, so it might be easier to understand scientific jargon if you knew that words with "psy-" have a unique root and that they usually have something to do with the mind. I believe that roots like that are the exception, and that there's no need to have an opaque medical jargon anyway, since German doctors uses words that come from German, and in general they are far more comprehensible to average Germans. For example, the "ough" in "Though" reflects the pronounciation of the root in Old English. The "gh" used to be a consonant sound that turned into "f" as in cough, laugh, and tough, but my guess is that most speakers of English don't know this. As late as 1750, you could find "thof" in literature, but since the sound that used to be "gh" and then "f" has disappeared entirely, I would say that there's no reason to keep writing "gh," and the same goes for "ou": the ancestor of "though" used to have a diphthong that has since shortened to "o". Unfortunately the spelling of "though" was standardized before the sound changes happened in the language. You are right, there was indeed a lot of variation in spelling in Middle English, but that was because spelling was done phonetically and the author would write English based on however he or she pronounced it. Spelling was standardized when dictionaries were written, beginning in the mid 18th century with Samuel Johnson's dictionaries, and spellings that reflected how words were pronounced in 1755 stay with us today. Question words like "which" or "when" used to be pronounced with an "h" sound in the beginning, but the "hw" consonant cluster is gone from most dialects of English. "Two" comes from "twa," the feminine or neuter form of the Old English numeral, but I don't think that either "feminine" or "neuter" comes to mind when any modern speaker of English uses the word "two" and probably wouldn't care if he or she were to find out. For the most part English is a graveyard of dead words, and the spellings were inconsistent even when the dictionaries were first written, because there was no agreement on any consistent way to spell a word phonetically. If it is so critical to understand words' etymologies then I wonder how people are able to hold conversations where there no silent "k"s, "gh"s or "w"s when a person happens to use "knight," "though" or "two," but somehow they pull it off. Even if inconsistent spellings helped people understand words' etymologies, which they usually don't, a word's etymology often has little to do with the modern meaning of the
word. "Nice" used to mean "stupid" (Latin "nescious"), "dinner" used to mean "breakfast," and "lady" used to mean "bread kneader." The inconsistencies that you cited in the modern pronounciations of "here" are regular, since they are based on consistent sound changes. The [i] in [hir] (which should actually have an upside-down 'r', but I'm sure you knew that) becomes [i] (the lax form of [i]) because the Southern Vowel Shift *******s that sound change: [i] to [i]. Using a character from the IPA, perhaps "i," would keep the spelling uniform and every dialect of English would roughly correspond to the IPA pronounciation, or it would derive from it in a uniform way, as opposed to the modern spelling which derives a sound like "o" from a million different spellings ("ou" ("though"), "o" ("volcano"), "ow" ("know"), or "oe" ("foe"), for example, and derives silence from a million other things. IPA happens to correspond to spellings in many written languages already, such as Spanish or Italian, so bringing English spelling into line with IPA would bring English more into line with conventional spelling internationally. People do not learn English with the help of its spelling inconsistencies, they learn English in spite of them. English is a museum of fossilized word from a dead time before cars or electricity, and the etymologies are not only opaque but they are for the most part useless anyway, since along with changes in pronounciation there have been plenty of changes in meaning, and the changes in meaning are interesting but usually not very informative. I can wear an apron without knowing that it is a corruption of "a napron" and that "napron" comes from a word meaning "tablecloth," which (I suppose) resembles an apron but hopefully I will never have to eat on my apron or wear my tablecloth to cook.

Also Spanish should be illegalized.

[homechicago]

Ebonics anyone?

[benjamin619]

a few illiterates do not need to be catered too. any 40 y/o white trash scumbag who cant read hasn't tried. forget this.

[JokeyLoki]

Originally Posted by Mayfuck

Devious James has a point, transcribing English in IPA and using that would make the spelling inconsistent. On the other hand, English itself has so many dialects today that differ so much that and one dialect may be incomprehensible to a speaker of another dialect, making the two dialects technically different languages, since mutual comprehensibility is the only way to determine whether two dialects belong to the same language. But for the sake of this discussion we'll assume that English is one language. It seems that it would be impossible to make a strictly phonetic spelling and keep the spelling consistent for all dialects of English at the same time. On the other hand, I would say that most words in common usage have spellings that reflect how the word used to be pronounced, but is not anymore, and that most speakers do not gain any understanding of the language from these irregular spellings. You could reform the spelling a whole lot without running into problems or losing anything informative. "psy-" is an exception because it comes from a Greek root that happens to be used in a lot of scientific words, so it might be easier to understand scientific jargon if you knew that words with "psy-" have a unique root and that they usually have something to do with the mind. I believe that roots like that are the exception, and that there's no need to have an opaque medical jargon anyway, since German doctors uses words that come from German, and in general they are far more comprehensible to average Germans. For example, the "ough" in "Though" reflects the pronounciation of the root in Old English. The "gh" used to be a consonant sound that turned into "f" as in cough, laugh, and tough, but my guess is that most speakers of English don't know this. As late as 1750, you could find "thof" in literature, but since the sound that used to be "gh" and then "f" has disappeared entirely, I would say that there's no reason to keep writing "gh," and the same goes for "ou": the ancestor of "though" used to have a diphthong that has since shortened to "o". Unfortunately the spelling of "though" was standardized before the sound changes happened in the language. You are right, there was indeed a lot of variation in spelling in Middle English, but that was because spelling was done phonetically and the author would write English based on however he or she pronounced it. Spelling was standardized when dictionaries were written, beginning in the mid 18th century with Samuel Johnson's dictionaries, and spellings that reflected how words were pronounced in 1755 stay with us today. Question words like "which" or "when" used to be pronounced with an "h" sound in the beginning, but the "hw" consonant cluster is gone from most dialects of English. "Two" comes from "twa," the feminine or neuter form of the Old English numeral, but I don't think that either "feminine" or "neuter" comes to mind when any modern speaker of English uses the word "two" and probably wouldn't care if he or she were to find out. For the most part English is a graveyard of dead words, and the spellings were inconsistent even when the dictionaries were first written, because there was no agreement on any consistent way to spell a word phonetically. If it is so critical to understand words' etymologies then I wonder how people are able to hold conversations where there no silent "k"s, "gh"s or "w"s when a person happens to use "knight," "though" or "two," but somehow they pull it off. Even if inconsistent spellings helped people understand words' etymologies, which they usually don't, a word's etymology often has little to do with the modern meaning of the
word. "Nice" used to mean "stupid" (Latin "nescious"), "dinner" used to mean "breakfast," and "lady" used to mean "bread kneader." The inconsistencies that you cited in the modern pronounciations of "here" are regular, since they are based on consistent sound changes. The [i] in [hir] (which should actually have an upside-down 'r', but I'm sure you knew that) becomes [i] (the lax form of [i]) because the Southern Vowel Shift *******s that sound change: [i] to [i]. Using a character from the IPA, perhaps "i," would keep the spelling uniform and every dialect of English would roughly correspond to the IPA pronounciation, or it would derive from it in a uniform way, as opposed to the modern spelling which derives a sound like "o" from a million different spellings ("ou" ("though"), "o" ("volcano"), "ow" ("know"), or "oe" ("foe"), for example, and derives silence from a million other things. IPA happens to correspond to spellings in many written languages already, such as Spanish or Italian, so bringing English spelling into line with IPA would bring English more into line with conventional spelling internationally. People do not learn English with the help of its spelling inconsistencies, they learn English in spite of them. English is a museum of fossilized word from a dead time before cars or electricity, and the etymologies are not only opaque but they are for the most part useless anyway, since along with changes in pronounciation there have been plenty of changes in meaning, and the changes in meaning are interesting but usually not very informative. I can wear an apron without knowing that it is a corruption of "a napron" and that "napron" comes from a word meaning "tablecloth," which (I suppose) resembles an apron but hopefully I will never have to eat on my apron or wear my tablecloth to cook.

Also Spanish should be illegalized.

tl, dr.

[Lie]

Originally Posted by Mayfuck

Also Spanish should be illegalized.

Sounds like you've got it all figured out.

[Eric Blair]

If that happens it'll be really great when kids taught that spelling start travelling.

[Starla]

This is no surprise. The public school in the district I used to live in, stopped teaching cursive writing and put the emphasis on learning how to keyboard in the 2nd grade.

I remember at my last job, how I had to stop and help customers who couldn't read, find a cd or dvd. They wanted me to read off the tracklisting to them. I've worked with people who don't even know how to spell or make change during a transaction. The curriculum they teach now is far worse than it was years ago.

[GlasgowKiss]

Let the free market sort it out. Obviously.

[homechicago]

actually, if the kids start learning simpleton grammar/spelling, then i will have minions to lord over....

viva la imbeciles!!!

[ravenguy2000]

Originally Posted by To Starla

This is no surprise. The public school in the district I used to live in, stopped teaching cursive writing and put the emphasis on learning how to keyboard in the 2nd grade.

Sorry but spending that much time learning something as useless as cursive is complete bullshit.

[Nate the Grate]

Originally Posted by ravenguy2000

Sorry but spending that much time learning something as useless as cursive is complete bullshit.

completely agree. the only times I write in cursive are to sign my name and when we had to write out some agreement thing for the SAT's (I don't remember exactly what it was, but it took me like 5 minutes to write three sentences). kids SHOULD know how to type, seeing how it's 5,000,000 times more relevant in this day and age than cursive.

[Starla]

Originally Posted by ravenguy2000

Sorry but spending that much time learning something as useless as cursive is complete bullshit.

Well, of course learning to keyboard is important, and I support children learning it at an early age, however, to not teach children good penmanship is still pure laziness.

[DeviousJ]

Originally Posted by Mayfuck

Devious James has a point, transcribing English in IPA and using that would make the spelling inconsistent. On the other hand, English itself has so many dialects today that differ so much that and one dialect may be incomprehensible to a speaker of another dialect, making the two dialects technically different languages, since mutual comprehensibility is the only way to determine whether two dialects belong to the same language. But for the sake of this discussion we'll assume that English is one language. It seems that it would be impossible to make a strictly phonetic spelling and keep the spelling consistent for all dialects of English at the same time. On the other hand, I would say that most words in common usage have spellings that reflect how the word used to be pronounced, but is not anymore, and that most speakers do not gain any understanding of the language from these irregular spellings. You could reform the spelling a whole lot without running into problems or losing anything informative. "psy-" is an exception because it comes from a Greek root that happens to be used in a lot of scientific words, so it might be easier to understand scientific jargon if you knew that words with "psy-" have a unique root and that they usually have something to do with the mind. I believe that roots like that are the exception, and that there's no need to have an opaque medical jargon anyway, since German doctors uses words that come from German, and in general they are far more comprehensible to average Germans. For example, the "ough" in "Though" reflects the pronounciation of the root in Old English. The "gh" used to be a consonant sound that turned into "f" as in cough, laugh, and tough, but my guess is that most speakers of English don't know this. As late as 1750, you could find "thof" in literature, but since the sound that used to be "gh" and then "f" has disappeared entirely, I would say that there's no reason to keep writing "gh," and the same goes for "ou": the ancestor of "though" used to have a diphthong that has since shortened to "o". Unfortunately the spelling of "though" was standardized before the sound changes happened in the language. You are right, there was indeed a lot of variation in spelling in Middle English, but that was because spelling was done phonetically and the author would write English based on however he or she pronounced it. Spelling was standardized when dictionaries were written, beginning in the mid 18th century with Samuel Johnson's dictionaries, and spellings that reflected how words were pronounced in 1755 stay with us today. Question words like "which" or "when" used to be pronounced with an "h" sound in the beginning, but the "hw" consonant cluster is gone from most dialects of English. "Two" comes from "twa," the feminine or neuter form of the Old English numeral, but I don't think that either "feminine" or "neuter" comes to mind when any modern speaker of English uses the word "two" and probably wouldn't care if he or she were to find out. For the most part English is a graveyard of dead words, and the spellings were inconsistent even when the dictionaries were first written, because there was no agreement on any consistent way to spell a word phonetically. If it is so critical to understand words' etymologies then I wonder how people are able to hold conversations where there no silent "k"s, "gh"s or "w"s when a person happens to use "knight," "though" or "two," but somehow they pull it off. Even if inconsistent spellings helped people understand words' etymologies, which they usually don't, a word's etymology often has little to do with the modern meaning of the
word. "Nice" used to mean "stupid" (Latin "nescious"), "dinner" used to mean "breakfast," and "lady" used to mean "bread kneader." The inconsistencies that you cited in the modern pronounciations of "here" are regular, since they are based on consistent sound changes. The [i] in [hir] (which should actually have an upside-down 'r', but I'm sure you knew that) becomes [i] (the lax form of [i]) because the Southern Vowel Shift *******s that sound change: [i] to [i]. Using a character from the IPA, perhaps "i," would keep the spelling uniform and every dialect of English would roughly correspond to the IPA pronounciation, or it would derive from it in a uniform way, as opposed to the modern spelling which derives a sound like "o" from a million different spellings ("ou" ("though"), "o" ("volcano"), "ow" ("know"), or "oe" ("foe"), for example, and derives silence from a million other things. IPA happens to correspond to spellings in many written languages already, such as Spanish or Italian, so bringing English spelling into line with IPA would bring English more into line with conventional spelling internationally. People do not learn English with the help of its spelling inconsistencies, they learn English in spite of them. English is a museum of fossilized word from a dead time before cars or electricity, and the etymologies are not only opaque but they are for the most part useless anyway, since along with changes in pronounciation there have been plenty of changes in meaning, and the changes in meaning are interesting but usually not very informative. I can wear an apron without knowing that it is a corruption of "a napron" and that "napron" comes from a word meaning "tablecloth," which (I suppose) resembles an apron but hopefully I will never have to eat on my apron or wear my tablecloth to cook.

Also Spanish should be illegalized.

Well first up, I didn't say understanding etymologies is crucial to speaking the language, I said that it can help when encountering unfamiliar words - both in inferring their meanings and in pronouncing them. Hell, if you can say that people manage to use the word 'knight' in conversation without pronouncing the 'k' or the 'gh', you can just as easily point out that people somehow manage to recognize the written word even with all these unpronounced letters. The written and spoken language are both English, and the written is based on the spoken, but they are used in different ways. With spoken language you're able to use stress and intonation, changes in pronunciation, body language, knowledge of your audience and even direct questions ('wait, do you mean this or this') to communicate accurately. In most written language most or all of these devices are unavailable to you, and spelling is the way that the words you're using are made specifically clear. Your old 'a "knight" to remember' custom title just wouldn't work if both words were spelled 'nite'. It's shifting things from 'why are the similar-sounding parts of these words not spelled the same?' to 'why does this one word have so many completely different, unrelated meanings?' when it's really several completely different words that have been merged into one.

The IPA thing isn't even related to dialects, it's a problem because people from different places narrating the exact same sentence will naturally produce it differently. So in standardizing it, one particular accent would have to be used as the basis for transcribing each word, and everybody else (again, the vast majority of people) would have to basically 'think' in an unnatural accent when spelling the words phonetically. This is a very difficult thing to do, especially when you get into the subtleties of pronunciation - I mean you sound like you know a lot about this, but you said that 'though' doesn't have a diphthong anymore, and it certainly does - the 'o' sound in 'know', 'no', and 'though' is /əʊ/ or /oʊ/ (depending on where you're from). If you can make a mistake like that, how can you expect young kids to grasp these things easily?

And if you merely use IPA as a basis for standardization, and just rely on the fact that words that share sounds will have a common spelling, without teaching people how to pronounce the individual phonemes - well you still have a problem. I pronounce 'up' and 'good' with the same vowel sound, but in Received Pronunciation 'up' is /ʌp/ and 'good' is /gʊd/. So for anyone who pronounces them the same, it's exactly the same situation: 'hey, these bits sound the same, why are they spelled differently?'. If you change them to a single common phoneme, then all the people who pronounce them differently can say 'whoa, these bits are spelled the same but pronounced differently, how do I know which to use?' It's cough/rough all over again.

And I disagree about people learning English completely in spite of the spelling - sure it makes things a little more difficult, but English is an incredibly rich language with a huge number of words, often with very specific meanings. The individual spellings make it easier to distinguish even homophonic words and to establish a stronger language schema in the learner. One of the hard things about Japanese for me is that the words are so short, and there are only so many syllable combinations to go around, so it can be difficult to remember all these indistinctive two- and three-letter words that are repeated throughout the language with different and unrelated meanings each time. This is more of a problem with the kana, which you mentioned, but really the written language (beyond a basic level) only uses the kana for foreign words and grammatical constructions, and most verbs, nouns and adjectives use kanji - which is even 'worse' than English in terms of opacity and ease of pronunciation. It gives the language much more form and structure, though, and as far as I'm concerned that's the case with English as it stands

[Lie]

Let's REALLY dumb ourselves down.

[Effloresce]

This had better never, ever happen.

[wHATcOLOR]

so some propose to get rid of the word through why is the suggested alternative thru prefereable to threw or throo

this is fucking idiotic

[DeviousJ]

Originally Posted by big white horse hung

so some propose to get rid of the word through why is the suggested alternative thru prefereable to threw or throo

this is fucking idiotic

θɹu: