Timeline for Why has English spelling reform never caught on? [duplicate]
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
21 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 26, 2015 at 1:16 | vote | accept | Mitch | ||
| Dec 29, 2014 at 7:16 | history | closed |
Tim Lymington tchrist♦ Lynn Drew choster |
Duplicate of Reform of English writing? [closed] | |
| Dec 26, 2014 at 22:33 | comment | added | Mitch | @TimLymington, tchrist: Re duplicate, the other questions was about whether there had been any attempts at reform. This question assumes those attempts and asks why they failed. | |
| Dec 26, 2014 at 17:20 | answer | added | user103188 | timeline score: 4 | |
| Dec 25, 2014 at 19:46 | comment | added | Peter Shor | @Mitch: yes, but I think all these incompetent proposals show that to get a spelling reform that results in a real improvement, you'd need a committee of competent linguists who knew what they were doing. And you won't find competent linguists to design a spelling reform when there's no chance that it'll ever be implemented. And incompetent suggestions just make the case for spelling reform harder. | |
| Dec 25, 2014 at 19:05 | comment | added | John Lawler | Turkish worked because Atatürk set up a committee of linguists who did a good job. The Arabic alphabet is a lousy choice for representing a language with vowel harmony, and that's not news. It was well known at the time, and it was all part of the modernization that swept Turkey after the fall of the Empire. Simplified Chinese is simply an example of what a truly determined bureaucracy can do if it controls all literacy education for a couple generations. We could convert to Chinese characters for English in the USA the same way, but there'd hafta be a revolution first. | |
| Dec 25, 2014 at 18:41 | comment | added | Mitch | @PeterShor OK, that's compelling for not worrying too much about having a direct phonetic spelling, but there's still the complexity of rules, the exceptions on top of exceptions. I think my Chinese example is to show that a script that applies to languages as different as Mandarin and Cantonese can still have a common script and still be reformed, not worrying about the individual languages. | |
| Dec 25, 2014 at 18:33 | comment | added | Mitch | @JohnLawler I find "installed base" to be a very plausible reason, but it doesn't work for the success of 'simplified Chinese' or Arabic to Roman for Turkish. | |
| Dec 25, 2014 at 18:01 | comment | added | John Lawler | Two words: Installed Base. Why is there still Windows™? Why is there Christmas®? Why is bête noire so hard to write? We have become addicted to print, and with it, addicted to consistent spelling rules. Befor Caxton, piipl spelt az they pliizd an nobody kerd. | |
| Dec 25, 2014 at 17:45 | comment | added | Peter Shor | There are somewhere between fourteen and twenty-one vowels in various dialects of English, and they are inconsistent between different dialects (e.g., General American and RP). We have five letters we're using to spell them. Most of the spelling reforms I have seen proposed don't really understand the phonetics of English vowels, and wouldn't improve things that much (although they manage to do the easy fixes like getting rid of "gh"). | |
| Dec 25, 2014 at 17:44 | comment | added | Mitch | @starsplusplus Well, yes, I was hoping for a minimal net +1. | |
| Dec 25, 2014 at 17:17 | comment | added | starsplusplus | Ah, I wondered if you were going for the up and down votes on same question one. Unfortunately you need a positive question score for "ask on app" and a positive question/answer/comment score for the "post on Christmas using app" one... | |
| Dec 25, 2014 at 17:08 | comment | added | Mitch | @starsplusplus 3 of them: posting on Christmas, ask using the phone app, responding to your own question. | |
| Dec 25, 2014 at 16:58 | review | Close votes | |||
| Dec 29, 2014 at 7:16 | |||||
| Dec 25, 2014 at 16:16 | comment | added | starsplusplus | @Mitch Which one? | |
| Dec 25, 2014 at 16:02 | answer | added | Oldbag | timeline score: 3 | |
| Dec 25, 2014 at 15:49 | answer | added | Mitch | timeline score: -1 | |
| Dec 25, 2014 at 15:48 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | Tsk! This is a dupe and you know it. | |
| Dec 25, 2014 at 15:47 | answer | added | user66974 | timeline score: 2 | |
| Dec 25, 2014 at 15:40 | comment | added | Hot Licks | Because it's a Communist plot. | |
| Dec 25, 2014 at 15:38 | history | asked | Mitch | CC BY-SA 3.0 |