From: davidba@carmel.technion.ac.il (David Ben_Ami)
Subject: Re: English Orthography (was "easy to learn?")
Organization: Technion, Israel Inst. of Technology
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 16:40:30 GMT

In article <1992Aug12.141030.11222@blaze.cs.jhu.edu> pjt@newton.cs.jhu.edu (Paul Tanenbaum) writes:
>In article <2A885C3B.10024@noiro.acs.uci.edu> Janis Cortese writes:
>>All natural languages have irregularities; English isn't so bad on this.
>>It's worst characteristic is monumentally stupid spelling.
>
>     I presume your complaint against English orthography is that it does not
>provide a particularly elegant encoding of pronunciation.  This lament is
>heard frequently, and I grant that a bijection between pronunciation and
>spelling is a nice feature in any alphabetic writing system.  But on further
>consideration we find that such a bijection is problematic even in theory.
>The typical model of your idealized situation is
>
>		    +--------+      +------------+
>		    | Speech | ---> | Strings of |
>		    | sounds | <--- | characters |
>		    +--------+      +------------+
>
>where the spelling system represents the interface.  But this model is
>unrealistically simple:  A more precise one is
>
>		    +------------------------------+
>    +--------+      | +----------+     +---------+ |      +------------+
>    | Speech | ---> | | Speakers |  X  | Lexicon | | ---> | Strings of |
>    | sounds | <--- | +----------+     +---------+ | <--- | characters |
>    +--------+      +------------------------------+      +------------+
>
>In a nutshell, whose pronunciation should our orthography encode?  QE2's?
>Walter Cronkite's?  Nelson Mandela's?  (Mandar, don't answer that question!)

Well, the fact that English has problematic spelling causes Great variance 
in pronounciation (at least contributes to it). if English were to have
reasonable spelling (like say: German or Italian and Finnish (not sure))
The problem of setting a standard is problematic but it's been done.
[again Italian is a good example and even Hebrew to some extent]

>     A second, more basic issue is that we can't have it both ways.  While
>the sound of a word is a good thing for its written form to capture, it is
>not the only feature of the word worth capturing.  Another very valuable
>thing to be ascertained from the spelling of a word is the word's origins
>and meaning.  Here we must choose, and the tension between these two valuable
>types of information pretty well explains the current state of English
>spelling.
>     Now if you require that pronunciation be paramount, then I hope for your
>sake that you never find yourself on a drawbridge while laborers are debating
>whether to "raise" or "raze" it.  And I fear that many adults will conclude,
>as I did in sixth grade, that "democracy" and "hypocrisy" must have similar
>meanings, since they sound so similarly (Out of the mouths of babes...).

I agree with you that any major spelling reform now, will utterly fail.
However, reasonable spelling is possible with reserving all the above 
advantages. see the languages I mentioned (German,Italian).

>     +++paul

David.
-- 
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  David Ben-Ami (irc: bigdav)      |   "I can resist anything but Temptation"
  s2780369@Techst02.Technion.Ac.Il |       Oscar Wilde
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