Jump to content

Talk:Spelling reform

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 210.200.105.228 (talk) at 15:49, 12 December 2006 (Pinyin). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Critisism of Spelling Reform

This article talks about "habits and lack" of governments. Somehow, these two do not belong together for the Netherlands, where the 1955 Spelling Reform was only made because: - in 1947 it was announced that another reform would come. - it had become a habit to change the spelling.

By the way, further scientific research has proven that: - People learn the word-pictures, even with alphabetical. This has some serious consequences:

  1. Spelling reform is annoying for anybody who wants to read or write.
  2. The quickest recognition can take place if a morpheme always stays the same.
  3. Phonological spellings do not speed up any learning process.
  4. A phonological spelling for English would harm the language abilities of children.

It has thus been proven, that the English spelling isn't too bad. It is very stable, as practically all documents follow the standard spelling, and differences between the US and the UK are very small. It also follows the morphological principle quite good (day-daily is one of the exceptions).

So the only case where spelling reform would be useful, is when morphological structures are not clear, or when the correspondance between speech and writing have become too large. But also this last thing does not apply to English spelling, as 85% of all spellings is completely regular! There is no case where "cat" would be spelt as "dog".

People recognize the general shape of words, not the exact "word-picture". Therefore, spelling reforms that do not radically change the shape of the words do not have a high transition cost. Cut spelling is an example of such a spelling reform. AdamRetchless 22:31, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)
According to most numbers I've read, something like half of the most common English words contain spelling exceptions. I don't know where this person got the 85% statistic, but the only way I can possibly see that as being true is if a couple hundred spelling rules were used (there are about 90 basic ones, for ~40 sounds). If phonological spellings don't affect the learning process, why do countries like Spain and Italy have lower rates of dyslexia and such? And if a phonological spelling would harm the language abilities of children, you'd better notify the Spanish, Italians, Finnish and any linguist creating an orthography for a language that doesn't have one yet - because they're all very phonemic, and presumably that means that Spaniards ought to be deficient, when the opposite is actually true. As for reading by word shapes - the only difference is that you'd learn different "word shapes" - but they'd be easier to learn. -Anonymous
Half or 85% or what? Well, it depends where your cutoff is. Inconsistent spellings are concentrated in the very common words (probably because perpetual repetition allows us to retain them despite their irregularity) and the very rare words (because this range tends to include non-naturalized foreign borrowings, proper names, and such). So if your list of common words is the top 20, the unusually spelled vowels in 'be', 'to', 'of', 'the', etc., are going to send your rate of exceptions through the roof. If it's the top 200, less so. Top 2000, not a problem. So you can pick your quotable rate of inconsistency by choosing your frequency cutoff carefully. (Compare inconsistent stress placement in Spanish verbs; very common words are likely to have stress in places not consistent with the stress style of the rest of the language (Eddington 2004, Lingua 114:856).) In original research I have shown that common words are measurably less consistent in the spelling of their vowels. Overall, in eight thousand monosyllables, 81% could be correctly predicted from spelling by comparing them with other known items, but words in the first quartile were only 79.3% predictable; second quartile, 83.2%; third quartile, 84.0%; fourth quartile, 82.7%.
It also depends on how you measure consistency. Kessler and Treiman (2001, Journal of memory and language 44:597) hand-analyzed a list of 3117 items and found that their vowel spellings were explainable in 92% of cases, but I ran my computer model over a comparable list of the 3173 most frequent monosyllables, which could be predicted by analogy only 80.6% of the time (with, again, all eight thousand words available for reference; if they were compared only to one another the rate of prediction dropped to 71.7%). So consistency as measured by a particular hand scoring method and as measured by automated statistical prediction are two different beasts as well. I'm not convinced such statistics, stripped of context as sound bites, add anything to our understanding of spelling reform.
eritain 08:47, 25 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's probably worth pointing out a difficulty for spelling reform based on pronounciation. The pronounciation of words varies significantly between regions (in English, at any rate), and historical distinctions which have been lost in some dialects persist in others. Thus, a system which might be more "logical" for one group of speakers could be less logical for others.

-- Paul


Several words are described as "anachronisms". This label was incorrectly applied to "thru" and "nite". Both of these spellings are common in informal writing, and "thru" is often seen in "thruway" because it fits on the road signs. I don't know what the author was getting at by labeling them as anachronisms, but perhaps there is another word that describes them better. Obscure? AdamRetchless 22:31, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)


Those sections are perhaps inevitably pretty subjective. It currently states that "cigaret" never caught on but that "agast" did (a bit), which I find to be pretty much backward. It could also use the addition of some more of Noah Webster's successful whims - for instance the dropped silent e in judgement/acknowledgement/abridgement/lodgement. Unfortunately I don't know where to put these chronologically - they were certainly in place by the 1913 edition (which rather coyly notes that the full spellings are "sometimes" used "in England" ;). Theatre/theater is also missing - they're now in about equal use, though the popularity of the revised spelling seems to be waning (a section on the sociological forces that popularise or revile reformed spellings might be interesting in itself). - toh 20:43, 2004 Dec 15 (UTC)


There is an error - I believe, in classifying American English spellings under dominant spelling; I think it better to place them under "variant spellings" while making clear that they are the dominant spelling for American English, instead of insisting on something that is not true for the vast majority of the English-literate world. User:anonymous

I'm not rejecting your main point, but I looked up some facts, and Americans represent 1/2-2/3 of native English speakers and maybe one third of the persons who use it on a day to day basis...so I don't think anything can represent a "vast majority" of english speakers without including Americans. AdamRetchless 15:28, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Yes, I made a glaring mistake on that... sorry. But I'd like to add that "native" is becoming more of a mystery to define; for instance, some books argue that Singaporeans (educated in an exclusively English medium, and the mother tongue has been mostly reduced to a foreign language; I am sixteen and going through its paces!) are native speakers, while others insist that only Caucasians fit the bill; and some books have "first-class native" and "second-class native" denominations, which seems to be a kind of modern day racism all on its own. User:anonymous

I've noticed that "tyre" -> "tire" is not on the list. It's interesting because the "tyre" spelling is never seen in Canada and "tire" (for the rubber wheel) is never seen in Australia. Also "program" is the only spelling for computer program whereas "programme" coexists with "program" for older uses in Australia.

My recollection of Canadian spelling is that, officially, they follow British usage when the differences cover an entire class of words. For example, Canadians follow the British in the colour class, the theatre class, and (sometimes) in the -ise class, although the American -ize is used in Canada also. Unique words that are written differently in Britain, such as gaol, tyre, kerb and so forth, are spelled in Canada as they are in the United States. Smerdis of Tlön 15:53, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

The distinction between programme (never a computer program), and program shows how nonphonetic spelling differences can be used to increase clarity. And the attmept by most spelling reformers to spell "come" as "cum" is an obvious example as to why these reforms will never, ever, get the backing of mainstream America. User:Anonymous

As a Canadian, I struggle between the American and British spellings. When I write official military correspondance, I use the British spellings. When e-mailing my peers, I use American spelling, as it is closer to the way we pronounce the words. We very frequently consult the Oxford Canadian Dictionary to find the correct spelling. It often lists both British and American variants as equal in preference. When I read the British printing of the Harry Potter novels, some of the spelling looks shocking to me: "plough", when we Canadians use "plow" exclusively. (Brian Merz)
That's pretty true for spelling in Singapore - generally British usage, American terms - best demonstrated as the Singapore English page notes, "sports pages" feature "soccer news". "Tyre" is very interesting too - I believe it's the dominant spelling in Singapore, but it's also true that Singaporeans aren't famous for keeping to their language conventions. Also, perhaps the use of the word "program" for computers is really by poor International English localisation on the part of Microsoft et al... the Mac OS (International English localisation was *removed* quite some time back) avoids this by reverting to the slightly less-familiar "application". User:Anonymous

---

Wile it's tru that vowels change considerably from region to region, consonants are pretty consistent and a minor reform would be great.Cameron Nedland 21:33, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Deceptive Nature of Functional Literacy Comparisons

Functional literacy is usually defined as an ability to read at the 9th grade level or so, with sophisticated materials such as medicine instructions, tax forms and the like which someone might encounter in day to day life. It primarily a vocabulary standard rather than a gauge of whether or not you can read at all. It is a standard based on an ability to function in an industrialized literate society, not the baseline literacy that comes into play at the stage of education when children are learning to simply spell at all.

Most people who are functionally illiterate can still read street signs, the headlines in a typical daily newspaper, and so on. In short, most can spell, albeit, often not terribly well. Ohwilleke 19:13, 18 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

French Orthography

As of this year, it would seem the reform might finally see the light. Publications, while not yet in the mainstream, now exist, including a lexicon of the modifications ("le millepatte sur un nénufar", showcasing two of the components of the reform, being a simplification of the rules for composite nouns and the rectification of some words which had what was considered as an anomalous orthography. Associations in the rest of the Francophony have been formed during the period after the adoption of this rectification, and are trying to spread it usage. From the little I know on the field, it is at the very least presented to teachers in colleges and universities in Quebec (and that I'm suggested to take a little time to introduce to students during my peer-to-peer tutor work), and I seem to have heard that teachers in Switzerland are considering its adoption. I'll check for copyright issues however before, but from what I heard the Academy is relatively prompt to answer, so it could be done in one or two weeks. David

---

Public domain and distribution

Texts distributed freely on the web are not necessarily considered public domain, am I wrong? David

Just because something's distributed freely online doesn't make it public domain, no. (You can download Linux from a whole lot of places, and of course Wikipedia articles are freely available all over the place, but certainly neither is public domain.) There may well be copyright in the work, and if it's not stated in the document you should contact the authors and ask for details. Marnanel 18:35, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)
In the US, copyright adheres to any work created by an author after 1977 even if no mention of copyright is made in the work. (For prior years, there are different rules.)
US law has a provision for "fair use", which can be explained (outside of court) as use that will be of no harm to the rights of the copyrightholder. (For example, copying a Mickey Mouse video for home use in order that the original will not be destroyed by one's VCR fits as fair use; copying an extra for one's friend is not, because it reduces the market for the specific video (even slightly); capturing an image from the video to make a birthday card is definitely not fair use, even though the particular image might never be used by the copyright holder to produce a birthday card. Copyright intrinsically bestows rights and duties of non-production as well as of production.) Fair use includes scholarly usage under certain circumstances.
When copyright has not expressly been refused by the author, such works are under copyright in the US for seventy years after the author dies. Other countries have different rules... it's really quite a hodge-podge -- especially when you add in the effects of corporations like Disney who have successfully pressured governments to lengthen the copyright protection periods so that their creations like Mickey Mouse are still protected. ~~ dwc 20060126


---

Spelling reform poll

Removed and inserted into the Manual of style as suggested below by Cadr.

This is the English Wikipedia, and that implies standard English authography (British, American, etc. varients all acceptable). I see no reason to adopt any other spelling method, and it would have to be discussed elsewhere (i.e. in the wikipedia style guide, and that sort of thing). Cadr 17:58, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I think it's all about things like beauty and efficiency. If a poll here was moved to the Manual of Style I can't find it. Etaonsh 21:57, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Peeve

Is there a neutral way to say that reformers can be very nitpicky, while ignoring larger issues of language planning? Something like anathematizing sexist language while ignoring grave cases of sexism?

I assumed (perhaps wrongly?) that he meant that spelling reformers bang on endlessly about the nitty-gritty of spelling reform proposals without exploring the more key issue of why the world seems to be irrevocably biased against them/us(?). Etaonsh 21:05, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Other languages' spelling reforms

Here are some rough thoughts of what is missing in this article in the non-English field.

  • Changes of script:
    Many languages, especially recently of the former Soviet Union have changed from Cyrillic to Latin; many of those changed from Arabic to Cyrillic at the onset of the soviet period.
    • Malay was written in Arabic script but changed to the Latin script. The former is still in use in Brunei.
    • Turkish was written in Arabic script until the reforms by Ataturk when a Latin script was adopted. See also Ottoman Turkish.
  • Changes of spelling:
    • China introduced its standardized simplified characters in the 20th century, they were not adopted in every Chinese-speaking country.
    • Danish had one or more reforms in the late 1940s or 1950s. Changes included replacing "aa" with "å" and ending the practice of capitalizing all nouns as German still does.
    • Dutch The Nederlandse Taalunie or Dutch Language Union was responsible for the modification of the Dutch orthography in 1995. The Dutch orthography article also mentions reforms in 1946 (Belgium), 1947 (Netherlands), and 1996 (Belgium and Netherlands).
    • German has undergone several reforms before the current one.
    • Icelandic eradicated the letter "z" in 1973 except in personal and family names. See Talk:Icelandic language (User:Biekko)
    • Irish underwent a spelling reform sometime in the past couple of centuries.
    • Japanese standardized the uses for hiragana and katakana, okurigana; also a few hundred (at most) kanji characters were slightly simplified after WWII. Some kana characters went out of use, when?
    • Korean has more or less eliminated hanja (Chinese characters) - was there an official reform for this in either country? Also several hangul letters have become obsolete - when was this?
    • Spanish used the cedilla (ç) for the sound of the affricate [ts] until an orthographic reform in the 18th century. (From Cedilla)
    • Swedish changed its alphabetical order, making å, ä, and ö separate letters coming after z.
    • Yiddish had differing orthographies in Russia and in other communities. A recent effort by YIVO has come up with an apparently popular standard.

Doubtless there is more - this is just off the top of my head as it's a field I've been interested in for some time but not in a very organised way. — Hippietrail 17:57, 30 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Even as an American, I had no idea that "catalogue" and "cancelled" were supposed to be spelled "catalog" and "canceled".Personally, I think that the English language is fine as it is; to change it would be to tarnish the sterling silver of linguistics out of which it is made. Many of the reforms made my Melville Dewey are totally absurd. If he spelled "lodge" as "loj" would he spell "lodged" as "lojd"? That's my take on things. --Amrun en' Sinta

Leading spelling reform proposals?

The "list of leading spelling reform proposals" is a misleading title. This is certainly not a list of the most popular or well-known proposals, so the extent to which these are the "leading proposals" is arguable. For example, I have seen no material about Nuspelynh except for the Nuspelynh website itself, and even that is extremely unlikely to succeed relative to other proposals for two reasons: firstly, it makes no attempt to represent sounds not found in Western American English (e.g. the vowels in the words cot, caught, and calm are spelt identically), and secondly it uses letters like "c", "q" and "x" and vowels, which I think most English speakers would find unacceptable. I don't think at this point we can set out a list of criteria that makes a proposal inherently more likely to succeed, since it will take a long time to even make people aware of spelling reform and willing to go through with it, and their attitudes about "acceptable" and "unacceptable" proposals could easily change in that time. For example, what if North American speakers become more receptive to the idea of using diacritics as Spanish becomes increasingly spoken in the US? By the way, why exactly does the list say that North Americans in particular do not favor diacritics? I haven't met any British, Australian or Indian speakers who advocate diacritics any more than Americans do. Certainly there is a place here for a discussion of how radical a scheme can get before it's too unrealistic, but it's a bit premature to be singling out specific schemes and setting up boundaries between what will and will not be accepted by the general public. — Ливай | ☺ 02:14, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

It does seem that Brits are more receptive to ligatures, at the very least. But nowadays they mostly write them as two letters, e.g. "foetus". -Anonymous

Theodore Roosevelt's spelling reform

This article makes no mention of President Theodore Roosevelt's efforts to reform spelling in the U.S at the beginning of the 20th century. Other Internet sites that I have visited do mention it, but suggest it had no long lasting effect. However when I was working for NASA as a summer intern in 1966, there were two lists of words in the U.S. Government Printing Office Style Manual that mandated certain spellings. One was the familiar list of U.S.--British differences (e.g. color vs. colour). The second was a list of reformed spellings that were only mandated for U.S. Government documents. I was told the lists dated back to the Teddy Roosevelt administration. One word I remember in particular was "align", which came up all the time in my work on guidance systems. In the U.S. Government, the word was required to be spelled aline (also alinement). Our section secretary had to retype (pre-word processor) a long technical memorandum I had authored to change those spellings. --agr 17:36, 18 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

re: The sub-heading List of leading spelling reform proposals... Is unclear wrt to which historical initiatives, versus current politicking (err.. politicing) among the COGNIZATI. No historical 'feel' is given to us readers for current versus past efforts, nor is there a distinction clearly made as to which are US proposals, or those of other English speaking countries. Which fact augments the very point made just above, WHERE IS TR's Letter to the Public Printer of the United States, and mention of the Simplified Spelling Board (Columbia Univ... and for all I know, Mark Twain), or the SSB's newsmaking 'Circular number 6'. Pultzer prize winning British historian Edmund Morris spends several pages (paperback, pp460-461, in Theodore Rex) discussing the impact of Teddy's guidance which targeted 300 words, and kept the press 'buzz' but implies that there was a rare partial failure here by a man who was 'winning everything' at the time. Some historical discussion of where he prevailed, and where he and the SSB did not is surely in order! Fabartus 16:26, 30 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

American variant spellings

It should probably be noted that, at least for the "analog" and "catalog", these words are the dominant forms in American English in some cases.

In my experience,

  • analog is commonly used as an adjective (an analog computer), while
  • analogue is commonly used as a noun (the toe is an analogue to the finger)

with some crossover in both directions; non-US usage favors "analogue" in all cases.

Also in my experience,

  • catalog is commonly used as a noun (The latest Sears catalog), while
  • catalogue is commonly found as a verb (I've got to catalogue all of these files).

This might have something to do with the awkwardness of trying to produce the -ing form of "catalog". In any case, there is again some overlap between these uses, and the whole thing seems to be in flux. Non-US usage still favors "catalogue."

Furry-ferry merger

Here's what L. Craig Schoonmaker http://www.geocities.com/sswordday/ has to say about the ferry-furry distinction:

  • Quote-THIS is the famous "distinction without a difference", except that there are about 4 times as many -erry's as -urry's. And please note that Dictionary gives woor.ee, foor.ee, and hoor.ee (that's the sound that the U with a 'hat' (circumflex accent) shows: short-OO), which I have not heard so regard as bizarre. Either they heard wrong or they're on drugs.

+

  • Dictionary, oddly, is sometimes just plain wrong. For instance, "water" is not shown there as ever being pronounced "wut.er", but I listened very carefully to reports of water-main breaks on TV stations in the New York Tristate Metropolitan Area (the broadcasting capital of North America), and wut.er is plainly the pronunciation educated people in this area give that word. The SSWD project, of course, cannot offer "water" precisely because it has more than one common pronunciation.

+

  • If you put together the -erry's and the -ery's pronounced the same, you get a MASS of words with ER as the crucial spelling, but if you try to use -ury rather than -urry, you get a completely different sound. So I think we'll go with -erry. But I appreciate your views. Cheers.
  • Quote-UR, ER, OR, and AR may be pronounced with tiny differences by SOME speakers in SOME dialects as to SOME words. I went to your URL for the Cambridge dictionary, which offers TWO bizarre transliterations (which may or may not be rendered in standard IPA but is opaque to me -- IPA transliterations tend to proceed from the positions of vocal apparatus of the linguists who speak them in preparing to write them; SSWD is concerned about what people HEAR, and if they hear no difference between, for instance, vaann and venn for French "vin", it doesn't matter to them whether the person saying it forms the word one way, because the listener hears it the same no matter which way a speaker might articulate it). Most to the point, the Cambridge dictionary shows TWO pronunciations, British dialect and American standard.

+

  • I then went to the Merriam-Webster URLs for the other words and clicked on the speaker icon to listen to the pronunciations rendered, in American English, and found no distinction worth making. All those words would rhyme PERFECTLY as most people regard things. Of course, we could avoid the problem altogether by saying that there are two different pronunciations for "worry", so the word can't be changed!

+

  • For most ordinary , for whom the SSWD project is intended, not for linguistics specialists, there is between a great many word pairs or groups, no difference worth 'worrying' about. There are a lot of overeducated people who have bugaboos about tiny matters of no consequence, and will argue them endlessly, to everyone else's tedium. I'm not about to argue the linguistic equivalent of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, a subject that may have fascinated some medieval theologians but nobody else.

+

  • The SSWD project is about NEEDED change, and preferably changes that people can readily apply to things they HEAR. One transliteration for a small range of actual sounds is convenient, and all spelling is convention. Few speakers of standard English distinguish in sound between "ferry" and "furry". Having a distinction in spelling for these two HOMONYMS is useful. As to which spelling you favor for a reform of "worry", I have noted that you favor "wurry".

+

  • The problem may be only that a following-R tends to alter the quality of the vowel before it, for some speakers more than others. I have not yet offered this word (which you plainly render "wurd" and I render "werd") and might select "wurry", on the basis that some people might see it as parallel to "merry", which they pronounce like "Mary". Or I may not offer it at all, since, as some people regard things, it has two pronunciations so cannot be changed if a change would antagonize some significant body of speakers. I am asking for more comments. Cheers.
  • Quote- YES, I noted that in checking "merge", some dictionaries use the U with a hat as the vowel. But in any case, that is the ER sound, as shown plainly by the sample words in Dictionary.com's own pronunciation key: "urge, term, firm, word, heard".

+

  • As for "ont", I suggested that because "ant" is a homophone we can eliminate from a language filled to overflowing with homophones, and seems to those of us who say "ont" -- meaning a large proportion of the best-educated people in the U.S. and almost everybody in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, etc. -- that calling a person by a homophone for an insect is arguably disrespectful. I have no power to impose anything, and the SSWD site is designed mainly to make people think. As for "tord", too-waurd is a spelling pronunciation, and as with ev-er-y and other spelling pronunciations (which my Random House Unabridged labels so people know better than to use them), spelling reformers can properly advise people that tho they think they are being careful to be correct, they are actually being wrong.

+

  • The distinction between "ferry" and "furry" is, I repeat, not "worth making. All those words would rhyme PERFECTLY as most people regard things." People who try to draw needless distinctions and force people to try to supply only one of essentially interchangeable spellings do spelling reform a disservice. This is not the distinction between "merry" rhyming with "berry" and "merry" rhyming with "Mary". It is TRIVIA that ordinary people do not waste time on and cannot justify wasting educational time and money on. If you see a poem in which one line ends with "ferry" and the next appropriate line ends in "furry" or "worry" or "cherry" or "very", will you be startled by an appalling lack of rhyme? If so, you are one in perhaps 15,000 people.

+

  • Native speakers of English cannot and do not make the short-E as in "bed" and follow it with R in the same syllable and come out with anything like what most people say for "very", "berry", etc. Following-R changes the quality of many vowels in its same syllable.

+

  • Make all the silly and PRETENTIOUS distinctions you want. Ordinary people concerned with communication rather than language as an arcane study to itself will not trouble to heed you. 64.12.116.67 04:22, 6 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

German spelling "reform" of 1901?

To my limited knowledge German simply didn't have any codified and unified orthography before 1901; each school used its own (though similar) rules.

While I am at it, I'd like to comment the quite short-sighted opinion against a spelling reform for English. Please read this.

Er... yes, English has the least logical orthography of all languages that use an alphabet, it's even worse than Mongolian written in the Mongolian alphabet and Tibetan, and that by any criterion -- phonetics, etymology, morphology, whatever.

David Marjanović david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at 00:34 CET-summertime 2005/8/7

Through v. thru

I changed "thru" to "through." Someone changed it back to "thru." And then someone else changed it back to "through." I see "thru" on signs at fast-food restaurants, but I've yet to see it in prose except in students' poorly written papers and here. Perhaps my experience is deviant from that of the majority, but I guess it should be put to a discussion. "Through" is standard, and even on a spelling reform page it seems appropriate. Savantpol 17:39, 30 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

"through" is normal, and "thru" is deviant, but "thru" does get a mention (with no value-judgement) in my Macquarie Dictionary, and I've seen it in various more informal writings (such as you might find on the talk pages here), even when the writer is taking the effort to spell properly for other words. "Drive thru" is an excption; that construction appears even in formalities up to and perhaps exceding (broadsheet) newspaper prose. —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 00:02, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
The use of thru is actually quite common on Wikipedia and this is only not apparent because some people have campaigns to "correct" it. It is most common in tables where space is at a premium.Dejvid 09:32, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hiccup

I don't agree with the listing of the word hiccup in this article as a 20th-century reformed spelling of hiccough. Hiccup is in fact, the older form—the spelling -ough arised owing to a popular etymology linking it to cough. The O.E.D. says that hiccough "ought to be abandoned as a mere error" and hiccup appears in quotations as far back as 1580. I'm going to remove it from the list.

Several of the worst spellings are due to a 16th cent fad for etymology. Repairing the damage and going back to more fonemic spellings is still a reform.Dejvid 22:42, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with you, but that logic seems questionable in this case. The O.E.D. gives quotations for "hiccup" from 1580, 1581, 1621, 1635, 1671, 1727, and 1893. "Hiccup" only appears in quotations from 1626, 1744, 1794, and 1876. For me, this seems to show that the two forms coexisted. Nevertheless, I'm willing to leave it there. I will just modify it to make it a little clearer. Lesgles 20:29, 26 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Disputed: Brazilian reaction to spelling reform

In the section on spelling reforms for the Portuguese language, someone wrote the paragraph:

"All this is moot in Brazil, where apart from some enthusiasts the reform is being thoroughly ignored, as most people do not see any problem with the current orthography and many linguists argue it would enforce uniformity where Brazilian usage is actually more regular or reflects local pronunciation."

Is this assessment based on some kind of opinion polls, or does who wrote it believe he can speak on behalf of the 180 million Brazilian citizens? I think such broad sweeping generalizations should either be backed up by statistical data, or not written down at all.


I have attempted to clarify this issue with the user who wrote the paragraph, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Leandrod#Portuguese_spelling_reform. He replied to me once, then stopped, so I am going to openly challenge his paragraph. Everything in it is either personal opinion, unproven, or unclear.

"All this is moot in Brazil, where apart from some enthusiasts the reform is being thoroughly ignored, as most people do not see any problem with the current orthography and many linguists argue it would enforce uniformity where Brazilian usage is actually more regular or reflects local pronunciation."

The spelling reform was stalled for over ten years due to legal impediments: it needed to be ratified by all signatary countries, which had not happened. Then, in the summer of 2004, a change was made to the text, allowing the agreement to go into effect in the countries that had already ratified it. One of these was Brazil. Although a year has passed, not much has been done yet to implement the proposed changes to spelling--in Brazil or elsewhere.

The phrase "All this is moot in Brazil" seems to suggest that Brazil's situation with regard to the spelling reform is special, which is not the case.

"most people [in Brazil] do not see any problem with the current orthography" This seems like unsubstantiated opinion. Furthermore, it is irrelevant. Whether or not most people see a problem with the current orthography tells us nothing about whether or not they will adopt the new orthography when the time comes to do so.

"many linguists argue it would enforce uniformity where Brazilian usage is actually more regular or reflects local pronunciation" This sentence is difficult to understand. Who are these "linguists", and how do we know they're "many"? What does "enforce uniformity" mean, and why do those linguists see it as a drawback of the agreement? What is a "more regular" spelling? How does the current orthography "reflect local pronunciation" in a way that the new orthography does not?

Dec. 4 2005.

  • I removed his adiction, it is obviously a personal feeling. Brazil is in fact the biggest supporter of this reform, and the country that will most gain from it (internationally, obviously).
  • There are obviously no linguistic problems with the reform as he stated, it is his imagination at the work. Only some accent marks that are not that useful will be removed, i dont see any linguistic problem with English speakers (they dont use accent marks). Next time, simply remove it. --Pedro 20:43, 17 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]


-- As a brazilian, i'll try to give my opinion on this. First, a rational spelling seems a good thing, and portuguese spelling is relatively good. However, our spelling has been reformed too often. The last one was in the 70's, so there are many people who learned the old spelling (the one that used the circumflex (^) more often) and they still confuse some words. Fortunately, the even-older-spelling (the one with y, ph, etc.) is dead, i could not find much information about it. So, imagine if they change things again! That would be a lot of confusion, wasted money and the spelling would still have its known quirks (c or ss? g or j? x or ch?). I would also like to point out that (1) the proposed reform isn't widely known here (i can only find small notes about it once in a few years) and (2) some points are dabatable, at least in my humble opinion (Do we really need to change the rules for hyphens to something else that is equally complex? Do we really need to get rid of the trema (¨)? etc. etc.). If they really want to reform our spelling, they should wait at least 70 years and then come up with something that's really easier for us, and not cosmetic changes that go nowhere. --143.54.13.75 18:10, 22 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]


Just to add my two cents, the new rules for hyphenization proposed in the 1990 reform are far simpler than the ones we use today ! I sincerely hope they are adopted. Having said that, I must say that, as a Brazilian, I personally feel uncomfortable having to write "ideia", "voo", "apoio", "joia" or "frequente" instead of "idéia", "vôo", "apóio", "jóia" and "freqüente" (readers who are familiar with Brazilian Portuguese phonology will understand what I mean !). Nevertheless, I am prepared to accept those aforementioned changes as a minor price to pay in exchange for the much more significant dropping of the mute consonants in European Portuguese spelling (e.g baptismo, óptimo, direccção, acto, etc...)


Spelling reforms usually face considerable opposition when they are first introduced and are normally slow to be implemented. That is true not only for Portuguese, but also for other major languages as well , see e.g. the discussion on this page on the negative reaction to the 1990 French spelling reform or the 1996 German spelling reform. Most of the reaction tends to come from publishers, newspaper editors and writers who have been using the older spelling for a long time and are predictably reluctant to accept changes. For the ordinary person on the street, spelling reforms may be even more painful as one needs sometimes to literally "unlearn" how to write certain words. Older people in particular sometimes never adjust to spelling changes and keep using the old orthography until they die. Nevertheless, as time passes and the new spelling is introduced in schools and is increasingly used in printed books and newspapers, the normal trend is for reaction to the reform to die out as a new generation of language users is brought up with the new spelling rules. That happened before following all major spelling reforms that were introduced in Brazil (e.g. in the 1940s and 1970s) and will certainly happen again following the implementation of the 1990 orthographic agreement which, incidentally, affects only a relatively small number of Brazilian Portuguese words (no more than 0.5 % according to estimates I've seen on the Internet). The impact on European Portuguese spelling is on the other hand more significant due to the dropping of the mute consonants, but, again, resistance will fade as younger people in Portugal begin to be schooled in the new orthography. At this point, I would say the implementation of the reform is inevitable and will be a reality in the coming years or decades. As a new media, the Wikipedia should yield to that inevitability and adopt the 1990 orthography immediately in all new Portuguese-language articles. At least, that is my POV. Mbruno 01:58, 14 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think Wikipedia should be prudent, and wait until the reform has actually begun to be implemented in practice. FilipeS 13:38, 30 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

German orthography

Deutsch (German) is cited as a language "which use[s] an anachronistic or overly complicated spelling [system]". First of all, the use of 'anachronistic' does not work here. Perhaps 'archaic', 'obsolete' (which I still don't like, as they are still usable), or perhaps even 'vestigial'. Secondly, and perhaps, most importantly, it's not true! German spelling is incredibly regular and phonetic, perhaps not quite as Italian or Spanish, but it's certainly a fair sight more regular than French or English (although that's not saying too much). I beg for examples to show me otherwise. I'm fluent in German, and I cannot think of an example that isn't an obvious French or English loanword (e.g.-"Genre", "jogging"). 64.122.95.110 20:40, 15 February 2006 (UTC) ColinKennedy 20:40, 15 February 2006 (UTC) (sorry, I got logged out)[reply]

I'm far from an expert on the topic (maybe Angr could comment here?), but afaik, no dialect of German distinguishes the various realizations of /ä/ from those of /e/. I wouldn't call this "anachronistic", I would call it "etymological retention" or something more along those lines. Anachronistic is like when modern English was being developed, some (fairly influential) folks went back and readded "silent letters" (some of the occurrences of the digraph "gh" come to mind) on an etymological basis, to the spelling. Even more anachronistic was the standardization of Føroyskt. Some official limba română spellings are anachronistic as well, including the name Romania. On the other hand, it could be that German is listed as using "overly complicated" spellings. /i/ is spelled "ie" (archaic diphthong), complex (and for outsiders, apparently arbitrary, especially since Duden's rules aren't followed in all of Germanspeakerdom) rules about when old sz is to be written "ß" vs "ss". No apparent rationale for the existence of both ü and y as separate letters. Failure to distinguish between adjacent [glottal-stop distinguished] vowels and diphthongs, e.g., "ee" can be either /e:/ or /eʔe/. /ʃ/ is spelled "sch". /ʧ/ is "tsch". /ʤ/ is "dsch". /ˈʧɛ·çɪʃ/ is "tschechisch". "g" is sometimes /g/ and sometimes /ç/. "ch" is sometimes /ç/ (/ʃ/ in some dialects) and sometimes /χ/ or even /x/. "r" is /ʀ/ or /ɐ/ (some places /ʁ/). Easy enough once you know the rules, but not quite as simple to an outsider.  ;-) Tomertalk 00:42, 23 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If you will, some spellings might be called anachronistic in the sense that non-etymological spellings were introduced. There are, for instance, dialects that distinguish ä and e also in short vowels, but the distinction is different from the one in the written standard. For instance, the primary umlaut of /a/ was /e/, not /ä/, so in Middle High German the plural of stadt 'city' was stedt(e), but in the modern standard language, ä is used in all instances that correspond to a, no matter what their etymological development. Then, ie is being used in words that never had the diphthong ie, vor instance wieder 'again', Friede 'peace'; ss as well, for instance Wasser 'water'; and then, there are anti-etymological distinction of originally single words into two words, for instance dass vs. das 'that', wider vs. wieder 'again'. 84.73.159.74 07:12, 10 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

"catalogue became catalog" Eh?

Since when, exactly, has catalogue been spelled as "catalog" in American English? I'm an American, from Ohio, and I can only ever remember it being spelled "catalogue." I'm 23, by the way, so it is not due to my old-timey nature or anything. ChildeRolandofGilead 15:08, 17 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Try a google search and you'll find lots. Indeed try google itself Google catalogs. There really isn't such a hard border between British and American spelling. Hence it is not unusual for Americans to use a "British" spelling and British "American".Dejvid 18:31, 25 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, how many "Ohioans" have contributed information online—AND in standard American English spelling? Would they maybe use "catalog" when in a rush? Who knows if that's how they spell it in their spare time. Y'know, people often use different vernaculars when in different situations. Talking (aloud, that is), is an exception: if I had to spell every word I spoke, in my mind and whilst speaking, I'd just as soon keep my mouth shut!… Anyway, I often use the spelling "thru" when working thru(/through/thrû) a computer, as well as many other ergonomic conventionalisms. So, the way people spell on the Internet doesn't necessarily reflect the way people spell on paper or typewriter or even word processor. The Web has definitely changed alot of things; spelling habits being one of them. Space is often a general issue for most non-aristocratic computer users. Although, one wonders, in terms of kilobytes, how much larger an e-text copy of the Bible in British English would be in comparison to that of American English version… Hunoz?
As for myself, I have developed a personal mishmash spelling of English words, wherein one will find the spellings "colour" and "favour" side by side with "program" and "catalog". It may seem bizarre to others, but that's the least of my worries. I just use spellings that are comfortable for me. After all, most people nowadays seem to prefer to communicate via e-mail over smail (i.e., "slow mail" or "snail mail"). Personally, I am content with the spelling of Modern English. I'm a lexicographer of sorts (and among other things) and I'm familiar with the histories of many English words and know that many of the "spelling vagaries" actually hearken back to an earlier pronunciation—indeed, if Shakespeare were alive today (and also not situated inside a coffin), we would marvel at the way he pronounced English. As a Germanic language, English is a bit mysterious, if you will, so, naturally, its spelling-speaking correspondence will seem inconsistent from the viewpoint of, say, an Italian speller-speaker. Needless to say, a reform of the spelling of English, proposed by some little whippersnapper seems to me a bit imprudent. Besides, after several centuries, current English spelling has naturally evolved thus, therefore let us see how it will further evolve…—Strabismus 21:26, 27 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Removed Arabic

I don't see how Hebrew is classified in one category when Arabic is classified in another. I have no idea how favorable Hebrew spelling is, but it is very similar to Arabic spelling so they are either both good or bad. Removed reference to Arabic.

Removed Hebrew

"consistent (and preferably phonetical) spelling systems -- like Finnish, Russian, Italian, Spanish or Hebrew". Hebrew spelling for Ivrith is a traditional spelling, which is far from being consistent or even phonetical. I removed it. Metron 12:10, 24 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Reference from Computer

The August 2006 issue of Computer references this article. I know there's some template to put on the talk page for it but I haven't a clue what it is or where I saw it. Cburnett 18:37, 11 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Pinyin

Make sure to mention the pinyin battle on Taiwan. jidanni.org/lang/pinyin --Jidanni 2006-12-12

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Spelling_reform&oldid=93828309"