On Thursday, 5 May 2016 at 14:52:00 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
[...]
But hey, it's just a coding convention. We shouldn't be too
attached to spellings, especially if reforms make it easier to
spell (i.e. to spell out a word as you hear it in your head)
and parse text. It's a code to communicate, not a religion.
[...]
It's a falsehood that you can just spell out a word "as you
hear it in your head". No writing system actually does that,
even though some come pretty close. Almost all writing systems
are compromises, balancing etymology, grammatical marking, ease
of use, and closeness to actual pronunciation -- the latter of
which is actually an extremely thorny issue due to the
existence of myriads of dialects and personal pronunciation
peculiarities. If you're merely talking about what's spoken in
the Queen's court, then there's no issue, but it's a big
problem when applied to the diverse regional English dialects
across the globe. The way a Texan spells will be
incomprehensible to a Briton, for example. (But perhaps that
would actually be an advantage of sorts, in recognizing that
Texan is actually a different language, contrary to popular
belief. :-P) Or, for that matter, American vs. Australian. It
would cause a splintering of dialects. Even across different
persons within the same dialectal community, there are bound to
be subtle differences that would make a difference in a pure
spell-it-as-you-say-it system.
Chinese writing is actually an ironic illustration of the last
point, in fact. Thousands of years ago everybody spoke the same
ancestral tongue, but since then, the original ancient Chinese
language has splintered into what's commonly called "dialects"
today, but in actuality are completely different languages on
their own. The distance between, say, Mandarin and Cantonese is
far greater than between Spanish and Portuguese, for example,
yet for some unfathomable reason we regard the latter as
separate languages whereas the former are somehow still mere
"dialects". But in spite of that, the one thing they all have
in common is a writing system understood by all -- thanks to
the writing *not* being phonetic, which is something usually
regarded as a bad thing. Since the writing isn't phonetic, it
has survived as a common system of communication in spite of
thousands of years of sound change and language drift, which in
any other community would have caused complete breakdown in
communication. (Of course, it's not a *perfect* common system
of communication, because "dialectal" differences are in some
cases big enough that one "dialect" would use characters that
don't exist in other dialects, or some words can't be
represented at all. But still, you can at least understand each
other to a workable extent just by having pen and paper handy,
which is a lot more than can be said for, say, an Englishman
trying to communicate with a Russian, having no common writing
system at all, even though thousands of years ago their
respective ancestors spoke the same proto-Indo-European tongue.)
So you see, "write as you say it" isn't quite the panacea as it
may first appear to be. Neither is "keep the ancestral spelling
even though nobody actually talks that way anymore, just so we
can communicate with the Russians in writing in spite of having
completely mutually unintelligible pronunciation". All
real-life writing systems are compromises between conflicting
goals. (Reminds one of programming language design, doesn't it?
:-P)
T
I knew I'd regret it, when I wrote "as you hear it in your head".
:) The ideal is phonetic spelling (Spanish comes quite close to
it). This does not mean that you have a letter for each sound, or
that you write allophones or every little local nuance. However,
it is important to be consistent, even if the spelling system
does not 100% reflect the spoken reality (which is the next best
thing to phonetic spelling). If in English you wrote "nite"
(instead of night), the grapheme <ite> would be identifiable as
the phonemes /ait/, bite, fite, lite, tite, although the -e is
silent.
In Irish, due to the differences between local dialects the
spelling is somewhat conservative and doesn't reflect the
phonetic reality of each dialect, however, it is quite consistent
and everybody can read it using their respective pronunciation.
