Micah
Would it be possible to change English spelling so that it was completely phonetic?

Would it be possible to use something similar to the International Phonetic Alphabet to standardize the spelling of the English language so that each letter could only represent one phoneme (basic sound) of the English language? It seems to me that that would make English much, much easier to learn. With the help of computers, anything someone typed or wrote could be converted to the new spelling system, so people who already know how to spell in English wouldn't have to relearn how to spell right away. I think this would make English much more accessible to the rest of the world. What do you think?

 

 

 

 

Aug 30, 2015 4:16 PM
Comments · 8
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P.S. I didn't think a single book had ever been published in the Shaw alphabet except Androcles in the Lion, but a search shows me that there seems to be one other: <em>Poe Meets Shaw, the Shaw Alphabet Edition of Edgar Allan Poe. </em>Now that we have computer typesetting and Unicode--the Shaw alphabet is included--it should be relatively inexpensive to produce books in the Shaw alphabet, and one great obstacle to its adoption no longer exists. 

August 31, 2015
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It's actually been done; look up "the Shaw alphabet."

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet

 

George Bernard Shaw thought that English orthography was idiotic and advocated the development of a purely phonetic system, and left money in his will for that purpose. At one time I personally owned a cheap paperback copy of the Shaw alphabet edition of his play, <em>Androcles and the Lion</em>. If a phonetic system were going to be adopted, I guess this is the one that's ready and waiting. 

 

The U.S. lexicographer Noah Webster, author of the incredibly influential <em>An American Dictionary of the English Language</em>, made some feeble efforts to make the U.S. spelling slightly more phonetic than British spelling, with the result that it is now just different enough to be annoying without being any better. In his later years he wanted to take it further and spell "tongue" as "tung" and "women" as "wimmen," but obviously that didn't happen.

 

I think myself that it's no more likely to happen than calendar reform, or decimal time (ten "hours" per day).

August 31, 2015
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Another solution to the dialect problem just occurred to me. The spelling would be written such that you could use a set of rules to figure out how to pronounce the words in different accents. It makes it slightly more complicated, but I think it'd be useful. For example, 'o' and 'oo' would be used to represent where they're different sounds in various accents, 'r' would appear where it's pronounced in rhotic accents. 'Æ' and 'ææ' would be used according to how Australians say the vowels in 'lad' and 'bad', 'q' (or some other letter) would be used in place of 'gh' to represent where people in parts of Scotland say it with German 'ch'.

 

For example, 'daughter' would be spelled 'dooqtar'. Anyone not trying to speak a Scottish accent would ignore the 'q'. Anyone speaking a non-rhotic accent would know to ignore the 'r'. Anyone trying to speak with an American accent would know to pronounce the 't' as a 'd' because it's between two vowels. Likewise, anyone trying to speak with an American accent would always treat 'o' as 'oo', and anyone not trying to speak with an Australian accent would always pronounce 'æ' as 'ææ'. It wouldn't fix the accent problem completely, but it could definitely go a long way to help. It would also mean that while you would always know how to pronounce a word based on its spelling, you won't necessarily be able to figure out how to spell a word based on its pronunciation.

I'm sure there are other rules in other accents I don't know if. Apparently (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet_chart_for_English_dialects) the Scots and Welsh pronounce 'tore' and 'sort' with different vowels, and the Scots pronounce 'date' and 'day' with different vowels, so the spelling could reflect that too.

 

The question really is, should a standardised English spelling be simple or informative?

August 30, 2015
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Is it just me or are my comments out of order?

August 30, 2015
1

Here's my attempt at a standardised spelling. Let me know what you think:

Pure Vowels:

'e' should always make the sound in 'bet'.

'ee' should always make the sound in 'air'.

'a' should always make the sound in 'cut'.

'aa' should always make the sound 'a' makes in 'father'.

'i' should always make the sound in 'bit'.

'ii' should always make the sound in 'beat'.

'o' should always make the sound in 'drop'.

'oo' should always make the sound in 'dawn'

'u' should always make the sound in 'put'.

'uu' should always make the sound in 'food'.

Apostrophes can be used for schwa sounds.

The vowels 'cat' and 'her' are both pure vowels, but I've run out of English vowels to represent them. We either have to introduce new letters or use a letter combination.

'æ' represented the vowel in 'cat' in Old English. We could use 'ae' instead (or let 'æ' and 'ae' be interchangeable until such a time when 'æ' is common on keyboards).

The sound in "her" is more difficult. As far as I can tell it's never been represented by a letter on it's own in English. I've done a bit of googling and apparently 'y' represents this sound in Polish, but I'm not a fan of 'y' being able to be both a vowel and a consonant in English already, so that's something I want to abolish. We could give the vowel in 'her' something like 'oe', but that doesn't really make much sense.

 

 

Dipthongs:

'ai' should always sound like 'eye'.

'ei' should always sound like the vowel in 'hey'.

'ou' should always make the sound in 'no'.

'oi' should always make the sound in 'coin'.

I'm struggling to figure out what sounds make up the dipthong in the word 'now'. Maybe 'au'?

August 30, 2015
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