The Chaos (1922) | Hacker News Reader

The Chaos (1922)

ncf.idallen.com

22 pointswfunction17 comments

Isaac Asimov, Benjamin Franklin, Richard Feynman, and many many other famous public intellectuals have argued for the simplification of English spelling. Many frame it as an ethical issue, arguing that our complex nonsensical spelling rules contribute to illiteracy. As the father of a three-year-old, I can attest that our illogical and inconsistent application of phonemes puts up uneccessary obstacles to my child's ability to read. Unfortunately, any time the suggestion that we simplify spelling is put forth, it gets waved away because the older generations think the new way "looks funny."

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Learning inconsistent/inefficient languages doesn't stifle literacy - just look at Asian languages. The problem with reform is that you'd be fine with it except if they decided on something you didn't agree with. Multiple by millions of speakers and any committee decision is laughed off the pages of public discourse. I remember the case of some place name being standardised a decade ago, and I guess they won the edit war on wikipedia but no normal person uses that pronunciation and they are just making it more difficult to find (although google's fuzzy matching can figure it out).

> and inconsistent application of phonemes

Do you mean graphemes?

We're sorta shifting that way with txt lingo slang.

If an official shift were made to simplify spelling, we would lose out on literacy for all work not translated to the new system.

Written-spoken and spoken-written are interestingly asymmetric problems. In the first chapters of his autobiographical "The Words" Sartre tells of his troubles learning to spell French, but reading French out loud is not especially hard; there's more of a problem in writing underdetermination than speech underdetermination.

Sooo the simplification of spelling movement may aim to bring these to better symmetry (as is in Spanish, German, etc.) but it's not necessarily about this poem's complaints.

Given that English is a hybrid language anyway and historically has demonstrated a willingness to accept loaner words from any source, a solution could be to adopt the 160 symbol IPA. According to Wikipedia, seems like everyday English could get by with around 20 vowel and 24 consonant symbols. Regional variation spellings, for example battery: bat-er-ree (US) v. bat-tree (UK), could be learned as synonyms. But how would you handle homophones? EG Japanese, which is loaded with homophones, had that problem way back when they tried to convert from Chinese hanzi logograms to an exclusively phonetic kana writing system. They wound [homograph] up mixing the two with Chinese ideograms setting the intended theme followed by phonetic kana to particularize pronunciation and grammar.

If anyone’s looking for a mostly idiomatic American reading, I made a recording of a variant of this poem at some point several years ago, after a discussion on IRC with several curious non-native English speakers who: https://soundcloud.com/jrus/english-pronunciation

Also see SJ Klein’s page about it: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/concordant-chaos/

Problem is not the writing, but pronunciation. The word "battery" is the worst in my experience. Everybody understands my pronunciation (Spain, Norway, Singapore) except all of the english-speaking world. But Google Talk to the rescue, it is prounonced "Bäätdrii", but I have zero clue why.

I feel your pain.

For me, as somebody that learned English mostly reading, to know how to spell a word is easy but I never know if I am saying it "properly" (whatever it means in this crazy language).

I think the opposite is true for the native speakers: they started learning to speak and then they have to learn how to spell.

I used to joke that learning English is like learning Japanese; you have to learn two languages, oral and written.

Having someone to talk to is of great help. Thing is you get to pick their pronunciation as well, so you have to choose wisely :) For example, due to this, I tend to say route that doesn't sound like root. There are some words which have a tendency to sound the same when spoken and you need context during speech to differentiate them (depends on the speaker) - for example, flour vs flower. It's definitely a language that needs to be learned both written and spoken, but then which isn't?

"It's definitely a language that needs to be learned both written and spoken, but then which isn't?"

As mentioned in other comments, Spanish and German, for instance, are consistent. You know exactly (mostly) how to write a word even if the first time you heard it and you know how to say an unknown word that you see in writing.

Since I speak German quite well, I don't think I would've known how to pronounce and write down umlauts before I was shown how to. I don't speak Spanish, so I don't know about that. In (some) Slavic languages there is a rule that each character is one voice, but then there are characters you have to learn how to vocalize first, and there are some ambiguous cases as well - letters č and ć for example. Even native speakers can't tell much of a difference for most of the time.

In Polish, letters ó and u sound exactly the same. There isn't a single case where using ó instead of u would cause a word to be pronounced differently. It's something that apparently used to make a difference centuries ago,but it doesn't anymore, and nowadays even experts in linguistics don't know how exactly it used to sound. And it's exactly the same with "rz" and "ż" - both pronounced in exactly same way.

Spanish speaker here: when you are a child you are taught "M plus A sounds MA", no further explanation needed. Obviously we have a good bunch of exceptions to the regularity of the language:

  * B and V sounds exactly the same.
  * ll + vowel and Y + vowel sound he same.
  * Y can work as the vowel I.
  * C, K, Q and Z share and overlap pronunciation:
    + CA, CO, CU = KA, KO, KU
    + CE, CI = ZE ZI (these later two are not valid combinations)
    + QUE, QUI = KE KI. (All other Q combinations are not valid).
  * H is always mute!, except for ch + vowel which always sounds like in chocolate.
  * G and J:
    + Strong: JA JE JI JO JU, GE, GI.
    + Soft: GA, GUE, GUI, GO, GU. This makes the sounds GU followed by "E" or "I" need a special writing: GÜE
    + Ñ: no comments.

Blessing and damnation: the stressed syllable is always encoded in the word.

Bonus point: the word "sal+le", imperative of go and indirect subject of the action is the third person, can not be written as it would be said, as the two consecutive L wold become the sound of Y.

Well, Spanish certainly has some inconsistencies, but it's more consistent than both French and Portuguese. And verbs are easier to use.

Finnish might be a rather good option since there are very few inconsistencies. But then you have to deal with words like päättämättömyydellänsäkään.

Italian is another rather straightforward example but there are a little bit more variety especially for c and g. And for some reason h as a first letter is usually dropped off.

Not related to the subject of this post itself, but did someone noticed the double-post on HN (with short 1st page hit) and 9gag ? This is quite rare, I'm not sure if it already happened !

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