We don’t need spelling rules, we need a new alphabet. See the Shavian alphabet. It’d be like the English equivalent of Hangul.
A quick reminder: our alphabet isn’t English, it’s Latin. The letters were only ever meant to represent sounds in Latin and were retrofitted onto the English language (which is why it sucks so much).
Even if we were to adopt something like the Shavian alphabet, it would only work for a few generations at most until sound change and dialect divergence built up enough to once again strongly divorce spelling from pronunciation. Not to mention the fact that it’s impossible to come up with a phonetic* alphabet that accounts in a useful way for dialect differences, even just in American English.
This has already happened with hangul - spellings that were once phonetic (though, again, in only certain dialects) have now become conventional due to sound change.
So, you’d end up having to either completely replace the alphabet again every hundred or so years, or you’d be right back where we currently are. Plus, interventions into the spelling system will a) make older publications harder to read without mass-translating them all into the new systems every few decades and b) will create reading difficulties for the generations that end up having to switch with each new update.
Not to mention spelling things the way we currently do (imperfectly) preserves etymological information about the words in question.
Not to say our current system is perfect, but rather that any such system is arbitrary, and will eventually become conventionalized either way without active, persistent intervention.
*Used here in the lay sense, not the linguistic sense. I’ve added this later since the conversation below turned to the difference between phonetics and phonology, and my use of “phonetic” in this comment could be seen as confusing in that context.
Shavian is built different. It’s not phonetic, it’s phonemic. Drifts in pronunciation occur along phonemic “fault lines” meaning that the spellings will be evergreen. Additionally it means it accounts for differences in regional pronunciation without spelling needing to be modified.
That assumes that phonemic splits and mergers never happen, or that different dialects don’t undergo contradictory sound changes. It’s already the case that different dialects have different numbers of phonemes (see the Mary/merry/marry distinctions, for example).
It’s not possible to design an “evergreen” writing system for any natural human language. Either you have to give up the benefits of standardization synchronically in order for different dialects to be equally expressible, or you have to give them up diachronically to account for language change, or both.
Ah, I see. When I learned about this the source made it seem like the lines between phonemes were unchanging but if that’s not the case then it’s not as solid as I thought. That being said it’s still more stable than a phonetic alphabet would be, correct?
Yes, it would be significantly more stable than a phonetic system. Depending on how you measured it, phonetic systems would likely last around a generation at most, but phonemic systems might last for upwards of a century before they become conventionalized enough to no longer be a near-1-1 match for the ‘Standard’ dialect (again, depending on how you measured it).
It’s worth noting that English’s current orthography is already mostly phonemic though (that is, it’s a combination of multiple different systems which are themselves mostly phonemic), and that the vast majority of the world’s alphabetic or syllabic writing systems are phonemic, not phonetic.
This is straightforwardly demonstrable in English by the use of, for example, the letter “t” for a wide variety of different consonant sounds in the same dialects: unaspirated and aspirated [t] (stop vs. top), released vs. unreleased [t] (stop vs. bit), glottal stop (batman), flap (butter), glottalized [t] (caught), etc.
Phonetic writing systems are very rare, because native speakers of a language are practically always unaware of their language’s sub-phonemic distinctions. Virtually no American English speakers, for example, are aware that they pronounce the “t” in top and stop differently.
So, replacing current English orthography wouldn’t even be “switching to a phonemic system”. English already uses a phonemic writing system - you’d just be switching to a different phonemic writing system (though, admittedly, one that has fewer subregularities/“inconsistencies” (for now)).
Since English spelling isn’t phonetic, what you’re saying isn’t even possible, so no. Just to be clear, the word phonetic is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and it very specifically means the spelling produces perfectly unambiguous pronunciation which, as far as I know, has never been the case for English with the Latin alphabet. And if you think about it, that makes sense. You are using symbols from a completely different language to describe the sounds - there is zero guarantee there are enough symbols to describe all of the sounds unambiguously. You might be able to get there in combination (see “ch”, one of our most stable letter combinations), but as soon as you do that, readers can no longer intuit what the sound should be. For example, for “ch” the sound for “c” (which is itself already ambiguous) plus the sound for “h” does not “make” the “ch” sound. Instead you’d get either “kuh” like in cousin or “sh” as in shush.
We don’t need spelling rules, we need a new alphabet. See the Shavian alphabet. It’d be like the English equivalent of Hangul.
A quick reminder: our alphabet isn’t English, it’s Latin. The letters were only ever meant to represent sounds in Latin and were retrofitted onto the English language (which is why it sucks so much).
Even if we were to adopt something like the Shavian alphabet, it would only work for a few generations at most until sound change and dialect divergence built up enough to once again strongly divorce spelling from pronunciation. Not to mention the fact that it’s impossible to come up with a phonetic* alphabet that accounts in a useful way for dialect differences, even just in American English.
This has already happened with hangul - spellings that were once phonetic (though, again, in only certain dialects) have now become conventional due to sound change.
So, you’d end up having to either completely replace the alphabet again every hundred or so years, or you’d be right back where we currently are. Plus, interventions into the spelling system will a) make older publications harder to read without mass-translating them all into the new systems every few decades and b) will create reading difficulties for the generations that end up having to switch with each new update.
Not to mention spelling things the way we currently do (imperfectly) preserves etymological information about the words in question.
Not to say our current system is perfect, but rather that any such system is arbitrary, and will eventually become conventionalized either way without active, persistent intervention.
*Used here in the lay sense, not the linguistic sense. I’ve added this later since the conversation below turned to the difference between phonetics and phonology, and my use of “phonetic” in this comment could be seen as confusing in that context.
Shavian is built different. It’s not phonetic, it’s phonemic. Drifts in pronunciation occur along phonemic “fault lines” meaning that the spellings will be evergreen. Additionally it means it accounts for differences in regional pronunciation without spelling needing to be modified.
That assumes that phonemic splits and mergers never happen, or that different dialects don’t undergo contradictory sound changes. It’s already the case that different dialects have different numbers of phonemes (see the Mary/merry/marry distinctions, for example).
It’s not possible to design an “evergreen” writing system for any natural human language. Either you have to give up the benefits of standardization synchronically in order for different dialects to be equally expressible, or you have to give them up diachronically to account for language change, or both.
Ah, I see. When I learned about this the source made it seem like the lines between phonemes were unchanging but if that’s not the case then it’s not as solid as I thought. That being said it’s still more stable than a phonetic alphabet would be, correct?
Yes, it would be significantly more stable than a phonetic system. Depending on how you measured it, phonetic systems would likely last around a generation at most, but phonemic systems might last for upwards of a century before they become conventionalized enough to no longer be a near-1-1 match for the ‘Standard’ dialect (again, depending on how you measured it).
It’s worth noting that English’s current orthography is already mostly phonemic though (that is, it’s a combination of multiple different systems which are themselves mostly phonemic), and that the vast majority of the world’s alphabetic or syllabic writing systems are phonemic, not phonetic.
This is straightforwardly demonstrable in English by the use of, for example, the letter “t” for a wide variety of different consonant sounds in the same dialects: unaspirated and aspirated [t] (stop vs. top), released vs. unreleased [t] (stop vs. bit), glottal stop (batman), flap (butter), glottalized [t] (caught), etc.
Phonetic writing systems are very rare, because native speakers of a language are practically always unaware of their language’s sub-phonemic distinctions. Virtually no American English speakers, for example, are aware that they pronounce the “t” in top and stop differently.
So, replacing current English orthography wouldn’t even be “switching to a phonemic system”. English already uses a phonemic writing system - you’d just be switching to a different phonemic writing system (though, admittedly, one that has fewer subregularities/“inconsistencies” (for now)).
Other Germanic languages use the Latin alphabet and have much more consistent spelling.
if we’re changing alphabet sets why not just use IPA?
Because IPA is phonetic, meaning a US Midwesterner and Londoner would spell the same word differently.
isn’t the point of this new alphabet to standardize pronunciations tho
No, it’s to standardize spellings, because spelling in English is dogshit.
i’m confused. aren’t the standardized spellings based phonetically off of a specific dialect? in which case, it does both?
Since English spelling isn’t phonetic, what you’re saying isn’t even possible, so no. Just to be clear, the word phonetic is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and it very specifically means the spelling produces perfectly unambiguous pronunciation which, as far as I know, has never been the case for English with the Latin alphabet. And if you think about it, that makes sense. You are using symbols from a completely different language to describe the sounds - there is zero guarantee there are enough symbols to describe all of the sounds unambiguously. You might be able to get there in combination (see “ch”, one of our most stable letter combinations), but as soon as you do that, readers can no longer intuit what the sound should be. For example, for “ch” the sound for “c” (which is itself already ambiguous) plus the sound for “h” does not “make” the “ch” sound. Instead you’d get either “kuh” like in cousin or “sh” as in shush.