Talk:Spelling reform

message: 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)
thread_title: Deceptive Nature of Functional Literacy Comparisons

message: 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)
thread_title: Spelling reform poll

message: 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?
* You're going to need to explain that remark... bitch. --Tysto 01:18, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Nit-picking and élitist? What is it about people here, the inverted snobbery, that we don't want to have an élite? The French are only too happy to high-fliers around. The word "correct" says it all. Memethuzla (talk) 04:32, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Peeve 

message: 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)
thread_title: Theodore Roosevelt's spelling reform

message: 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)
thread_title:  Furry-ferry merger 

message: 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)
replies: text: "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 exceeding (broadsheet) newspaper prose. —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 00:02, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Through v. thru 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Hiccup 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title: German orthography

message: 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.
:To put it simply, they both suck but are probably better than English.Cameron Nedland 21:38, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed Arabic 

message: "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)
thread_title:  Removed Hebrew 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Reference from ''Computer'' 

message: Make sure to mention the pinyin battle on Taiwan.
jidanni.org/lang/pinyin
--Jidanni 2006-12-12
:Pinyin is a transliteration system, not really the spelling of the language. Likewise, you cannot say the change from Wade-Giles to pinyin is a spelling reform.  Strictly speaking, Chinese is not spelled with alphabets, hence the closest you can get is writing reform, not spelling reform.  I would said the spelling reform in other languages is analogous to the Traditional verses Simplified Chinese writing reform.  Kowloonese 02:20, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Oops, I just added a section on pinyin to the article, and foolishly didn't come look here until afterwards.  I will leave it up to someone else checking this page to decide if it should be deleted or removed or anything...  --Politizer (talk) 03:26, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pinyin 

message: "languages which use anachronistic or overly complicated spellings -- like German, French or English."
I'm not sure that German should be used as an example of this.  German uses consistent spelling and is entirely phonemic.  At least this is my experience.  Morrad 20:12, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  German 

message: I find it a little strange that there is no mention even in passing of the Hungarian linguistic (and spelling, which is relevant) reform which occurred at the end of the nineteenth century. 140.142.175.94 05:25, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hungarian spelling reform 

message: 'Because the Bible was the first English book to be read by large numbers of people, its spelling errors had a large effect on English spelling. People regarded them as God-given and copied them.[citation needed].' No citation is in fact needed, because the reasoning is quite valid in itself; altho perhaps it could be better phrased, e.g., for the latter sentence: '...For most readers, this would inevitably have endowed them with a seemingly God-given validity.'
Having said that, perhaps a citation is, in fact, required, i.e., giving specific examples of said 'spelling errors'(?).
A citation is definitely required. While 'God-given' spelling errors sounds vaguely plausible, this is not an argument that I’ve come across anywhere else and in fact, falls down pretty quickly when you consider the significant number of bibles identified as faulty (see Bible errata#KJV) because of various spelling mistakes within them. I think this whole paragraph should be removed ref WP:NOR Mighty Antar 10:45, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Irregular English spelling: 'God-given'? 

message: I think not enough attention is paid here to the circumstances in which language reform generally takes place. Isn't it interesting, historically, that many of those who have pushed for reforms tend to be political radicals also? There might well be a hidden agenda as well as an impatient desire for change and simplicity. 
It is certainly true that it does not require a political push for a language to evolve, it will do so on its own (though whether that is an advance or dysgenesis is moot). 
Leaders of major political revolutions (or invasions), particularly the more oppressive regimes, waste no time in "simplifying" the spelling, grammar, vocabulary of the lingua franca, ostensibly to make it more available to the poor ......, but certainly to impose a Newspeak of their own, to insinuate the new culture into every cranny of their subjects' new existence. A mere side-effect of all this generous help is that, very shortly, most old literature and guidance in the old ways becomes almost completely inaccessible to the new generations, & a cultural paradigm can be completely shifted in double quick time.
For that reason alone, those of us who value our liberty should be very suspicious of educational (quiet) or political (noisy) initiatives radically to change our mode of basic communication.
Think about that the next time you are offered something "for free"; a subtle semiotic variant of "in return for you freedom".
Memethuzla (talk) 06:20, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: The above is nothing more nor less than a biased statement of political preference. And when so many contributors present the constipation of conservatism as some attractive, apolitical norm, it is hardly surprising that overdue change, if and when it does finally come, comes in unpleasant, explosive bursts.--86.31.105.33 (talk) 22:46, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dubious political and cultural motivations for Spelling Reform 

message: 'Simplified spelling' should not redirect here, but it does, at the time of writing. To those in the know, the two concepts are far from interchangeable. Simplified spelling has been implemented repeatedly, not only in the writings of private hobbyists and historical genii, but in the secret communications of companies, as well as learning simplification programs such as the I.T.A. and Sayspel.
The current redirection arrangement also seems to mitigate against both Simplified Spelling and Spelling Reform. For one thing, it results in simplified spelling schemes not being properly documented, despite their limited historical successes and implementations. Additionally, I raised the subject of 'spelling reform' with another ordinary working class gent, recently (a caretaker at Charlton House, in fact) and noted that he responded with much greater enthusiasm to the concept of 'simplified spelling,' which, despite involving a longer word, sounds less hifalutin. 
Arguably, the confusion between simplified spelling and spelling reform is among the historical reasons for the failure of the latter. The failure to appreciate, treasure, and use simplified spelling, once devised, itself mitigates against its acceptance, but an instant, assumed equation of examples of simplified spelling with spelling reform, or an attempt thereat, sets it up for something it is unlikely, in any given instance, to achieve. Many simplified spelling schemes are devised, in many written languages, but the number of historical instances of spelling reform is minute in comparison - this becomes clear early on in the study of the subject. Some schemes may be 'born to fail,' in that respect, in the sense that there was never any intention for them to replace traditional spelling - I.T.A. is an example of this. Many are doomed, in this sense, simply owing to the obvious difficulty of instituting changes which will meet with the approval of large (and sometimes, even, comparatively small) language communities. Said confusion therefore leads to expectations unlikely to be met, and a failure, at the time, to appreciate the beauty and worth of any individual simplified spelling scheme for what it is - an experiment in design.--86.31.105.33 (talk) 06:59, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  'Simplified spelling' should not redirect here! 

message: I've removed from the article the part where it seemed to state that switching Moldovan spelling from Cyrillic to Latin was accompanied by a phonemization of the orthography. The same part also was saying that Moldovan is a variety of Romanian. Both statements are false. I didn't bother labeling the passage as lacking sources, since I know for a fact that there aren't any.
Moldovan is in fact Romanian. The language was given a different name (and a different script) in Moldova for political reasons and no other. There is no linguist stating they are different languages, or dialects, or anything of the sort. It's one language.
Its Cyrillic orthography was in fact about just as phonemic as the Latin orthography that was used before and after. There is an almost 1 to 1 correspondence between the two scripts (somewhat like the two spellings of Serbian), with only a few exceptions that are regular and depend on the actual pronunciation. As such, the transition in 1989 from Cyrillic to Latin in Moldova was not, and cannot be, justified as a means to render the spelling more phonemic, but to reunite the orthography of the language. — AdiJapan 07:52, 18 November 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Moldovan

message: There's a dialogue on the talk page of English-language spelling reform about the definition of spelling reform (here). Your input is appreciated.  Throughme (talk) 20:59, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Definition of spelling reform