exposition, language

Automatic spelling reform

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The English language badly needs spelling reform. It is becoming a widely used language and the spelling is a real hindrance in learning it. But spelling reform has two big problems:

Resistance
Both the French and the Germans have tried rather minor spelling reforms in recent years that have utterly failed. The Chinese Communists made substantial changes in the characters used in Chinese and succeeded where they had dictatorial control, but failed in the diaspora. As a result, people educated in Taiwan and Hong Kong can’t read stuff printed on the mainland and vice versa. On the other hand, Greek spelling reform, mostly a matter of simplifying the accents put on vowels, seems to have succeeded.

Any English spelling reform would succeed at most partially, resulting in texts being written in two spellings, the old one and the new one. People who grew up on the old one probably could learn to read the new one, but never as easily as they read the old one. And conversely.

Dialect differences
Americans outside the south pronounce “Mary”, “merry” and “marry” the same. Southerners and Britishers distinguish between two or three of them.

Britishers pronounce “Wanda” and “wander” the same. Americans pronounce them differently.

Most Americans pronounce “bother” and “father” so they rhyme. Some Americans pronounce “cot” and “caught” the same. Canadians and Britishers distinguish these pairs.

The people who don’t distinguish between two phonemes have to learn different spellings for words that sound the same, or else people who DO distinguish them have to whether the writer meant merry or marry, for example.
 
 
Technology comes to the rescue
The text-to-speech system in Excel 2003 pronounces both of the following sentences correctly:
“We will record the song and I will make a record of it.”
“I will read the book and when I have read it I will tell you.”
It no doubt makes mistakes in some situations, too.
This system presumably operates by at least partially parsing the sentences, looking at context and perhaps using other methods as well. So it would be possible to devise a system that would convert text on the fly from a traditional spelling to a reformed spelling. This would probably work well most of the time and could allow several different spelling systems to flourish. When books involving fixed print on paper become obsolete, as they surely will, this will solve the problem.
One obvious way to do this is to add diacritics and accent marks to the existing spelling.
 
Note
On this blog I once proposed that subject and predicate phrases in English be color-coded. Writers would not want to do this by hand, but when sentence parsing gets good enough (maybe it already is) this could be done automatically in the same way as different spellings.
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5 thoughts on “Automatic spelling reform”

  1. Philadelphians pronounce all of “Mary”, “merry”, and “marry” differently. It’s a distinctive aspect of the Philadelphia accent.

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  2. Russians had their spelling reform in 1918.
    Several letters were eliminated, some spelling rules were brought to accordance with the actual spoken practice.

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  3. What Walt said is correct, but he didn’t mention is that for this Philadelphian, merry and “Murray” are homophones. This drives my wife mad. Another peculiarity is that, for example, “bad” and “sad” do not rhyme, nor do “ran” and “man”. In fact the modal “can” rhymes with “ran” (in stressed position), while the noun and ordinary verb “can” rhymes`with “man”.

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  4. Pingback: Composites of functions « Gyre&Gimble

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