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Mar. 30, 2005 George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), the distinguished Irish playwright and socialist, was also an advocate of spelling reform of the English language, and bequeathed a sum of money for the best alphabet that could be invented for it. Years ago, an American man, as I recall, was awarded the prize, but of course his proposed reform came to nought. There are two approaches to the whole question, depending on the restrictions you wish to propose. If transcribed with a one-to-one correspondence between spoken phonemes and written letters, the English language would take an alphabet of about 40 letters in order to be committed to paper properly. If using 40 letters is not reckoned a problem, one can merely adopt the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), or those parts of it that are applicable specifically to English. Actually, the IPA can reduce all languages to a single alphabet of about 200 letters, but the additional 160 wouldn´t concern us. Currently, American dictionaries use a wide variety of pronunciation schemes, which is very annoying, because you have to keep consulting different pronunciation keys as you go from dictionary to dictionary, unless you can memorize 6 or 8 of them. The Oxford English Dictionary and most bilingual dictionaries already use the IPA, which is really convenient once you know it. The next step would be to eliminate the traditional spelling and use only the IPA spelling. Of course, with this scheme, all our keyboards would become obsolete and computer technology would become a mess. An alternative scheme might replace capitals letters by using a prefixed slash, for example: /a for A. This would free the capital letters to be assigned new values, giving us up to 52 letters, but it would look weird. If transcribed so as to use only the customary alphabet of 26 letters, the English language would have to rely on a number of digraphs. A digraph is a pair of letters that is given a special single value it would not otherwise have. Examples are: sh, th, ng, ch, au. This method can also be used, but it has to be done in such a way that the two letters in a digraph never come together as independent letters. Is it "di-sheveled" or is it "dis-heveled"? Is it "hea-then" or is it "heat-hen"? Such a system can be devised though, as, over the years, I personally have created several such alphabets, as a pastime. While less pleasing from the philological and esthetic standpoint, such a scheme would preserve the existing alphabet. In a transition period, books and newspapers might appear in either orthography, with the older one gradually phasing out. It has already been done in many languages. Spanish orthography is very good. One can always read a Spanish word, without looking up the pronunciation, if he knows the basic rules. German and Greek are almost perfect too. Russian would be perfect if it had an accent mark, so it remains problematic, but could be corrected quite easily. Italian, Portuguese and Hindi have a few flaws, so for about 25% of the words, you have to look up the pronunciation. French is often unpredictable. English is very poor, but in some cases one can guess correct pronunciations. Hebrew, Arabic and Persian are very bad too, as the vowels aren't written at all. And of course, Chinese and Japanese are the worst of all. English orthography is really a nuisance when you get to technical terms--biological nomenclature, medical jargon, names of pharmaceuticals and so forth. If you think you can always pronounce English words as sight, try these: psittaciformes, charadriiformes, gadofosvesetum, alemtuzumabum, syngnathiformes, malesherbiaceous, silasesquiazanes. And there are thousands of such words, as remote as they may be from everyday life. The situation gets worse all the time. Every year Oxford English Dictionary and Webster's International Dictionary issue supplements of new words, 10,000 words or so, many of them just as unpronounceable as those listed below. To mention a couple of down-to-earth absurdities, why is it that these words rhyme: word, whirred, bird, burred, heard, sherd, shirred, curd? How many ways can 'ea' be pronounced: bread, knead, hear, heard, react, reality, reagent, nausea? What about these homonyms: rose, rows, roes, rhos? And these: right, rite, write, wright? And finally, the most famous group: though, through, bough, enough, cough, hiccough, slough, hough. "Slough" rhymes with "cow" or "coo" when it means "swamp", but it rhymes with "cuff" when it means "shed skin". "Hough" is a variant of "hock" as in "ham hock", and is pronounced the same way. I'm too realistic to expect reform, but I thought I'd at least do some wishful thinking online. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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