Benjamin,

Thank you for your comments. I will try to respond to a couple of
them:

> Benjamin Barrett wrote:

Standardization is an important feature of the English alphabet. I
personally cannot understand the speech of native English speakers in
many parts of the world, but the standardized orthography allows us to
communicate.

SB: I presume you mean the English writing system. 250 years ago,
written English was standardized at the word level with the 1755
publication of Johnson's influential dictionary.

There are still about 2000 words with variant spellings in current
dictionaries but for the most part we have retained Johnson's
recommended spellings. He based his spellings on the practices of the
best writers. This was evidently not a simple task because in the
17th c. most people spelled as they pleased.

SB: Of course there could be 100's of different standardized
orthographies for English and more than that many have been proposed.
They would all permit speakers of different dialects to communicate.

9. To improve literacy, English needs to modernise its spelling, as
other languages do.

(BENJ) I'd like to see some examples, here. Does Upward intend to
modernize "modernise", for example, to "modernize"? With the exception
of the "silent 'e'", vowels can't easily be touched because of all the
dialects in the world.

(SB) Prof. Upward's recommendation was called "cut spelling".
Essentially what he proposed was to eliminate all of the redundant
letters. *through was cut to thru. *modernise would be cut to
modrnize. Webster's American spellings are preferred over the British
spellings. labour --> labor --> labr

(BENJ) Is Upward suggesting we write "probably" as "probly"
or "remember" as "member" when pronounced that way?

(SB) Cut Spelling was not that phonemic. It reduced irregularity but
did not eliminate it. Word spellings were brought a little more in
line with the way they were spoken (e.g., *debt became *det) but there
was not a high level of precision. The vowels in traditional spellings
were rarely changed. *remember would be cut to remembr.

(SB) Altho members of the spelling society have proposed over 100
solutions to the alphabet problem, only a few have been endorsed.
Society members (Sweet & Jones) along with Passy in France were
principle architects of the IPA (1888). The IPA has become the most
popular dictionary pronunciation guide.

(SB) The Oxford American Dictionary recently switched from a variant
of New Spelling to the IPA. New Spelling was also developed by
members of the society. It was endorsed as the first house style for
the spelling society. IPA's Latin based eI i: aI oU ju was shifted to
ae ee ie oe ue in New Spelling. New Spelling was also the basis for
Pitman's i/t/a or initial teaching alphabet.

--Steve