Tangential, but I recently realized that spelling bees wouldn’t make sense in a lot of other languages, because English reading is exceptionally irregular. I wonder if there have been attempts to reform the language.
A Plan for the Improvement
of English Spelling
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
>Finally, then, after some 20 years of orthography reform, we would have a logical, coherent spelling in use throughout the English-speaking world.
I guess it helps that a lot of those letters are being used in the way I'm used to in other languages.
"By year 15 or so, it would finally be possible to make use of the redundant leters "c", "y", and "x" -- by now just a memory in the minds of old dodderers -- to replace "ch", "sh", and "th" respectively."
So "x" is removed as redundant, and then reintroduced for "th".
Right. Rather than eliminating letters, I'd go the other direction, and add more letters to account for the the various digraphs.
I know we'll never be able to choose one, but any dialect would be fine to standardize on.
http://www.i18nguy.com/twain.html
>Note 1: The authorship of this piece is in question. Although frequently posted on the internet as authored by Mark Twain, there are some claims that it is authored by M. J. Shields in a letter by him to the Economist. See http://www.ojohaven.com/fun/spelling.html.
And from there..
>I did, however, come across one error: the "Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling" that you attribute to Mark Twain is actually (IIRC) a few paragraphs out of a letter to The Economist, written by one M.J. Shields
A couple other sites mention the same thing but I didn't bother digging any further
The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".
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 in favour of "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 "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 people 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.
Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.
Some of his proposals never caught on though. I think I remember tung (instead of tongue) being one of the rejected ones.
The more French-influenced colour was more common in England, and obviously eventually did totally win out.
There are generally very similar stories for most “American” spellings.
Polish is weird like that.
It was a deliberate effort, not something that just happened.
car park -> parking lot, lot -> bunch, dustbin -> trashcan, punch-bag -> punching bag, sellotape -> scotch tape, cinema -> movies, post -> mail, trolley -> cart, queuing -> lining up.
See https://www.hp-lexicon.org/edits-changes-text-ps/ for more
I feel deceived.
They all have their shortcomings, of course. Possibly the most universal one is that none of the ones that I'm aware of seen do a good job of capturing the word stress system in English pronunciation. By contrast, for all its failings, the the current orthography does encode clues that a very experienced speaker of the language can use to infer word stress with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Dictation_of_the_Dutch_L...
Languages where a single country has a "majority stake in the cultural control" of a language tend to be able to pull off spelling reform (German, Chinese, etc.). Languages where this isn't the case (English, Portugese, French post-1900) find it a lot harder to gain the necessary consensus.
One theory is that it was confused with "Fanshawe". We aren't even _trying_ to write what it sounds like:
> So Festonhaw, which is the recorded shortening of Featherstonhaugh, was somehow garbled further to something like Fesnaw or Feshnaw [...then...] we can just say that the garbled Feshnaw sounded so similar to the preexisting surname Fanshawe, that people just conflated the two surnames in speech.
> But not in writing.
> We don't pronounce the -er suffix like we're French
Though interestingly you've kept that with "herb" - in British English, it has a hard H (but I'm not quite sure what you mean by the -er suffix - in my experience, it's the same in both. Did you mean -re?)
https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-surname-Featherstonhaugh-g...
It's not exclusively a British thing though - Connecticut and Poughkeepsie come to mind.
I hope not, the complexity and overall size is its strength. Especially the widespread and mandatory use of its embedded "idiomatic usage" subset makes it a hell of a lot more fun than something regular, like Spanish.
English is great as is.
On the other hand, reading French is easy. There is no such thing as the English -ough suffix.
Some examples:
- temps (time): the "p" and "s" are completely silent
- oignon (onion): pronounced as "ognon" (the "i" is silent)
- asseoir (sit down): pronounced as "assoir" (the "e" is silent)
- poids (weight): the "d" and "s" are silent. "poi" (pea) is also a word.
- most words ending on "ou" take an "s" in plural, e.g. "verrou" becomes "verrous", except for certain words like "hibou", which becomes "hiboux" in plural.
- the noun "dépôt" takes the "^" accent, yet its derived verb "déposer" does not.
Heh, as is the "g" as well. The best way to explain the pronunciation to English speakers is "say onion but with a French accent". The "g" is the most confusing part of the spelling to native English speakers as a "g" is never silent in English.