English spelling reform

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This preschool effort compares favorably with plenty of grown-up systems :-)…

Some of the comments:

https://twitter.com/renzalisasis/status/998531950523580416?s=20

 

[h/t Adam Rosenthal]

 



47 Comments

  1. Chris Button said,

    May 22, 2018 @ 1:42 pm

    What a great insight this provides into Sal's pronunciation:

    – A dark-l explaining his use of "o" for "le" in "triangle", "rectangle", "circle"

    – Syllabic sonorants "r" and "n" for "ir" and "on" in "circ.le" and "diam.ond"

    – No aspiration after "s" through his use of "g" and "d" for "q" and "t" in "star" and "square"

    – affrication of "tr" as shown by "chr" for "tr" in "triangle"

  2. Y said,

    May 22, 2018 @ 1:46 pm

    Every time a precocious kid reinvents precise phonetic spelling, they are ridiculed.

  3. outeast said,

    May 22, 2018 @ 2:44 pm

    I have a page of writing like this my son did (in this case it was notes he was writing to me one day when he was angry and refusing to talk to me, but still wanted attention). He and his sister regularly get it out and make me read it to them – much hilarity, as they say, ensures.

    And I once stopped him partway through writing an "out of order" sign on the bathroom door after a particularly pungent evacuation. It still says "distoylutiznt", to the occasional bemusement of guests…

  4. Rubrick said,

    May 22, 2018 @ 3:22 pm

    I've recently been spending a good deal of time helping a Russian friend improve her English, written and spoken. It's a bit embarrassing how often I find myself saying "Yeah, sorry, English is just stupid that way."

  5. Ellen K. said,

    May 22, 2018 @ 5:12 pm

    Strikes me as a rather smart pre-schooler, actually. Able to sound things out.

  6. Narmitaj said,

    May 22, 2018 @ 5:25 pm

    I have a 1978 typed letter from a then-teenage girlfriend explaining getting to grips with welding in her art college sculpture degree course, in which she generated the word "oxceyacetreleean". As I said when writing to her recently, she chucks more or less relevant letters at the problem until the reader gets the impression of the word, then pushes on with her stream of info without apology. Obviously, especially in pre-Google days, it was easier to continue enthusiastically rather than stop the creative flow to check accuracy (and I do still have to check to be sure I spell the word correctly).

    I now do handwritten shopping lists and diary entries a bit like that – not so much spelling inaccuracy as lazy style that's mostly squiggles of about the right length that are hard to read five minutes later. Oddly, I can still easily read my neat notes taken in university lectures 40 years ago.

  7. Christopher Henrich said,

    May 22, 2018 @ 7:03 pm

    Your library may have a copy of a book Gnys at wrk : a child learns to write and read.

  8. Rebecca said,

    May 22, 2018 @ 7:34 pm

    This reminds me of an article read long ago that used pre-school writing as an insight into English phonology. The part that sticks in my memory (accurately or otherwise) is the kid informant getting frustrated with nasalize vowels. The kid was at the lettersound stage of spelling and basically just spelled everything by the one sound he had learned for each letter. The author (kid’s dad?) was giving him a bunch of words of the form /bVk/ like bike, back, book, etc. The kid did this happily but balked after bake, back bike he was given “bank” to spell. He had run out o& all the plausible vowels he knew, didn’t have one that sounded quite right and was miffed. He knew the letter “n”, but also knew that there is no “n” consonant in the word “bank”, or at least that’s the assumed state of his mind, given that it never occurred to him to put an “n” in just because he couldn’t find the right vowel. Anybody remember this work? I didn’t do enough phonology to have it stick

  9. KevinM said,

    May 22, 2018 @ 9:56 pm

    I clearly recall learning in 1st grade that "haf" and "have" were the same word. I still don't really believe it in my heart. Anyway, I know I wasn't nearly as cute as young Mr. Perez.

  10. Michael Watts said,

    May 23, 2018 @ 1:46 am

    This would seem to damage the theory that vowels got left out of most Semitic writing systems because they're less important in Semitic languages than in other languages.

    Possessive "have" and obligatory "have" are pretty clearly not the same word, in that they are pronounced differently and mean different things. But there are lots of pairs of different words that are nonetheless spelled the same.

  11. David Morris said,

    May 23, 2018 @ 3:41 am

    When I read this post at home earlier, the photo didn't show, so I couldn't figure out what it was actually about. When I looked again at work, the photo did show. Clearly, this person was smart enough to remember the names of the shapes and to make an attempt to spell the words. Poor spelling does not automatically make one dumb any more than good spelling automatically makes one smart.

    We had a family friend with the surname of Mickey. One Monday at school, I wrote that we had met 'Bill Mice' on the weekend (viz Mic + e).

  12. David Marjanović said,

    May 23, 2018 @ 5:07 am

    This is awesome. This is massively awesome.

    This would seem to damage the theory that vowels got left out of most Semitic writing systems because they're less important in Semitic languages than in other languages.

    Nope, this is all phonetically real. You won't find many Americans who pronounce a vowel between the /s/ and the /r/ of circle, and you will find plenty who don't pronounce one between the /w/ and the /r/ of square either, at least when they don't put too much stress on the word. Syllabic consonants are much more common than the spelling pretends.

  13. KevinM said,

    May 23, 2018 @ 8:21 am

    @DavidM: I'm guessing that much could be learned by a statistical study of spelling bees. For example, the schwa is the downfall of many a contestant, who is left to guess at the "missing" letter of a word he or she doesn't know.

  14. Jerry Friedman said,

    May 23, 2018 @ 9:46 am

    He says he was a preschooler, but are preschoolers really asked to spell three-syllable words?

  15. Ellen K. said,

    May 23, 2018 @ 12:19 pm

    @Jerry Friedman. He give no indication he was asked to spell those words.

  16. Michael Watts said,

    May 23, 2018 @ 12:50 pm

    I find it hard to believe that the writer here pronounced the vowels of circle (the first syllable), square, and star all the same way.

  17. Jerry Friedman said,

    May 23, 2018 @ 2:08 pm

    Ellen K.: Well, if he wrote them for his own reasons, he has even less justification for calling his preschool self dumb (not that he'd be likely to remember why he wrote them).

  18. Rob Wilson said,

    May 23, 2018 @ 3:57 pm

    @David M, the lack of vowel pronunciation by some Americans caused some puzzlement to this Brit when I heard a White Stripes song (Little Acorns, I think).

  19. David Marjanović said,

    May 23, 2018 @ 5:40 pm

    I find it hard to believe that the writer here pronounced the vowels of circle (the first syllable), square, and star all the same way.

    Not the same way, but at least with retroflexion setting in long before the vowel is over. The IPA calls this overlap a "rhotic vowel": circle, square and star would have [ɝ ~ ɚ], [ɛ˞ ~ e˞] and [ɑ˞]. I'm not sure, though, if [ɚ] is anything other than the syllabic consonant [ɻ̩].

    the lack of vowel pronunciation by some Americans

    Squirrel [skwɻ̩l]… or [skɻ̩ʷl] perhaps.

  20. Chris Button said,

    May 23, 2018 @ 9:58 pm

    @ Michael Watts

    This would seem to damage the theory that vowels got left out of most Semitic writing systems because they're less important in Semitic languages than in other languages.

    Rather than being left out by Semitic alphabets, I think it would be more correct to say that the notion of "vowels" was added in by the Phoenician alphabet. In my book, distinctive "vowels" are really only a surface feature in all languages anyway, but we probably shouldn't get into that here…

    Possessive "have" and obligatory "have" are pretty clearly not the same word, in that they are pronounced differently and mean different things.

    I'm not sure I agree with that. While the /v/ in "have to" often devoices to /f/ due to the close juncture (and would almost always be unvoiced lenis /v̥/ rather than voiced lenis /v/ before the voiceless /t/ regardless), it is still etymologically the same word as possessive "have" and may be pronounced as such. Compare: "I have apples" /hæv/; "I have ten" /hæv̥/; "I have to go" /hæv̥ ~ hæf/

  21. RachelP said,

    May 23, 2018 @ 11:47 pm

    I enjoy how you can very clearly tell the specific dialect of English spoken by this person.

    Would it be wrong to think certain spoken dialects would naturally get people's guesses at spelling closer to the standard? I'm thinking certain consonants that are clearly elided in this pronunciation are not in other pronunciations and would probably be included by a person guessing at spelling.

  22. Michael Watts said,

    May 24, 2018 @ 3:04 am

    Vowels were certainly not "added in by the Phoenician alphabet", which doesn't contain vowels. The Greek alphabet derives from the Phoenician one and does have vowels.

    Akkadian is a Semitic language written with vowels, but notably it inherits its writing system from the unrelated Sumerian.

    There are many, many different words out there that derive from a common source. Ship and skiff are "etymologically the same word", but that is meaningless. They're not the same word now any more than "go" and "wend" are.

  23. Chris Button said,

    May 24, 2018 @ 5:48 am

    @ Michael Watts

    Vowels were certainly not "added in by the Phoenician alphabet", which doesn't contain vowels. The Greek alphabet derives from the Phoenician one and does have vowels.

    Sorry – yes I meant Greek of course. It was late at night when I was writing :)

    There are many, many different words out there that derive from a common source.

    That's not really my point. The word "have" may be pronounced the same way in both situations you cite.

  24. Ellen K. said,

    May 24, 2018 @ 7:28 am

    I would consider the have in "have to" to be pronounced in citation form with a voiced V, and not to be homophonous with half (which despite the spelling has no L sound). And, yes, to be the same word has "have" in other usages. Just that in some uses it gets reduced/devoiced to "haf", and in some it doesn't.

  25. Philip Anderson said,

    May 24, 2018 @ 7:34 am

    I only have one pronunciation for ‘have’ (British English), and it is natural to interpret ‘to have to’ as ‘to have an obligation to’.

    Do many people rhyme star and square, as implied by giving them both syllabic ‘r’?

  26. Mike said,

    May 24, 2018 @ 8:40 am

    My 'have to' meaning obligation definitely has a fortis /f/ instead of a devoiced lenis /v/ (American English). It's possible to write a sentence like "There are many things I have to do today." that is written the same but that has two different meanings depending on how 'have' is pronounced.

    I don't know any accent that rhymes star and square so I'm guessing it's just a preschooler not understanding vowels very well, or that can't pronounce R properly yet (is it common for preschoolers to be able to pronounce R? Usually it's more like W until they can control their tongue (and pharynx) better around 5 or 6 years old).

    My R is not retroflex but it seems before the vowel even begins my tongue anticipates the rhoticized vowel and is already partially retracted so square is pronounced something like [sk̙w̙ɛ˞] which might confuse a preschooler since it wouldn't sound like regular oral vowels.

  27. Bloix said,

    May 25, 2018 @ 12:39 am

    Square to rhyme with star is something I have heard in Tennessee. It sounds so much like a stage accent that it's startling. "That purdy little girl stood raht thar on that top star and looked me squar in the ah." Like that.
    David Marjanović – the British English pronunciation of squirrel is one of strangest differences between American and British English to this American's ears. I wonder if my skwerl sounds as odd to them as their skweerel sounds to me.

  28. David Marjanović said,

    May 25, 2018 @ 6:15 am

    More phonological comments, including on the "rhotic vowel" issue, followed by a link to yet more comments and spikes spelled sbighx.

    In my book, distinctive "vowels" are really only a surface feature in all languages anyway, but we probably shouldn't get into that here…

    Ooh, you've been studying Mandarin for too long. ;-)

    I wonder if my skwerl sounds as odd to them as their skweerel sounds to me.

    I'm sure it does.

    (Though they have KIT, not FLEECE, in squirrel.)

  29. Amy W said,

    May 25, 2018 @ 6:50 am

    Regarding the pronunciation of obligatory "have," I'm pretty sure I use the "haff" pronunciation even in contexts where it isn't immediately followed by "to." For example, I would say, "I don't appreciate haffing to clean up after you." I'm sure that not everyone does this, but I doubt I'm the only one who does.

  30. Bloix said,

    May 25, 2018 @ 9:14 am

    "Though they have KIT, not FLEECE, in squirrel"
    Yes, they do. that's a problem for an amateur in trying to spell phonetically. If I'd written "skwirrel," an American reader (like me) would voice the "ir" as schwa-r. We Americans turn our short vowels into mush and their precise pronunciation in England sounds affected to us – while I suppose we sound sloppy to them.

  31. Bloix said,

    May 25, 2018 @ 9:15 am

    "I don't appreciate haffing to clean up after you."
    This sounds like a Cherman accent to me.

  32. Amy W said,

    May 25, 2018 @ 10:03 am

    Bloix,
    35-year-old from the Missouri Ozarks. I also devoice the S in newspaper, for what it's worth.

  33. Tom davidson said,

    May 25, 2018 @ 10:30 am

    I hope someone will write about the increasing use of “less” modifying countable nouns, and the declining use of “fewer” . Is it to save the cost of ink?

  34. Chris Button said,

    May 25, 2018 @ 11:09 am

    @ David Marjanović

    Ooh, you've been studying Mandarin for too long. ;-)

    Not just Mandarin, but basically any language on which I have ever conducted any deep level phonological, and by extension comparative historical, analysis. Now, what I don't understand is why the linguistic community generally remains so unaware (unaccepting?) of such a reality.

    @ Bloix

    I wonder if my skwerl sounds as odd to them as their skweerel sounds to me.

    It's funny how that word really jumps out. It seems to me that it can range from /ˈskwɪɹ.əl ~ ˈskwɪɹ.l̩/ to /ˈskwəɹ.əl ~ ˈskwəɹ.l̩/ to /ˈskwɹ̩.l̩ ~ skwɹ̩l/

  35. Trogluddite said,

    May 25, 2018 @ 11:16 am

    @Bloix
    When the US cartoon series 'Secret Squirrel' was first shown here in the UK, "skwerl" became a running joke for me and my Mum; decades later, it can still raise a giggle.

    We both have a penchant for silly voices and nonsense poetry, but there was definitely something about "skwerl" in particular that made it really stand out to us as slightly comedic rather than just unusual. I think the similarity to the word 'squirl' has some part to play in it, though I'm sure there is more to it than that. I find the US pronunciation of 'aluminium' has a similar effect; the last few syllables remind me of the "om nom" sounds of someone enjoying a really tasty meal!

  36. Victor Mair said,

    May 25, 2018 @ 11:28 am

    On words for "squirrel" in Mandarin, Singlish, German, and Bavarian, see:

    "Pinyin for Singlish"

    http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24420

    As noted there, my dear, old friend Yin Binyong used to pronounce the English word thus: "eeskweerill".

  37. Jerry Friedman said,

    May 25, 2018 @ 12:51 pm

    Trogluddite: Thanks for "squirl", a new word for me.

  38. Frank Y. Gladney said,

    May 26, 2018 @ 3:28 am

    Re /hæf/ vs. /hæv/: I've graded all the papers I [hæf] to grade. Cf: I had to grade them. vs. I've graded all the papers [hæv] to grade. Cf. I have papers to grade.

  39. Pflaumbaum said,

    May 26, 2018 @ 5:20 am

    @ Tom davidson:

    "Less" has been used with count nouns in English since at least the time of Alfred the Great:

    http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog/archives/003775.html

    As to whether its use is increasing, my own impression is that the use of "fewer" is increasing, probably due to prescriptive pressure. But both of us could be falling prey to the Frequency illusion:

    http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002386.html

  40. David Marjanović said,

    May 26, 2018 @ 8:50 am

    Not just Mandarin, but basically any language on which I have ever conducted any deep level phonological, and by extension comparative historical, analysis. Now, what I don't understand is why the linguistic community generally remains so unaware (unaccepting?) of such a reality.

    Can you recommend a reference? Even for Mandarin I have no clue how to analyse it as having fewer than two contrastive vowels, and hadn't encountered the claim that it can be analysed that way.

  41. David Marjanović said,

    May 26, 2018 @ 8:51 am

    …heh… I just noticed I used fewer. It comes naturally to me because I'm not a native speaker and that's what I was taught in school. My native German lacks that distinction altogether.

  42. mg said,

    May 26, 2018 @ 4:06 pm

    My great-grandmother grew up speaking Yiddish and never learned English spelling after she came to this country. My mom says that when Great-Grandma sent her letters, the only way to understand them was to have someone else read them to her phonetically.

  43. Chris Button said,

    May 26, 2018 @ 8:57 pm

    @ David Marjanović

    Can you recommend a reference? Even for Mandarin I have no clue how to analyse it as having fewer than two contrastive vowels, and hadn't encountered the claim that it can be analysed that way.

    Pulleyblank (1984:57) treats schwa as epenthetic and lets /a/ pattern as a glide like /i/ and /u/ in Mandarin. It's not so different in that sense from Kuipers' feature of openness to compare with palatility and labiality in his 1960 book on Kabardian. However, while of theoretical interest, it doesn't help much in terms of Old Chinese where /a/ patterns as /ə/ rather than as the glides /j/ and /w/. In that sense it is closer to Lehmann's (1952:112) model for Proto-Indo-European where the single vowel /e/ (i.e. /ə/) is treated as the default feature of syllabicity with its conditioned variant /o/ (i.e. /a/).

  44. David Marjanović said,

    May 27, 2018 @ 4:49 am

    I know about the "openness" analysis of Kabardian, but agree with apparently everyone else that that's just a thought experiment, with no connection to phonetic facts or what can possibly be going on in speakers' minds. (And why Kabardian? Why don't people choose Abaza for this, which really has just two vowel phonemes under a much more traditional analysis?) Calling /a/ a glide instead of a vowel likewise seems to be just an exercise in labeling; it keeps the total number of phonemes exactly the same.

    Speaking of Kabardian, though, it's featured in this paper (Kiparsky 2013) which argues for two underlying levels in phonology rather than just one, roughly morphophonemic vs. phonemic. I recommend pretty much the whole paper.

    I read Lehmann's paper long ago. From what I remember, he wasn't saying at all that PIE *o was conditioned. Rather, he engaged in internal reconstruction, tried to figure out the origin of ablaut* and arrived at a hypothetical stage where all vowels were epenthetic. I see no reason to think such a stage ever existed.

    * Without ever stopping to wonder whether the separate prehistory of PIE was even the right place to look for it. Ablaut seems to be an areal feature, and could be cognate among IE and some of the families in that area.

  45. Chris Button said,

    May 27, 2018 @ 7:19 am

    @ David Marjanović

    I'm not convinced by the "openness" (Kabardian) or "/a/ glide" (Mandarin) arguments either. They are theoretical notions based on synchronic statements which, as I mentioned above, do not chime with the historical evidence for "vertical vowel systems" (whether they can really be called "vowel systems" or not) clearly attested in language families like PST or PIE.

    As for Abaza and Lehman's one-vowel PIE, I would recommend W. Sidney Allen's "On One-Vowel Systems" (Lingua 13, p.111-124, 1965).

  46. Janet G. said,

    May 27, 2018 @ 8:20 pm

    Sal's spelling is very much like the way a typical student would spell in the early weeks of first grade. The tr blend in triangle, along with the dr blend, are usually the most difficult consonant blends for early spellers to learn, and they almost always use ch and j, respectively, for those blends if they don't know the correct spelling. This baffles their teachers, but notice where your tongue is when you say them, and you'll get why.

    While it's interesting to speculate about Sal's pronunciation, it isn't necessarily true that he was pronouncing them wrong or in a dialect. Lots of kids who are saying the words correctly still spell them wrong. Early spelling is a sort of semi-educated guesswork, which is why many teachers call it "estimated spelling."

    All of this makes me think that Sal was not in preschool when he made his sign about shapes, but actually in first grade. Few preschoolers and even kindergartners have that ch digraph on their radar.

  47. BZ said,

    May 29, 2018 @ 11:09 am

    Regarding "have to". I can't think of any situation when this sequence of words (followed by a verb) does not indicate an obligation to me no matter how it's pronounced. Both examples offered that allegedly differ based on pronunciation are unambiguously obligatory to me. Something like "Look at this sheet of paper. I attached all the stickers I have to it." is theoretically a non-obligatory "have to", but will cause a double take from me if I read it. But I'm pretty sure I'd pronounce both "have to"s the same way (except maybe accenting "have" more in my example.

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