That's the goal of Simplified Spelling. Has been for ~100 years.

If this catches on, America and England will be separated by more than a common language. Curious to see how Gillianren feels about this.

Next thing you know, we'll be seeing phrases such as "Boyz II Men" and "2 Live Crew"...

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Examples given in the artical are over the top and I think will just put people off the idea.

Having said that, I think an effort should definitely be made to simplify English spelling. English speaking countries make billions of dollars from English language computer programs, books, magazines and web sites. They would be fools not to try to make English more accesable to non-native speakers. Also, it will lower the cost of educating children.

Unless they have changed their goals, China is moving towards a phonetic system. It would be kind of funny if China ended up with a more convenient writing system than English speaking countries.

But the changes should be logical, easy to grasp and gradually introduced. For example I think England and Australia would do well to adopt many simplified spellings already used in the United States.

Perhaps we should all try and pronounce the words as they were originally meant to be said? That way the current spelling would still be relatively phonetic.

I first heard this idea as a way to germanise the world ...

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1·618033988749894848204586834365638117720309179805 76286213544862270526046281890244970720720418939113 74

Bah. They screwed even a "simpler" word up...

issue -> ishoo (should be ishyoo).

But I had some trouble reading about a quarter of that "simpler English". Certain combinations of letters sound a certain way and seeing those combinations in the simpler words, where they aren't supposed to have a combined sound, threw me off. Heck, my correction of "ishoo" above could even be wrong...

People have designed phonetic alphabets with forty characters. It's practically impossible to spell anything wrong, but each regional variation in pronunciation will result in differences in spelling. That could get confusing. Also, introducing a new expanded alphabet wouldn't be terribly practical or popular.

I think we need an X prize, indeed, many X prizes for simplified spelling.

First we need prizes for newspapers and publishers outside the US that use many simplified spellings currently common in the US.

Then we need a prize for newspapers who simplify the worst examples of current difficult spellings.

Personally I'd be happy with one change a decade. We could get rid of the silent K and give people ten years to get used to it.

Who will pay for the prizes? I suggest we ask the secret society of spelling nazis to cough up. But then, they might refuse on account of how it will ruin their fun.

All those silent letters are such BS too, really makes no sence. I could spell anything the way i wanted and just say "oh well theres a few silent letters in there."

I've done that! Actually it has 45 characters, but some are for
sounds in non-English words.

I don't want to change existing spelling, though.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

Here's a specific little thing about my phonetic spelling system.
My system distinguishes between two phonemes which I clumsily
refer to as "long i" and "half-long i":

Long i: eyes, hide, my, pie, fly, try, island

Half-long i: ice, height, might, pike, flight, trite, item

I'm not sure I've seen this distinction in other phonetic
systems. I have to believe that it's in the IPA, but I don't
recall finding it the last time I looked.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

Yea, small words it would work, but large words sound to spell differently for different people.

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The bit quoted by Josh first appeared in SF mags of the early 50s, and was called "Mahem in ce klasrom" if I have the speling rite...

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Standing on the shoulders of giants...

Heh. For a start, I think it's a doomed experiment that people just refuse to abandon. While yes, in theory, it would make better spellers of a lot of people, it wouldn't actually improve comprehension any.

Think about "to," "two," and "too"--they're all pronounced the same way. How do you decide which is the best spelling? And if the best spelling is "tu," that's a lot of spelling changes. Granted, people do use the wrong one a lot already . . . .

Also, consider that a lot of regional dialects pronounce words differently than other regional dialects. How do you decide which spelling will carry? You couldn't even safely decide English versus American spelling, because there are lots of regional variations in both.

Come to that, Noah Webster tried to simplify American spelling. Very few of his changes took; the only one I can think of that reliably took was "jail," which is clearly a more phonetic spelling than "gaol."

I never claimed English spelling made sense, gods know. However, simplifying spelling has been tried for a very, very long time, and it hasn't caught. (For more, try The Mother Tongue, by Bill Bryson.)

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

The problem with "spelling words how they are spoken" is that the spelling will change depending on who's doing the speaking.

The article uses the word "capcher" for capture, but I actually pronounce the word as "cap-ture", so the new spelling would force me to pronounce the word differently.

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The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

I've taken up a policy of not chatting with people online if they use "u" instead of "you," "r" instead of "our" or "are," "2" instead of "too," et cetera. It occasionally annoys friends, but their abuse of the language annoys me even more. That's a much nicer policy than my old one, which was that a conversation ended not only at those points, but when really gross grammatical errors were made. (Misuse of "whom" remains grounds for being temporarily placed on the ignore list, however. You'd think it would be impossible to use incorrectly, because people who don't know how to use it usually just use "who" instead, which is marginally acceptable. "Kewl" is another offender, because it's not only wrong but actually inconvenient to type. It's like having an acronym that is longer than the words it represents.)

Better than changing the language, how about we encourage people to read more often in the current one, and thereby gain such familiarity with words that they can spell (and use) them properly? That way, we don't need to reprint all our books.

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I first heard this idea as a way to germanise the world ...

QUOTE

... In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped favor of the "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with the "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter. In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

END OF QUOTE

That's very good.

Didn't we try some sort of experiment like this with the metric system, and didn't we learn anything about these kinds of changes from that?

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"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

Just change "gaol" to "jail", "celtic" to "keltic", and "hallelujah" to "halleluyah", and I'll be happy.

There is a difference?! They seem the same to me...

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"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

I think German has also issues with pronounce, as in 'ch', 'ei', 'eu', not to mention the use of the Greek beta as 's'.

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I have to say this is one of the more stupid ideas to come down the pike since 'Outcome based education'.

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"It was a crime of passion! Not premeditated dentistry!"

Yeah, I don't have any good things to say about this idea either. One way or another, there is no way I will ever willingly sandbag my writing to accomodate willful ignorance or educational laziness. (I have no trouble making accomodations for a second-language audience, a younger audience, or an audience with special needs.)

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"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
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