Nick needs to switch to Lojban - http://www.lojban.org/ - then his written language will perfectly match his spoken language and he will be unintelligible to all but a small fraction of the human race. The pronunciation vs. spelling problem is like the QWERTY vs Dvorak problem is like the 120Hz vs DC is like US vs metric is like…. Humans are lazy - if they have used something to the point of muscle/nerve/subconscious memory, they are reluctant to change. The only time such change happens is, interestingly, associated with Imperial central governments (metric under Napoleon, Modern German under Wilhelm and Bismarck).
Ray Parks Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager V: 505-844-4024 M: 505-238-9359 P: 505-951-6084 NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder) JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder) On Feb 24, 2014, at 5:46 AM, <lrudo...@meganet.net> wrote: > Nick, > > Don't apologize--take the tack that Wayne O'Neil took in his lexicographic > introduction to (at least the first edition of) the American Heritage > dictionary: > English spelling includes a *lot* of useful information about the history and > otherwise-hidden relationships of our words. (I'd quote some examples but > all > our copies of that dictionary are on another floor and I'm too lazy at the > moment.) > Teach the kids that spelling is a fascinating key to hidden history! I'm sure > they're smart enough to catch on to that, given the hint. Make it a game! > > As to "blatant irrationality": > > English orthography is only "irrational" if (as you, despite my urgings, > appear > to continue to believe) the single measure of "rationality" is "faithfully > reflects > pronunciation"--meaning *your* pronunciation and not necessarily that of the > guys in > the next state, or the previous half-millennium. Think of all those "dropped > Rs" > that most of our fellow Massachusettsians have in their non-rhotic speech: > would > you really want your grandchildren to drop the "r"s from their spelling when > and > if they move to the East Coast? What about the "wh" digraph? In my dialect, > the > first sound in words like "what" and "when" is aspirated (and the written "h" > shows that the dialect of the people who froze English spelling was, in that > respect, like mine--though now that aspiration is quite rare): "what"/"watt" > and > "when"/"wen" are so-called minimal pairs in my speech. Witch side, in your > model of rationality, whins that match? ... And so on for all the many other > examples in all the many other dialects. > > I admit that there are cases where more "phonetic" spelling would elucidate > facts about English grammar that are largely obscure. For instance, there are > *two* verbs "have" in English (historically, of course, they're one verb): > the auxiliary "have" is pronounced either "v" (as in "I've been there") or > "haff" (as in "I have to go now"), while the true verb meaning "possess" is > pronounced "havv" (as in "I havv three copies of the American Heritage > Dictionary"). Similar statements apply to "used" and other auxiliaries. > Would *that* group of spelling reforms make you happier or sadder? > >> Lee, >> >> I just want to be able to teach my grandchildren to write and spell without >> having to apologize every third sentence for the blatant irrationality of >> the language they are learning. >> >> N >> >> Nicholas S. Thompson >> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology >> Clark University >> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: lrudo...@meganet.net [mailto:lrudo...@meganet.net] >> Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 6:57 PM >> To: Nick Thompson; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group >> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames >> >> Nick asks: >> >>> How come other people can standardize their spellings and we can't >>> standardize ours. >>> >>> >>> >>> Damn! >> >> Well, in the first place, the case of actual Spanish-as-she-is-spoke, >> including all its dialectal differences, isn't quite as clean as the >> official Castilian standard that Frank has cited. For instance, Galician is >> (I am assured) mutually intelligible with Portuguese (specifically, the >> dialect of Portuguese spoken in the nearby parts of Portugal), and >> Portuguese is famous for the difficulty of decoding the written language >> into (any of the many and various dialects of) the spoken language. >> >> In the second place, two desiderata are incompatible. It is evidently >> desirable to many, including you, Nick, to be able to have a written >> language that encodes the spoken language in a faithful manner. But it is >> also desirable to many (including, I hope, you) to be able to read texts >> written in one's language in earlier periods, when the pronunciation is >> *very* likely to have been (often, *very*) different. In one European >> country (I forget which one; it was either the Netherlands or one of the >> continental Scandinavian countries) a fairly recent spelling reform, >> designed to fulfil the first desideratum, reportedly made texts from even a >> hundred years ago totally unreadable (in their original form) by modern >> schoolchildren. >> We can at least recognize Shakespeare--and certainly Dickens!--as writing in >> something like our English, even if many of his rhymes and jokes don't work >> for us. ("Busy as a bee" was a better joke when "busy" was pronounced as >> we'd pronounce "buzzy".) >> >> > > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
