On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 02:45:11AM +0200, Dave Long wrote: > [quoting Kragen] > >At some time in their lives, all eccentrics who spend a lot of time > >reading must take on the doomed project of the orthographic reform of > >their language. Occasionally this project is not doomed; for example, > >if their scheme is backed by a king or revolutionary government, it > >may have some chance of success. > > The eccentricity may lie in the top-down assumption of orthographic > reform, as opposed to the bottom-up processes of orthographic change.
You are clearly correct. I wonder why that wasn't clear to me before you wrote. I'm not sure that it makes the project any less doomed. > > Of course, we would have to pick a standard pronunciation to use > > for the phonetic spelling. > > But why? A reform of an orthography certainly requires a standard, > but by dropping the "ortho" requirement, people could simply spell as > they pronounce. That might not be such a bad idea; it would certainly make literacy more widespread. But perhaps people can already do this, and as you point out later, many already are. The same forces that impeded hangul's adoption in Korea for 500 years are at work today: language use as a group membership marker rather than a means of communication. That's part of it. But a standardized, or at least slowly-changing, orthography makes it quite easy to communicate among, say, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico. Even though the orthography differs between Portuguese and Spanish, it's close enough that you can read clearly. English spelling reform might widen that gap between English and the Romance languages, though. "Frequently" is much closer to "frecuentemente" than "freekwuntlee". > Consider the IM style displayed in these two versions of the same > commercial: > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knb6I9s8Wk8 (gsw) > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLyRbZ55hw (fr) Do you suppose the orthography ("heterography"?) in the commercial creates a communication barrier? Consider this quote from "Donna Babee" on the Carbrain Young Fleeto page at http://www.bebo.com/Profile.jsp?MemberId=5362005867 here drew ya wee cum stain hoo dae u hink u r fck ma scheme al cum up n wreck ur scheme ya wee wank ur the wan thts no go a life if aw u dae is pelter wee boiz on bebo u need tae get a grip ya poof never mind a life FCK UR SCHEME CYF on top non stop run a mock full stop in reply to "Drew Mcskimmin": fuck yer schemes fae cumbernauld yez are aw wee fuckin daft bois wae nae life ya bunch a chavie bastards btyre all the wiy ya fuckin tossers cumbernauld yez are haein a laff mare like scummnauld haha poofs Maybe the communications obstacle there is not the presumably already mostly phonetic spelling ("dae", "hae", and "no go" aren't that hard to figure out) but the vocabulary I don't share. (I guess "pelter" is "pester"? "fae"? "btyre"?) Even if the intended effect is creating a barrier to communication, that barrier will exist even when it's not wanted. Argentine IRC is considerably more difficult than formal written Argentine Spanish in part due to the absence of dictionaries. (For spoken Argentine Spanish, now at least we have a national academy of lunfardo...) > One problem with popular orthographies of this sort is that they may > be too ephemeral; by being too faithful to the speech patterns of a > particular time and place, they lose the universality that we'd like > to see in a language and a literature. Shakespeare, for instance, > seems to be more accessible for the novice when printed on the page > rather than presented on the stage. I've always found it more accessible on the stage. Watching it on stage seems to be a more popular activity. Maybe that's an illusion because watching a stage play, or a movie in a theater, is more observable than reading a Dover or Penguin Classics paperback? But http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_(1996_film) says Branagh's Hamlet was a failure by earning only US$5 million at the US box office that year. But Dover Publications sells Shakespeare in printed form (see e.g. http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Literature/21L-420Spring-2006/Readings/) and http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01E2D81F3FF935A2575BC0A9669C8B63 says (in 2000): The Courier Corporation said yesterday that it had agreed to buy Dover Publications Inc. for $39 million, adding special-interest books to its list of titles as it seeks buyers on the Internet. Dover, which had revenue of $32 million last year, sells more than 7,000 publications at bookstores and by mail order. Based in Mineola, N.Y., it reprints books on subjects from architecture to math. Courier identifies buyers on the Internet with special interests and tells them where they can find a particular work. So Dover at the time sold maybe 16 million copies of all of the Shakespeare plays (and everything else) every year, and maybe a million people went to go see Branagh's movie in the few weeks or months that it was in theaters. I was hoping to dig up something more definitive, but I think that's pretty indecisive. > [0] To be fair, since early composition was primarily oral, the > ancients took greater care to clearly signpost and articulate their > thoughts than we do in contemporary written text. Rhetorical figures > are much more important when one is asking an audience to reconstruct > a parse tree, not from a punctuated text, but from a strictly linear > sequence of phonemes. Interesting. I wonder if there are rhetorical figures in modern writing that would similarly disappear with comic-book bolding and better layout. Would it be a net positive? Tonight I had a discussion with a taxi driver about whether the use of seatbelts discourages caution in driving. > I've seen many TROFF sources that seem to have been written in a > ventilated style. At the time, I had thought it was just a > reflection of the early line editors: by keeping phrases and clauses > on distinct lines, editing at 300 -- or even 110 -- baud on a > teletype becomes less painful. But if ventilation were a meme of the > 60's, it may have even been the result of conscious choice. Perhaps it was intended to reduce the size of linewise diffs. I've certainly done that in TeX, especially when collaborating with other people by emailed patches. (On second thought, |}fmt or M-q isn't particularly convenient in ed; perhaps the lines remained unfilled after edits because refilling the paragraphs was too inconvenient.) > (indeed, this may be a reasonable halfway step: although we'd like > for a reader to quickly grasp the structure of a text, it's even > more important for an editor to have done so) Indeed. > Finally, what about format=flowed email? Stallman wants Emacs to do general word processing, with fonts and stylesheets and so on. Perhaps separating the formatting codes from the text (put them in a comment block at the end? in a separate file?) would provide a less disharmonious format than the usual memory-dump word-processor formats; and in that case you could provide several alternative sets of formatting for the same text.
