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| - The first major work written in the Oceana language is the George Ský Translation which used a very consistent spelling based on Slovak and English. Ský's spelling remained in use for a few years, but as the Oceana language developed very rapidly, his spelling was no longer consistent with the actual pronunciation. It would take another seven decades before new consistent spellings were proposed. In the meantime, hundreds of literary works were produced with highly inconsistent spellings, often spelling Slovak sounding words exactly as in Slovak (which resulted in the surname Opať still having the Slovak letter <ť>, which is absent in English and present day Oceana) and English sounding words as if they were English. To make matters worse, most spellings also kept an etymological base, oft
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| abstract
| - The first major work written in the Oceana language is the George Ský Translation which used a very consistent spelling based on Slovak and English. Ský's spelling remained in use for a few years, but as the Oceana language developed very rapidly, his spelling was no longer consistent with the actual pronunciation. It would take another seven decades before new consistent spellings were proposed. In the meantime, hundreds of literary works were produced with highly inconsistent spellings, often spelling Slovak sounding words exactly as in Slovak (which resulted in the surname Opať still having the Slovak letter <ť>, which is absent in English and present day Oceana) and English sounding words as if they were English. To make matters worse, most spellings also kept an etymological base, often attributed Slovak words with a folk etymology from English, f.e.: [mackɑ], meaning mother, comes from Slovak matka and is pronounced approximately the same way, was written as mothka ([motʰkɑ]) because writers thought it was a corrupted version of mother with the Slovak dimunitive ending -ka. The current writing system of Oceana was published by Seyberg in the early 80's. Before that time, no unified spelling existed for all dialects. It was even very common that people just wrote Oceana the way they thought would be best. This lead to very inconsistent spellings based on English which also influenced the pronunciation of many words as a result of spelling pronunciations. Most of these pronunciations have been reverted (or otherwise made less English) in Seyberg's new writing system. Some examples of words with changed pronunciations are fly (1950: [flɨː], 1980: [flaɪ̯], 2000: [flʌː]), vague (1950: [vɪːgə], 1980: [veɪ̯g], 2000: [vagɔ]), and vicedah (1950: [viə̯kda] or [viə̯zda], 1980: [vaɪ̯stɑ] or [(vaɪ̯)ˈstɑː], 2000: [vikʲɛdax]). Another example is the word for English "type" (written by Hladovka as tayp). Some people used a spelling pronunciation, while others used the English pronunciation. This resulted in the word having two forms nowadays: taip (English pronunciation: [taɪ̯p]) and tayp (spelling pronunciation: [teɪ̯p]). With Seyberg's spelling, the major problem of the inconsistent spellings, legibility, was solved. Hladovka used eleven ways of writing the word for power in his book Michal Hlán, making the book one of the most inconsistent works in the Oceana language. A new edition was therefore published recently. Seyberg's most difficult task was creating a flawless spelling which could be applied to all dialects. He was not able to get all forms down to one spelling all the time. Therefore, the word for power still has two forms: motsh and motch. There was a lot of resistance to Seyberg's proposal but over two decades' time, the spelling became official in the State of Oceana and hardly any other spelling systems are in use nowadays. Two notable exceptions are the Skiechlawn spelling, which is used in Mäöres for political reasons, and the James-McCrooke spelling, which is used for Muzan Oceana, as Seyberg did not adjust his spelling to this dialect because he did not consider this dialect to be "pure Oceana".
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