Re: "Push for simpler [English] spelling persists"

David Starner wrote:

>
> 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

What nonsense. The topic was English spelling reform.

> 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.

How out of touch are you? Have you never looked at the list of Penguin
Classics? at what Project Gutenberg has _already_ digitized?

> 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

By whom?

Are you also unfamiliar with the economics of publishing?

> 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.

If the process would be automatic, then English
spelling-to-pronunciation is _already_ fully predictable and no reform
is needed.

Now pull the other one.

> <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.

No idea what you're referring to (no, I won't click the link), but if
it's printing the texts in the Deseret instead of the roman alphabet,
then that's nothing but font substitution.

I have no idea why font-engineers are so fascinated by Deseret. It's
never been used for anything.

> 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.

We _have_ a system that reflects the complexities of English vowels --
because it happened to get standardized just before the language got
taken around the globe and major extra-England dialects developed. The
different morphophonographs are interpreted differently in different
dialects. If one of those dialects -- with all its own peculiar phonemic
mergers -- was chosen to be the standard (Earl referred to the
cot/caught merger), then all the others would be short a representation,
and/or would have to deal with distinctions that meant nothing to them.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...