| abstract
| - This is first of all an essay about standard English spelling. However, it may also be of interest to those involved with the Anglish project who wish to devise new spellings or new systems of spelling. For convenience, it is written in standard English. It is a counterpart to my other essay, Overlooked Benefits of Modern English Spelling . A note on possibly confusing conventions used here: when discussing particular letters or digraphs used in spellings, C represents any single consonant letter, while # represents the end of a word. Here's an example: oaC represents the vowel digraph in words like "oak" and "boat", oCe represents the spelling of the vowel in hope and note, and oe# represents the spelling of the vowel in foe and toe. To discuss the actual sound of a vowel when spoken, I will use example words or "lexical sets", which are just words in all-caps that have the vowel in question. So GOOSE represents the "OO" sound found in words like "goose", "loose", "lose", and "prove". I think the clearest place where English spelling is sub-optimal is the use of spelling variants (mainly redundant vowel digraphs) that never correspond to different diaphonemes (in words that follow regular spelling-pronunciation correspondences). For a discussion of the scale of the problem and the number of alternative spelllings English has for the same sounds, see Masha Bell's analysis . However, some people also think that besides pronunciation, it's also useful to have etymological information encoded in spelling. Interestingly, most of the spelling variants that never correspond regularly to a distinction in speech, also do not correspond regularly to a distinction in etymology. At best, they give hints to the source language of the word; they generally don’t mark distinctions between different sounds in historical or dialectical pronunciations. The only arguments I can think of that remain in favor of these spelling variants would be: a) having arbitrary variant spellings for the same sound in different words causes different words to have a more distinct shape. Because of this, it is easier for experienced readers to read (the “bouma” hypothesis). I think this argument is pretty lame, because even if the variants don’t look like each other, one of them might look more like another word (for example, the digraph oa has the same bouma as the digraph ea). And of course, the “bouma” hypothesis was never proven. b) Having arbitrary variant spellings for the same sound allows us to spell homophones differently, which is a good thing (because it prevents confusion or something like that). Well, maybe. If this is a real advantage, it would still have to be weighed against the cost of learning and remembering the variants and which words have which spelling. Neither of these arguments convinces me, so I’m going to make some recommendations for what the optimal respelling of these sounds should be, if their spelling were to be reformed. The recommendations are mainly for a reform that keeps most of the rest of the current English spelling system in place.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)