On 7/8/06, Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@...> wrote:

> And we'd soon be cut off from all past literature. Shakespeare would
> (and does) get reedited into modern spelling, but who else would?

First, that's a little anglo-centric; English speakers are cut off
from the vast majority of all past literature because it's not in
English. With anything prior to 1800, with the exception of a few
authors, most of whom would get reedited pretty quickly, the only
copies available are noisy b&w photocopies that use the long-s and
other pecularites of early English spelling, most of which aren't
available on paper at all, both of which doesn't encourage readers.

Which is to imagine that most people aren't already cut off from past
literature by their own choice. Besides school literature, already
reedited, there are but a handful of authors from before the 20th
century still read, like Dickens, Austen, and a few others, all of
which would be transcribed within weeks of any declaration of the
change-over. I hardly believe that the 21st century will be more
merciful to the works of the 20th century. The only people who would
be cut off from the texts are scholars of literature, and what
self-respecting scholar of literature is going to have much problem
adding learning a new spelling system for English to the several
languages they already have to learn?

Besides which, for any text already transcribed, converting it to
another spelling system would be no big deal.
<http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/Deseret/BoM.html> says that "it
only took me a couple of hours to produce the actual text [of the
Deseret edition of the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants and
Pearl of Great Price]. In fact, I spent a lot more time editing the
text to make it look pretty on the page than I spent actually
generating it." Given a few more hours of work, several of the
problems of the resulting text that he mentions could be largely or
completely fixed; given an actual commercial effort, a program could
be made that would transcribe any etext with a high degree of
accuracy.

Earl M. Herrick wrote:

> the problem would be to choose the spoken dialect of
> English that the revised spelling should be based on ...
> I would have to insist that everyone spell it DAG.

Why would you _have_ to insist? There's no reason it has to match your
dialect, or that it has to match any particular English dialect. The
differences between the dialects is much less different than the
difference between any spoken dialect and the written language. One of
the main problems with it is that no one is willing to compromise on
their personal ideas of what it should be. Personally, I'd be a lot
more of a fan of a system that reflected the complexities of English
phonetics rather then continuing to try cram it all into 5 or 6
vowels.