English, Furigana, and the Problems of Spelling Reform
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- Опубліковано 4 тра 2024
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Let's ignore the fact that I used narrow transcription for schwa (should have been broad, I know, but I'm not redoing this video AGAIN).
Also I bet you really wish I had that pop filter now after listening to that, right? So Patreon: www.patreon.com/user?u=73482298 innit
A sequel to the videos:
• When Spelling Reforms ...
• That Time Everyone in ...
and • The Worst Spelling Ref...
Videos about Japanese I referenced:
• JAPANESE WRITING SYSTEM
• The Hardest Writing Sy...
• The Japanese Writing S...
• Understanding the Japa...
0:00 Intro
2:18 Japanese
3:56 The Reform
Written and Created by Me
Art by kvd102
Music by Me
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Translations:
Leeuwe van den Heuvel - Dutch
Merc - Japanese
#linguistics #spelling #japanese
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Let's ignore the misuse of narrow transcription for schwa (should have been broad) :(
There are a few problems:
a) Using the grave accent for stress. The grave accent is already used to indicate non-silent letters where they should be silent from pronunciation rules (e.g. learned vs learnèd), so maybe choose a different diacritic.
b) Using the breve to indicate schwa. This may allow you to infer pronunciation from spelling, but not spelling from pronunciation as you have no idea of what letter goes under the breve. I suggest just using e breve for schwa in all cases.
c) Using a dot over g's has the same problem as b). When you hear a 'j' sound, you don't know whether to spell it as 'j' or '[inset g with dot on the top]'. I suggest that just always using j's is better.
@@Anonymous-df8it a) agree, although that sure is a niche part in English spelling. Still, fair point there. As a Spanish, and knowing that many English-speaking people have had decent contact with Spanish, I would suggest the acute for it (yes, I know it is used in some loanwords, mainly from French, but those are SO minimal, I think they can be dealt with as irregular)
both b and c) the problem of mutual intelligibility, PLUS the suddenly ABUNDANT new wave of homographs that that would bring to the English language (memory becoming memery 💀🗿)
@@enarmonika5557 " I would suggest the acute for it (yes, I know it is used in some loanwords, mainly from French, but those are SO minimal, I think they can be dealt with as irregular)" Or maybe we can remove the acute from the loanwords instead, making English spelling more consistent.
"both b and c) the problem of mutual intelligibility, PLUS the suddenly ABUNDANT new wave of homographs that that would bring to the English language (memory becoming memery 💀🗿)" What problem of mutual intelligibility would arise? The new wave of homographs would correspond to homophones, so if you can understand speech, you can understand reformed writing.
Some more suggestions:
If all but one vowel is schwa, then the non-schwa vowel is assumed to be stressed unless otherwise specified.
If there are multiple non-schwa vowels and neither are a long vowel, then the first syllable is assumed to be stressed unless otherwise specified.
The diaresis is used to split a digraph/trigraph into two syllables. This is already done in English, albeit only with vowels. So now, things like [ŋg] will go from 'ng' to 'nġ', whereas previously, this rule wouldn't apply.
Voicing of voiceless sounds will be replaced with their voiced counterpart (so as becomes az)
All silent letters are removed unless strictly necessary (so knife becomes nife, but phlegm stays the same because of the pronunciation of phlegmatic)
Every instance of 'gh' will be removed or replaced with 'f' as, let's be honest, when was the last time you pronounced the 'gh' in daughter?
Sample: This iz ĕ sample text ov thĕ speling rĕform. Az you can së, it doezn't chänj wordz signífikĕntly, whïlst mäking Enġlish speling way more phĕnétic! Ï have mĕny, mĕny other sĕjéstions, but thӧz should bë sävd for after thĕ first round ov rĕformz. It would bë ësy tӧ implĕment az it just looks lïk ĕ bunch ov speling mĕsdäks with dïĕcrítics sbrinkld evrywhere.
Pollard's synthetic reading system did this a century ago....
I like this idea; I’ve heard a lot of people say that “we should just add diacritics to English because loads of other languages do it!”
Meanwhile in my other language, Spanish, lots of people drop their diacritics *constantly* because they’re really irritating to type, and that’s in a language with only two.
Having them for learners seems like a good middle ground.
damn you made my 7-minute entire argument for me in a three-sentence comment lol
Yeah, put them in learners textbooks, dictionaries (maybe, there are already IPA pronunciation guides, idk), and maybe like beginner books.
Only people with low education drop the tildes in Spanish, it is generally seen as fairly boorish to do so, especially since our system is very logical and not really difficult.
T. Native Spanish speaker.
Isn't that what Arabic does? We only use diacritics in places where we don't want you to mess up; so learning materials, the Qur'an (a religious book), rare words, and differenciating homographs (rébel vs rebél),
Similar in Polish, though there are way more diacritics, and a lot of words only differ by a few funny marks above the letters. They're still dropped in informal messaging, and it's surprisingly easy to read the words based on context if you're familiar enough with the language.
I think having optional diacritics is a neat idea.
Russian does this also. When people are learning to write, they accentuate the stressed syllables of many words, but slowly drop that accent as they progress.
That could actually work. In Russian, the pronunciation can change according to where the stress is, like "фо́то" /ˈfotə/ and "фотогра́фия" /fətɐˈɡrafʲɪjə/. English kind of does the same thing with "photo" /ˈfəʊ.tə/ and "photography" /fəˈtɒɡɹəfi/. But you would need to learn how to pronounce vowels in stressed and unstressed positions.
You say, when people are learning to write Russian, they accentuate the stressed syllable. Do you mean foreigners learning Russian, or do you mean Russian children learning to write?
@@bigscarysteve children.
Came here to say this. Russian dictionaries list words with their stress patterns, I guess because words are already written phonetically. There are probably English dictionaries that do the same. But! Even stress is not consistent in English. It often differs between British and American pronunciations of French words, like in the word décor.
@@EdwinWalkerProfile in russian words aren't written phonetically. Russian has morphological rules to write words. It's only соincidental that morphological spelling might occur the same as phonetic. But if you want phonetically written words take a look at Belarussian, same word as in Russian might be written drastically different over there.
The use of the breve ăbove evĕry letter that represents schwa is actuălly an impressive ideă. I really like it buuut there is a diălect variatiŏn in distrĭbutiŏn of schwas as well (weak vowĕl merger between unstressed /ɪ/ and /ə/)
Upd: I dón't prŏnounce secŏnd e in the wurd 'every' niether but if I'm not mistáken it was mentiŏnd in the vidéo that sílent letters ålsó might be written with breve
5:27 point three
You see, I'm a fan of spelling reforms too
That's exactly what we do in Romanian. ă means a schwa. For example apă("water") is [ˈä.pə]
Then we could use ă for /ə/ and î for /ɪ/
@@LorenzoF06 You could do that, but /i/ for _i_ generally occurs in stressed syllables with /ɪ/ occurring elsewhere. It might be a bit redundant.
Finally we can easily read the difference between rebĕl and rĕbel.
@@MenwithHill We re꙼bel a꙼gainst the rebe꙼l.
Spelling reforms work best when applied slowly, the first thing we should do is standardize the spelling of "through" and "though" as "thru" and "tho"
Wud we really be able to see that thru, tho?
as a lazy speller, I already do that in casual writing
Could we also do that with every ough word?
@@farmervillager8651 no because rough, hiccough, Slough
I prefer the ambiguous orthography because it carries the history of the pronunciation of the words, which I see as important as spelling reform itself
this is interesting! it reminds me a lot of how the nekudot/vowels in hebrew are typically used as training wheels when you’re first learning and then disappear altogether later on
I had not thought about that lol, but that is very true :)
I was thinking the same thing
Literally was thinking the same. I think it's a better analogy than the furigana
גם חשבתי כך
I = Ai; you = yu; he = hi; she = shi; it = it; we = wi; they = dhei; this = dhis; that = dhat (stressed pronunciation), dhet (unstressed pronunciation); here = hir; there = dhér; where = whér, who = hu; what = whot, whoet; how = hau; not = not; all = ool; many = meni; some = soem (stressed pronunciation), sem (unstressed pronunciation); few = fyu; other = oedher; one = woen; two = tu; three = thri; four = foor, four (depending on pronunciation); five = faiv; six = siks; seven = seven; eight = eit; nine = nain; ten = tén; long = long, loong (depending on pronunciation); heavy = hevi; head = héd; hammerhead shark= hamerhèd shark; short = short; narrow = naro; woman = wumen; women = wimin; men = mén; need = niid; person = poersen; husband = hoezbend; diseases = disíiziz, disíizez (depending on pronunciation); throughout = thruáut; father = faadher; daughter = dooter, dootter (depending on pronunciation); thought = thoot; though = dho; low = lo; now = nau; know = no; knight = nait; doubt = daut; presentation = prezentéishen, priizentéishen (depending on pronunciation); island = ailend; business = biznis, biznes (depending on pronunciation); bury = beri; story = stori, stouri (depending on pronunciation); bird = boerd; world = woerld; fur = foer; does = doez; fruit =fruut; put = put; little = litel, littel (depending on pronunciation); flower = flauer; etc.
When you broached the example of Japanese, my hackles were raised (I'm born and raised Japanese) anticipating for usual nonsense pet theories and cringeworthy font choices but instead of all that, I believe that analogy actually makes some sense! I guess some of the UK place names would benefit greatly from this reform should it be implemented, although I've heard that those impossible-to-pronounce-at-first-glance place names sometimes function as a shibboleth to reinforce us vs them difference lol
This is a tangent but I remember reading some Japanese linguist argue something along the lines of like kanjis in Japanese have much in common with the homophones in English only distinguished by spelling. And as a native Japanese speaker that sounds about right; words themselves are what really matter and learners focusing neurotically on individual kanjis and its many potential readings is kinda ridiculous because that feels like you're learning it upside down, just like a hypothetical non-native English speaker trying to memorise all the pronunciations 'gh' can have in English apart from context and then proceeding to learn actual words only after that pointless rote memorisation.
fantastic comment
also glad I didn't disappoint with the Japanese stuff, it's not a language I know much about but I think furigana is a really cool idea lol
@@kklein Tell you what, furigana can do some really neat tricks more than being an aid for kids! One of them would be sarcasm. Let's say you've got a word or a line saying one thing on surface but the opposite is its true meaning. Furigana can solve that so gracefully, and lots more.
@@nomadicmonkey3186 sorta like improved scare quotes! ( Oh that's crazy! Vs. oh that's "crazy")
Yeah right but what's so awesome about contextual furigana is that unlike in scare quotes where it almost always means sarcasm, it can literally denote anything from mockery to high praises because you basically add a tag to a word or a sentence by furigana.
Omg you’re the only one who’s noticing the questionable font choices thrown around UA-cam!
Kanji is not trivial to learn. But, after studying for a year for fun, I can confidently say that Kanji is useful, if not necesary for Japanese writing. And yes, there's lots of them but you start with the most common ones. And multiple readings can seem tricky, but it's really not because you generally learn multiple words that use the same Kanji concurrently. So
the 人 character is pronounced differently in the words 人間 and 外人; but in both words the character 人 carries the meaning of "person" so you know both words have to do with people, even if you forget the reading of the character (which you won't, because 人 is one of the first ones you learn). And if you see a new word with this character, you can guess that it is another person type word, much like if you know the different roots/prefixes/suffixes of different English words
@@AllyFin not trivial = not easy
Even for beginners like me, text with kanji + furigana is so much more easy to read than pure hiragana alone.
Or they can use one of the existing syllabaries to write, just add SPACE between words. WOW… problem solved. No need for Kanji. As cool as they look, logograms are an outdated idea.
@@RadoDaniWhatever there is to say about the efficiency or usefulness of Chinese characters, technology without a doubt has brought them more into the modern century than left them behind. There's a major reason why Japan, China, and Taiwan are able to have literacy rates above 90%, and I'd probably thank the internet for it.
@@RadoDani The thing is...
It's only troublesome for learners.
Once you just use to how it works, spaces aren't that necessary.
That and, do you know how hard it is to switch to a new writing system?
5:05 YES! This is exactly like Greek, people learning Greek find it weird that words always have to take a stress marking unless they're monosyllabic. Then you point this example out, they're shocked!
Laughs in polytonic orthography.
But some English words have secondary stress
Speaking as a Bilingual Anglophone who learned French, this would actually be a lot easier to implement in places like my home country of Canada. It'd make Canadian English more intuitive to Francophones and French (both Metropol and Quebecois) more intuitive to Anglophones like me. I mean we already need to learn the accents to learn French.
one day I'll be able to read and comprehend Quebecquois. I swear.
English is my second language and honestly once you know a certain amount of words you get a feel for how English spelling works.
You probably won't be able to write every word just by hearing it but you will rarely come across a written word that you can't pronounce.
The worst word I've ever come across is "victual" which is actually pronounced "vittle" but that's at least kind of similar to the actual letters.
Kanji pronunciations on the other hand cannot be guessed at all and similar characters can produce completely different sounds.
Yeah, almost no one calls food "victuals" in modern Britain. I have only encountered the word in the works of Charles Dickens, for example. It's such an old word that at that time spelling was barely standardised in Britain. Hence you get people spelling things differently to match the way they say them in their local dialect.
As another non-native speaker, I totally agree! Yes, English does have a little bit of quirky spelling, but I truly don't think it's that big of a deal once you get a feel for it.
And complicated as they surely are, rules for pronunciation clearly exist: if you make up a new, vaguely English-looking word, most people will agree on how you'd pronounce it (or occasionally, there might be something like two obvious ways to read it, sure, but either way they will follow some clear logic). Case in point: you wrote "vittle" to communicate how "victual" is supposed to be pronounced and I'm sure 95% of people will agree on the "correct" pronunciation of both of those!
I honestly don't think English spelling is anywhere near bad enough to invest a huge amount of effort that a major spelling reform would take. The most I'd see as potentially nice to have are either some specialized, niche uses (like the ideas proposed in this video that would help new learners) or minor things like removing some of the "true" exceptions, i.e., words that pretty much nobody would pronounce right based on its spelling alone, like your "victual," or "draught" (as in, draught beer), or "worcestershire."
It's mostly ok, mainly the vowels that can be random (bow/bow or the phrase - they sought to cough up enough dough through the borough of Slough). Place names can be a right pain though, with towns with same spelling but different pronunciations.
@@mattcay today I realized that "water" is an exception!
Fatter = /fætəɹ/
Batter = /bætəɹ/
Saber = /seɪbəɹ/
cater = /keɪtəɹ/
water = /weɪtəɹ/?
It should really be spelt watter!
"Vittles" was a common word for food in 19th-century American English, but it has long since fallen out of common usage. (It may be preserved in some southern dialects, possibly.) I've always seen it spelled as "vittles," though. When the rare word "victuals" is encountered, I've always heard it spoken with a spelling pronunciation.
I think what makes almost all proposed english reforms bad, is the fact that there is no, ugh, uniform "paradigm"(?) in how english speakers perceive pronunciation.
Just an example: stress in russian and ukranian is a mess. The system of that was used long ago in early slavic languages was difficult, but at least consistent. But as slavic languages developed, this system stopped being productive, and new rules appeared, for example, in now polish the second-last syllable is always stressed. But in russian new system just kind of never developed. One of the main reasons - loanwords had stress patterns that made no sense in the old system, and there were a lot of them. So now stress is basically "all words are exceptions lmao". And on top of it it constantly changes, with no apparent structure underneath. And you cant just "fix" it, there is no system to begin with, and you cant just convince everyone to change how they speak. You just have to wait for a new system to emerge.
Sounds familiar? Well turns out you cant just smash together germanic\old engish idea of spelling with a french one, and expect a consistent spelling. But english does change, so, imo, best thing you can do is not to enforce new systems, but to make it easier for new paradigms to emerge. Normalizing diacritics is probably one of them.
Excellent comment. I agree that normalising "odd" spelling is a good way to encourage reform- for example, if people add accents or just start using tho/though interchangeably, that shouldn't necessarily be shamed.
why did you spell it ugh
as a Ukrainian speaker, yeah, its irregular. And every dialect usually does some words differently, so my parents have different stressed syllables for the same words.
I think that because we are in the age of the Internet, large-scale language reforms cannot happen. Simply because everything is build around how our languages are now.
"in now polish the second-last syllable is always stressed" - except when it's not :P Even in native Polish words it can fall as far back as the 4th lat syllable. Although that is, thankfully, quite regular (completely for native words), and slowly fading in all borrowed words (like "fizyka" - should be accented /'fizyka/ often is /fi'zyka/ instead).
Grave for stress is not what I would use - an acute accent is much better - it's used to indicate stress in many more languages (Spanish and Portugese spring to mind). It's also way easier to input on English keyboards and most people already somewhat understand it to mean a stressed or fully pronounced letter - like the é in Pokémon.
Now that the grave is free, I would use it instead of the breve for vowel reduction. No need for it to specifically indicate a schwa either, just a generally reduced vowel - so it doesn't matter what it's reduced to in each dialect. This is also nice because reduction and stress never intersect.
As for other ideas, hacek > overdot in all cases for consonant letters. Way more familiar, easier to input, and easier to write than an overdot. As for the distinction between /θ/ and /ð/, I would probably use lowercase th for θ and either bold/capitals for ð. This distinction is hard for ESLs to get around but native speakers handle it fairly easily, so it might not be that neccessary.
If we want to go into more detail then a macron can be used for "long" vowels (/a/ -> /ei/ for example) but this is probably not needed. Silent E is not too hard to wrap your head around.
Sample text : ínsight vs incíte
I was about to comment how grave makes more sense to me because that's what's used for stress in my native russian (where it's also mainly used in educational materials), but after quick googling turns out I remember it wrong and they use acute accent instead.🤷♂
Now the only argument I have against it is that, as someone who's learning Chinese, my first intuition is to pronounce a word with an acute accent with a rising tone. But I guess making English more consistent with Spanish and Portuguese makes more sense than following pinyin.
But are there any phonemic distinctions between /θ/ and /ð/ in English? Surely most speakers would understand in context
yeah I think you're right on the acute rather than grave accent actually, I'm just much more familiar with Italian
as for the grave for reduced vowels, this makes more sense in every way but I like the way breve looks 😤 and you will never sway me on this one - I did mean reduced vowel rather than schwa in the video though, I forgot to put it in the "bonus notes" I put on screen
The é in Pokémon is stressed but so are all the syllables in Pokémon, no?
Also, note that British speakers put the stress on "Po", meaning they stared straight at that é and decided not to put the stress there. Doesn't make é look like a natural candidate for stress...
@@GT-tj1qg i hear a lot of people (american and British) pronounce it /poʊkəmɔn/ (ɔ →ɑ if you have cot caught merger)
It's almost like they make a difference between "poke"+mon and po+ke+mon
This feels similar to how latin can be written with accents to clarify pronunciation, especially for new learners! Latin only uses an overbar* like in "ē" iirc, but I don't see why the same system couldn't work for english as long as we try to keep the number of new accents to a minimum
* is it called an overbar for letters? I'm used to calling it that in a maths context but I'm not sure it has the same name here.
They're called "macrons" or "long marks". They show a vowel is long. I like this comparison too!
Latin without the macrons is an ambiguous mess. It’s not that it can be written like that to facilitate learning. It’s more that it should always be written like that, but medieval people stopped marking long vowels, and the Roman church just went with that system that simplifies writing but destroys pronunciation.
The Romans themselves used an upwards-slanted “apex” mark instead of the perfectly horizontal macron, though (think Á, É, Ó, Ú). Except for the letter i, which they just made taller.
@@mathy4605 Latin without macrons is never ambiguous. Apart from sentences that were precisely made to demonstrate that supposed ambiguity, there is no confusion possible in context. Furthermore the Romans didn't consistently mark long vowels and the practise of writing widely varied depending on the surface writing was done on, that is why you might see some monumental inscriptions with apices (not all of them) and rarely a papyrus with them.
The Medievals are a continuation of writing as it was practised in the Roman empire, and did not necessarily simplify writing at all. Just look at a manuscript and see the amount of ligatures and diacritics some copyist used.
Latin written without macrons is not wrong or worse than Latin with macrons. Many conventions exist and discarding one on the principle of a fabled ambiguity is unfair.
@@pkomelette4305 In addition to the admittedly rare sentences in which the meaning is ambiguous, pronunciation will be ambiguous (unless you have heard that word before), which is the same problem that English faces. Figuring out where the stress lies and how long each syllable is requires either marking the vowel length, or knowing the word previously, which is not always practical.
And yes, I'm aware that Latin's lack of a character for U vs V and J vs I is also a source of ambiguous pronunciation, but that's for more manageable than missing length markers.
And I disagree that Latin in the Medieval period was a continuation of Latin as it was written in the Ancient period. While it is true that many manuscripts lacked apices in the Ancient period, they were completely gone from inscriptions in monuments by the Medieval era as far as I know. Of course this was probably a gradual change, but it was nonetheless a change that showed their waning ties to the language (which is even more obvious when you look at Church Latin, which came about by the time of the first Frankish empire).
@@gregoryford2532 It actually has more speakers than you think, there aren't any native speakers, but fascinating nonetheless
since im learning japanese, i thought i could add my 2 cents to the kanji debate. while they are really difficult to learn, once you get used to them, it makes a lot of sense (to me at least). kanji is full of meaning basically. the words "kaki" 描きdrawing and "kaki" 書きwriting are just a small example. i think a fluent jp speaker will instantly know what you mean when you use the kanji, and it clarifies meaning. and then theres the fruit, kaki. which is a persimmon. theres more kaki words too . when hearing, you have to rely on the context sure, but i think when reading it kind of works. i think kanji are especially cool in their use in names, because you can really customize a name for a child and put a lot of meaning into a small amount of characters. theres a lot of words where i dont even really "read" them anymore, i see the kanji and recognize what it is right away. i think the language would lose a lot of detail, nuance and meaning without kanji. but who knows if people in the future disagree with me, or if japan wants to make it easier for its own kids to learn the language. even japanese people struggle with kanji in some ways. sorry long comment !
long comments is what we do here lol, thanks for weighing in on this debate.
this is one of the main arguments I've heard for keeping kanji and it seems to make a lot of sense to me, but again, I might be missing something Japanese is not a language I know very well
as a fellow japanese learner i was going to type out a comment but it seems you've already hit all my points perfectly! kanji are no doubt hard to learn but i think there is a lot of both beauty and practicality in their utilization. it's also just really satisfying to see how much you progress over time and how so many kanji just become subconcious.
Thank you for your concern but ordinary Japanese people don't struggle with kanji as much as some learners would like to make you believe lol
Plus it'd be greatly appreciated if you kindly stop using 'Japan' for a subject of a sentence like you did that Western journalists tend to use without giving much thought, implying the legendary uniformity and lack of internal diversity in Japan which is an outright lie thank you very much.
Sorry for kinda kneejerky reaction, actually much of your comment is on point Check out my comment down there, that may be relevant to you so take a look if you please. Have fun (and tons of challenges) learning Japanese! It's definitely rewarding, since IMO the bestest of best of fiction written (and nonfiction to boot) in Japanese don't get translated in English whereas like the lowest common denominator stuff get the lion's share of JP-EN translation scene today.
Ok to start I would like to tell the story of the first time I asked myself "Why isn't there Kanji?!" basically I read "あした" and didn't realize until I read the translation of the song that it was supposed to be "明日" about the hearing part no you don't have to JUST rely on context you can rely on pitch accent for example if I knew 明日 had an 尾高 accent it probably would've helped me which is probably a bad sign because I noticed the pitch accent which means I'm gonna get overly confident overcorrect and pronounce "橋が" as "ʰᵃSHI ᵍᵃ"... anyway the part about Kanji in names 小鳥遊 and 月見里 to start 小鳥遊 has nothing to do with "たかなし" but the logic is a little bird plays when it feels safe thus no predators thus no hawks thus たか (Hawk) なし (Without) same with with 月見里 (やまなし) A village sees the moon when there are no mountains thus やま (Mountain) なし (Without).
@@kklein The biggest thing they left out is pitch accent Japanese has 4 pitches 頭高 (Head high) 中高 (Middle high) 尾高 (Tail high) and 平板 (Flat) basically it works like this
箸が means chopsticks and the pitch starts high drops and continues low AKA 頭高
橋が means bridge and the pitch starts low goes high then drops in the particle (in this case が) AKA 尾高
端が means edge and the pitch starts low goes a little bit higher then continues high in the particle (in this case が) AKA 平板
中高 is the easiest since a lot of English words have stress in the middle so as long as you don't make the syllable longer (Vowel length is phonemic in Japanese) and don't make it louder you should be fine but here's an example 日本 the pitch starts low in the purely palatal nasal (which no one told me is different from the palato-alveolar nasal in my native language) goes high in the "ho (Or "ppo" depending on how you read it) and falls in the uvular nasal ɲiHOɴ.
The main problem with marking schwa like that is that some words can be stressed or unstressed depending on what the speaker is emphasizing which changes their vowel.
For example "A" can be both /ə/ and /eɪ/ depending on weather or not its stressed. Similarly "An" and be /ən/ or /æn/ and "The" can be /ðə/ or /ði/
Indeed. But it could help in that it marks a difference between pròject (n.) and prŏjèct (v.) etc.
I don't think children need a patterns to be taught how to pronounce articles.
Yeah what's the problem with writing "a vs ă"?
Accents are actually already used in English (to some extent) like in blessed ("blest") vs. blessèd ("blessid") and naïve - it's just that not many people use them.
One problem I see for putting a breve over letters that represent schwas is that the breve is already used in classroom teaching for "short vowel" sounds (in contrast with the macron for "long vowel" sounds), none of which are the schwa.
K did say that the system wasn't final or anything. I was thinking to use the diaeresis/umlaut for long vowels (ä -> "ay", ë -> "ee", ï -> "eye", ö -> "oh", ü -> "oo") where it isn't clear, but this unfortunately clashes with naïve. Why naïve has an accent anyway is confusing - most modern spellings of "café" don't include the accent (not to mention the inconsistency with "hotel", from French "hôtel"). So I think a decent idea, from my POV, is to use acute accents for stress (á), breve accents for short vowels when ambiguous, and macron accents for long vowels, and remove any other accent. Many European languages do the same when they have accented loanwords. These can be easily typed with three dead keys on an "educator's" layout. I mean, UK extended keyboard already manages five.
@@goombacraft For homophones in English,it's better to use 3-4 variations of the vowels with monographs and digraphs. Also there's already basic digraphs such as ai,ei,ie etc to fill in the place of your examples. But the main problem in English is that even the digraphs are really irregular so they should rather have a more regular spellings such as ai only symbolising the vowel sound in daisy. Also diaeresis already exists in English to mark heterosyllabic vowels such as in coöperate but it's pretty rarely used.
don't forget now-abused-and-forgotten (but still accurate and accepted) diaereses/umlaut! In coöperation, for example. Which makes it more like Dutch, almost as if English's second closest language is Dutch!
@@roman.ia.empire vacuüm got that from Dutch iirc
@@roman.ia.empire Always liked that one. For the unaware: in English this indicates (or at least indicated) that there is a syllable break between the character and the one before it, and thus they do not form a digraph. the difference between "coop" and the start of "cooperation". Unfortunately, those responsible for typewriters, keyboards, and commonly used computer software apparently hate the thing. ... then again, those same people seem to think that I and l (and sometimes 1) being indistinguishable is just fine... (the typewriter manufacturers had a reasonable excuse. Everyone else? Not even slightly).
I’ve been a fan of accents/diacritics ever since I started learning Czech. IMO Czech has a *beautifully* transparent writing system.
I regularly differentiate "read" and its past tense "read" by spelling the latter as "rēad" or "réad"
not in any official capacity (yet) but when i'm messaging in chats etc. moreso for my own sake than anyone elses lol
Funny thing, I had the idea of saying " No, let's use the circumflex ". Why? French and Latin practically took a hammer to English destroyed the spelling, the scribes themselves added too much annoyances. CH making too many sounds is UNACCEPTABLE.
Reeds and reed stay... For past tense of read,
Lêd (the metal ); rêd ( past tense of read ); while read can become rêed... Introducing a system of long vs. short vowels along side forced short by doubling doubling a consonant is good, but if needed use umlaut to avoid overlap vowels. Macrons to force a long vowel... These would preserve history of said words, but fix a lot of shenanigans.
CH THAT BECOMES SH, it has no diacritic E, should 100% stay, CHAOS, becomes CĀOS, NO NEED FOR A CH THAT SOUNDS K. Church, check, chivalry with the CH, should either become SH or use ç+H CH making K should be dropped.
this sounds a bit like a very simple version of what we have in hebrew and arabic for writing vowel sounds!
Learners usually use them, then as you learn the language they're dropped (unless some unknown word or specific pronunciation is specified)
I think another good idea for an English spelling change would be the re-introduction of Þ and Ð, to help make things easier to speakers (especially non-native speakers) which dental fricative is pronounced.
I’d also recommend re-adding the hyphen to prefixes, but as an optional form of spelling for schools.
And the trema reïntroduction, reädding, coöperate, reäction, etc...
I like the diacritic idea. In Portuguese (I'm Brazilian) we've been losing more and more of them throughout the decades, and that is causing problems. We use them mainly to keep track of where the stress is, but also for the quality of the vowel (open vs. closed). Reading some old texts/books I can't help but regret how much easier reading Portuguese could be. The latest reform tried to unify the spelling for Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde, etc. Well, turns out everybody hates it. Damn, even if the plan was to have to translate a book once for all these countries, it failed by assuming the words, phrasing, and culture per se would the same, and by eliminating local editing jobs.
i feel this is closer to hebrew niqqud than japanese furigana, for those who dont know (also i havent touched hebrew in a good year correct me if im wrong pls) they dont write a lot of vowels in their words, and those they do pronounce have different pronunciations, so they added "accent marks" (niqqud) to show which vowels to actually say in the words. its mostly used in government or super formal documents or places non native speakers of hebrew would be reading usually, including children. i love this system and im so glad you brought up bringing it into english :)
Yeah more or less! And the thing is, they were a Medieval invention to make reading ancient texts easier
I distinctly remember using a system like this for "long" and "short" vowels basically distinguishing the difference of "A" in the words face and cat respectively
0:15 King liked its own comment 👑
Love the reform and the slower visuals(I can read without pausing now :]). I've noticed most spelling reforms start in a similar way: 1. "most reforms are bad", 2. "they're bad because english has many very different accents", 3. "i *could* make a reform for a specific accent/set of accents, but i'm going to make one for all of them". Why does everyone do that? I think it'd be cool as fuck to make a reform designed for a select set of english speakers. It's unlikely anyone will actually use the reforms anyone makes regardless(for better or worse), so why *not* make one thats specialised, and thus can feasibly have real changes. Only instance of this I can think of is in some Scottish English speakers and Scots speakers, where they tend to spell things much closer to their pronunciation than any other accent(ignoring whether or not Scots is a separate language or a dialect)
I still have to pause it to read!
are you familiar with the "annotated english" system? it's a set of diacritical markers which can be used to make spelling unambiguous, as rules exist for every possible way a set of letters can be read, and they don't alter the actual letters themelves.
Seems complex.
unless you want to just use a phonetic writing system on top, any such system would have to be
@@fanqa9765 Yes. So that system isn't great as an optional one. It's a lot of work for limited benefits (given that it won't be widespread).
Was just about to mention this myself.
Even shep+herd vs she(ph)erd?
I really appreciate the idea that spelling reform should be embraced in a way specific to local dialect. In te reo there are different spellings and even different compound words in different dialects (in formal writing too) and it's just normal. On another note, our long vowels are also marked with a macron diacritic because they're phonetic and carry information, but in informal writing (and usually in people's names) they're often at least partially left out. They're super important for language learners though, and can clarify which word is being used in written text when context doesn't make it clear.
I actually like this idea a lot because that's what happens in Farsi for vocalizing short vowels.
آن بَچّه را کوتاه اَست is helpful for new speakers and children but for experienced speakers آن بچه را کوتاه است is sufficient
I am totally on-board with helping people pronounce words with schwa more consistently, but our education system still insists there's only 5 vowels. We might be stuck for a while.
One of my favorite things about being an advanced Japanese student is the way they sometimes intentionally use the wrong furigana in literature and manga to create an effect of essentially saying two words at the same time
I've seen Russian learning materials use accents to indicate stress like you describe here! As far as I'm aware, normal native Russian doesn't use accents at all. So it seems Russian has done successfully what you propose here for English!!!
How to put this on a keyboard though for English? German umlauts have their own key as a final letter. So ü, ö, ä. There is no ë for instance. So German can get away with this since only a view letters have them and not all.
Defenestrate/ défenestrer/ defenestrar are some of my favorite verbs in the languages I know. I like so much how your videos develop some thoughts and are fun as hell!
As a language teacher, my experience tells me that any orthography in a new language can be challenging. Portuguese has some nice regular rules about the usage of accents, except when it doesn't have... just kidding (or maybe not).
One usage of the accents is that the accent differentiates two words that have the same spelling/pronunciation but they belong to different word classes as in the case of these two: preposition and the verb .
Usually, native Portuguese speakers have a hard time telling me which one gains the circumflex accent for example. Damn, I had a hard time with the accents, I suffered so much with accents in my own language when I was a kid. One in particular was really hard for me, -éia as in (that ironically was the brazilian spelling to highlight the pronunciation of the diphthong), but after many years forgetting the accent, NEW PORTUGUESE ORTHOGRAPHY has arrived, and now that word is spelled but I keep spelling it wrong. Before the problem was that I never remembered to put the accent, the issue now is that I put the accent by habit making a misspelling.
Thus, everyone will have their own particular struggles as always, adding more features may create more complexity for some, and sometimes removing some features can create more complexity for others as well.
babe wake up, k klein dropped a new video
No lie, literally just woke up and first thing I saw
honestly, I do think that having regional orthographies for every dialect is the best way to go, insisting on spelling everything the same across the Anglo-sphere is crazier than insisting all romance language should still have a single orthography based on Latin, whole yes the Romance languages have had longer to diverge than English, the Latin alphabet was made *for* Latin and would have a much less messy orthography than English for a starter
Just a quick note (since I couldn’t seem to find anyone who already told you in the comment section): In German our Umlaute, like ä, ö, and ü aren’t really accents. Instead they are their own letters. Contrary to accents, they are substantial to the meaning of a word and they could not be left away.
But I really like your idea :)
I just _knew_ that accents were going to factor into this when you mentioned making vowel sounds easier to identify. The line - macron - over long vowels is used in Māori, and that was one of the first thoughts I had.
Actually, in English there are already two optional markings. there is the acute which indicates a short vowel sound (like in french, so é is like eh for example, and yes, nestlé is pronounced nest-leh) and a diaeresis which makes it clear that two vowels are seperate for example naïve or coöperation
Honestly an awesome idea. I've always found it somewhat odd that English utilizes no diacritics/umlauts/etc. at all, given how vast and complicated it's phonology is. And if used consistently (and ideally without requiring all too complex context clues, like, this means that, but only if there is such and such before/after it, etc.), then I can imagine it would actually be rather helpful, especially to foreigners like me. Though I would worry that it would end up being the exact opposite, with it being something additional that has to be memorized and applied correctly in tests, instead of being taught as a helpful guide. At least that had been my experience with accents in French when I was in school, it was only afterwards that I figured out that they actually mean something phonetically.
I had a spelling reform phase a couple years ago, and the problem that I ran into is that whenever you make a rule, there is always some homophones that used to be spelled differently that are now spelled the same (like some and sum, son and sun, comb and come). I gave up, but in the process I learned a lot about the history behind English's weird spelling conventions and how to figure out the origin of loanwords based on their spelling. Because of that I am actually much better at spelling in English. There are some that I am pretty confident about though:
change indict to indite
change doubt and debt into dout and det (douting, indetted, dettor's prison)
change pterodactyl, ptarmigan, pneumonia, and mnemonic to terodactyl, tarmigan, neumonia, and nemonic
I don't see how the homophones would be a problem. If they can be distinguished in speech, they can be distinguished in writing.
With that though, theres also a similar amount of homographs that diverge and become written differently in spelling reform like wind and wind (/wɪnd/ and /wɑɪ̯nd/).
And as someone else said, if it’s distinguishable in speech it wont be any issue distinguishing homographs (which we already have) in writing.
Akin to furigana, in Taiwan we use an alphabet called Zhuyin (注音) for phonetic transcription. It’s also used in children’s learning materials and is taught in kindergarten before children learn characters (國字) in elementary school.
This reminds me of Latin, where you would have, in a textbook a line or a dot to indicate if it's a long vowel or a short one. It's also used in some original texts to differentiate words that would be homographs (same spelling, different meaning) and could confuse the reader.
That seems like a really good idea!
im reminded of older versions of english where the grave accent was used in words like belovèd to denote that the last e is pronounced. though it's use would be much more limited now it might still be useful in contexts like it.
I really like such remarks you're making to your words 2:25. It makes me a lot of fun XD
I think the simplest spelling reform but also the most useful (I'm sure there are ones that beat this in either individual category) is the addition of the letter eng (ŋ) to represent the velar nasal. Because ng can be both a digraph (as in hung) or a consonant cluster (as in hungry) or sometimes both (as in English), using this digraph can cause a lot of confusion. It's already used to write a lot of Australian Aboriginal languages which use both sounds, sometimes even in the same word (such as in the Yolŋu word djunuŋgayangu) and using it can help clear up this confusion. Also important for any proposed spelling reform to have is a unique spelling of English as its name, which this one provides (Eŋglish). One letter is not that difficult to learn, especially when it has a consistent phonetic value. There's not many letters that clear up confusion in quite this way, the eth or thorn would be replacing th but there's not nearly as much confusion surrounding that digraph. And the wynn would literally just be another w. And vowels are subject to a high degree of dialectical variation, higher than most consonants, so any new vowel would have to contend with that. That's why I think the eng is the most simple and useful spelling reform. This doesn't solve English spelling, it's a minor patch for a minor issue, but not every spelling reform needs to be a complete overhaul. Language tends to change little by little, not all at once.
Accents aren't consistent on whether certain words are ŋg or just ŋ though... (I'm thinking "singer" but maybe others)
@@alexjago51 I've never encountered singer pronounced siŋ-ger, regardless the idea that spelling reform must account for every single dialectical variation and accent is a silly and unrealistic standard (English spelling already doesn't do this) especially when you consider that 67 countries have English as an official language and there is no superseding linguistic authority. Any reform would be implemented on state level.
For me, the most simple spelling reform in English is to add the letters thorn (þ) and eth (ð) for ðe unvoiced and voiced "th" sounds. Going from ðere, adding ġ for ðe dzh sound, like in Old English, would be ideal (wiþ optionally but strongly recommending replacing ðe ch diagraph wiþ a dotted-c, and ðen the sh diagraph wiþ an Old English-style sċ). A step furðer would be adding in ðe letter æsċ for ðe, well, æ sound in "ash". It will be inevitable ðæt words will ċanġe spelling in different reġions due to different pronunciations (i.e. baþ in England vs bæþ in ðe US). If I hæd to make ðe most simple and basic spelling reform wiþout overhaulling more harsċly, ðis would be ðe end result, I suppose. It removes many ambiguities hwilst still being easy and regular to learn. (oh and please flip wh back to hw, in ðe dialects ðæt say "wh" it sounds like hw, was oriġinally written hw, and it provides continuity wiþ oðer Ġermanic languaġes like in ðe word hwite.)
I love it, but aesh can be forgotten for a time. And ch point g point also. First need to focus on germanic words (before latin loanwords) in order to prove intern consintence and later an especial spelling rules for those latin words.
I þink ðe biggśt problḿ wið Eŋgliṡ spelliŋ is just ðæt it doesn't have enuff lettęs fę all its sounds. Pęsńĺly, I don't þink ðere's anyþiŋ wroŋ wið two lettęs soundiŋ ðe same. I'd raðę be abĺ to pronounce a word from its spelliŋ but be unabĺ to do ðe revęse ðæn the oðę way around. For example, ę = "er," but ðe r isń't always pronounced, instead makiŋ it more v́ a modifię to ðe vowĺ ðæn a full consńńt. I also like makiŋ distinctińs between reĺ vowĺs and sĺæbic consńńts, hence ðe æccents ovę sevŕĺ consńńts.
I find it funny ðæt you made /ʃ/ a modificatiń of /ʧ/ raðę ðan ðe oðę way around.
The dot above the g is definitely my favorite suggestion here. It satisfies my Old English disposition.
What I really like about the proposal is the sheer flexibility of it. Different dialects can use different diacritics without being thaaat confusing.
And absolutely everything is better than "I read that" without diacritics.
I still stand by my suggestion of dropping all vowels from English spelling and making it an abjad, like Hebrew or Arabic (with optional vowel marks, of course).
Tht's rlly gd d, 'm gnn strt sng tht!
... bt wht d d fr sngl-lttr wrds?
I dn’t knw f tht wld b gd d. Cnsdrng hw mn nglsh wrds r nl dffrnttd b n vwl, nd w hv mn sngl vwl wrds lk nd.
Amazing video, best of yours so far I would say
I like this idea a lot. It's a bit like how some latin materials use more diacritics than others. You could even keep it really simple and it would be a great help. Like marking silent letters and the stress as mentioned. Those could be easily ignored.
When I was in primary school in the mid 90s, our learning materials had short vowels marked with a breve and long vowels marked with a macron. Was that unusual? Bc it sounds pretty similar to this suggestion. Basically I already thought this was a thing for learners
I had the exact same thing in primary school in the late1960's.
We also did and that wasn't even 10 years ago
I... actually had this idea myself a while ago. Optional accents that can be used for clarity but omitted in contexts where they're unnecessary or unwanted for whatever reason. I thought it was really cool!
Thank you for the new video Cake Line, very cool
I really don't find English spelling that bad, and I'm not even a native speaker. Like, English messes up the pronunciation often, trying to adapt the writing system is shooting at a moving target. Honestly, I think everyone should just have stuck with the British spelling -- this one respects the history of the word and the roots, so when the new pronunciation fad inevitably comes, people can still look at the original.
Isn't this already a thing? I think I've seen some pronunciation guides using a system with accent marks before. Sometimes it shows up on Wiktionary.
That's not quite the same thing. Those are phonemic descriptions, and you only find that kind of thing in encyclopaedias, dictionaries, &c. IPA is the gold standard, but some publishers have their own ad-hoc method of doing something similar. Those don't follow the spelling. This proposal retains the spelling but adds optional annotations in the form of accents.
@@talideon That's true, it doesn't follow the spelling. It does only sometimes unintentionally do it, and that's probably when I got confused of how it worked.
My little brother had problems learning how to read so my mom taught him using a large book made exactly for that purpose- it started with different accents above vowels then gradually stopped. I think it really helped. Now, many years later, he loves to read. Ain’t that great? I totally think your idea should be adopted in early educational content. It would help a lot :)
that's really cool!
4:37 I'm for a spelling reform, but... Taking more inspiration from the French. Circumflex, le circonflexe, macrons to lengthen, the ocasional Umlaut to avoid overlapping vowels. Because 1. Reduced changes in writing. Keep some silent letters like "KN, GN ( Like SIGN ), WH, 2. Circumflex WOULD BE RIDICIOUSLY USEFUL FOR ENGLISH for the amount of silent letters...
The Circumflex can fix the multiple readings of " Read and Lead. "
Reed for REEDS for music, Red for the color, Led being within the verbs of " Lead, led, leads.
The orthographic distinction of making clear " long vs short vowels ".
Lêd (the metal ); rêd ( past tense of read ); lêeder; rêeder ( a reader )
The vocab change, circumflexes overlap previous vowels. Circumflex to representing " vowels or silent consonants that used to be there...
Used when there's no " to " follow up ". Used to know, use't to know.
To, two, and too... Change to -> tu.... Two -> Tû... Too STAYS as it still fits within the system of OO -> long U...
The incite vs. insight have no phonetic distinction in my region on the stress, but we do have the hic-up like "a' " proceeding verbs of 'ing to turn "constantly, or emphatically stress " in the tenses. Which would work as a schwa, but depends on regional dialects and accents that use a schwa.
Circumflexes are ORTHOGRAPHIC, and still follow the same PREVIOUS rules of short vs. long. GHOST, can easiy turn into Gōst...
These are my ideas.... Any words with E as their last letter impact the sound of turning vowels long.
as a turkish person. when i was second class in my first scool we started learning english, when our teacher told us spelling and writing is difirent in english i was confused ''this is how they read a letter? why k is silent in knight? why dont they just add more leter to make it simpler(like i ı o ö u ü g ğ) just like in turkish''
That's funny. A lot of English speakers would think adding extra letters in would make it more complicated but it probably would make wrangling our horrible vowels easier lol XD
The gigachad alphamale way to reform English spelling is to switch to Cyrillic.
damnit why didn't I think of this smh
Ват'с а фантастик аідия!
Уфкорс ит ис 😀
@@kklein would be much easier to write Swedish in Cyrillic to, that way we could avoid digraphs/thrigraphs almost entirely
ЄС ФАІНӘЛИ САМҮАН СѢД ІТ, аім гона әдміт маі сістәм ізнт ҙә бест, бәт іц хела фан ѣниүеі (гѵд џаб іф ю кѵд рид ҙіс баі ҙә үеі)
6.11 holy shit seeing those biff and chip books brought back so many memories of english class in primary school. I'd love to hear you talk about Japanese more, it's my favourite language in terms of funny linguistic quirks and your style of preseneting is so enjoyable I hope you touch on the old 日本語 again.
This is a really neat idea, even if you had some of your children's learning books you could even write some accents about certain words. A practical idea you could implement for anyone learning. Though it would be a lot of work in some cases, you could figure a good system out. If I have children I would homeschool them and implement this idea some how.
actually, this was how i learnt to read and speak english, by using a system of accents and stuff to show how each word is pronounced and which syllables are stressed, and eventually it just came naturally to me
as a non-native English speaker, I can say that marking the voiced-unvoiced th and whether “ch” makes a /k/ sound instead of /t͡ʃ/ would have helped me a lot during the learning process since this kind of stuff can most of the time only be deduced if you’re familiar with the etymology which is not the main interest if most of non-native English learning kids
This would give English something in common with Hebrew and Arabic. Both use what are called abjads, which are basically alphabets, but just for consonants. Vowels (at least the short ones) are left unwritten and subject to contextual inference. However, in educational materials designed to teach kids and/or foreigners how to read and write, both languages have a system of diacritics placed above the main letters to indicate vowels which would otherwise be invisible.
Meanwhile, for something more ambitious regarding English, you might like this playlist on my other channel: ua-cam.com/play/PLAy3GfJbt0WF93GCJoKSXRy2PP_2o34MG.html It explains a complete overhaul to English spelling of my own design.
Though this does have the problem of not working for all dialects, the fact that it's optional and more of a helping guide makes this an excellent idea!
Russian does a similar thing, where there is a difference between е and ё (е is pronounced "ye" as in "yes", or as "eh" as in "lentil" when unstressed. ё is pronounced "yo" as in "yo-yo"). In Russian writing, both of these are written as "е" usually, but sometimes ё has the two dots over it to help foreign speakers or to clarify the pronunciation, but it it entirely optional. So this already has some precedent as a way to clear up inconsistent orthography. Great idea and I'd love to see a whole text written with this spelling reform suggestion :)
Not to mention an acute accent on vowels to clarify syllable stress.
Wait -- isn't ё a separate Cyrillic letter from e?
Fun fact - Belarusian also has this letter, but unlike in Russian, it IS compulsory to include the dots for “yo” sounds in Belarusian!
@@rosiefay7283 it is, but it's not mandatory to include in writing most of the time. In some words you have to include it (e.g. все [everyone] Vs всё [everything]) but a lot of the time it's optional in orthography
Wait K Klein being positive about Romania???? Stop the presses
That's one of the most random ads I have ever seen. And I'm here for it.
In the US, we are taught diacritics in elementary school when learning to spell. A bar indicates the long sound of a vowel (hate, bite, be, hope, true), an inverted breve indicates the short sound of a vowel (hat, hit, bet, hot, hut). So I disagree with the symbols you chose, but I do agree this is a good idea, because the system we used to learn failed to capture all of the sounds these vowels make.
As a demo, this would be the tile using this reform:
Ăn àctuăl gòòd ēnglish spèlling rĕfòrm
It's a bit ugly and I think it could be slightly improved by replacing the grave accent with an acute accent instead
and maybe the stress accent can be implicit? like how in spanish not every word has an accent but the lack of it is also telling you which sillable to stress
@@Metodones I noticed this when making my own reform, Njuuskript: most English words are automatically stressed on the first syllable, so the acute accent only marks stress on any non-initial syllable.
Ai noutist dhis when meikiq mai oun rifórm, Njuuskript: moust Inglic wyrdz ar ootomáetiklii strest on dhy fyrst silabyl, sou dhii akjúut aeksent ounlii marks stres on enii non-inícal silabyl.
@@Metodones the problem is that in spanish, the stress pattern is easy to predict, there are some exceptions but like 90% of words have a predictable stress pattern, however, in english, there is no rhyme or reason to any of it, the stress is entirely random and there is no way to predict it
@@LinguaPhiliax Took me way too long to realize that you were using q for ng XD
@@crusatyr1452 Unless it occurs before a velar stop, then "n" is used. That's why it's spelt "Inglic" and not "Iqglic".
What kind of longness? Ā is ɑː or eɪ?
This is *exactly* what I was trying to develop/implement when teaching English to children in Hong Kong.
I kept getting hung up in things like having different marks to distinguish dipthongs. With the long 'e' sound component of the long 'a' and the long 'u', having the accent over the long 'e' as _part_ if the accents(s) over long 'a' and 'u'.
Also trying to find consistent use if accents for voiced vs unvoiced 's' and 'th', etc...
Of having compressed font so that groups if letters that are sounded together ( 'sh', 'ou', etc) occupy exactly one character space in monospace font...
Big issues with how to best depict vowel_letter-pair sounds when the second vowel is silent 'e'...
Working with the Python "reportlab' library to render the orthography... with automatic conversion from plain English source text where possible...
All in all, a lot of pieces lying around without much of any complete system. Mostly ad hoc implementation when teaching some words, rather than blocks of text fully rendered.
I'd love to know more if what you've done. It seems like we've had somewhat parallel goals.
Cheers! :)
we sort of have this for filipino textbooks here in the philippines
while tagalog isn't a tonal language, it does have words that sound similar, so textbooks have accent markers to clarify the pronunciation
I can't agree with this at all. Catalan, a variant of Spanish, is my native language. It has many accents and symbols that help you understand the way to pronounce words, and I can assure you that that isn't helpful to me. In fact, I still make a lot of mistakes in my Catalan writing because I use the wrong accent or things like that. I make more mistakes writing in my native language than in English. When I started to learn English, it was a fresh new way to understand how a language can work in a much more simple manner. I never had many difficulties learning to pronounce it, either. You just have to listen to a lot of English. I just think that the simplicity of written English is what has made this language so popular.
What K Klein is suggesting is that we use these accent markers for people who are learning English, not those who already know English pronunciation well. This reform would be optional for each word so you wouldn't need to write accents for every single word. I can see how a system like Catalan's orthograhy could be difficult to learn though.
It looks like it's only to be used in reading materials for learners, so almost no one would have to write with diacritics.
It sounds to me that this spelling reform would only really help foreigners learning the language. Native speakers already find it intuitive enough to associate what a word looks with how it's pronounced, because they already know the pronunciation, since they're native speakers. The problem arises when they need to spell a word themselves, and this reform does not help it.
That's a good point. This definitely helps foreign learners but not so much native speakers. Clever Brits with a linguistic bent can be quite good at figuring out how to spell a word they've heard, but plenty of Brits either don't know or don't care, and simply memorize each word. This reform would only help the second category of Brits. Even more specifically, it would only help them work out how to pronounce rare words. It wouldn't help them work out how to spell them.
When we learn how to read in elementary school, we actually already do use breves and macrons to learn how to pronounce words. There are some books with those accents over them, but they are generally limited to books with only a few words per page. The breve is used over short (usually lax) vowels (ash, epsilon, small-cap i, script a/open o, and upsilon), whereas the macron is usually used over the long vowels/diphthongs (ei, i:, ai, ou, ju/u:). The system isn't perfect, and I'm not sure how widespread it is, but I remember learning to read that way.
I've never heard of that ever... Where abouts are you? And how long ago did you learn to read?
@@tenor1190 I grew up in Seattle, WA, US and was born in 1997, so between 2001-2004ish?
@@frosty_brandon damn that's really odd!! I've never heard of that, but I guess it would have to be a local thing because my country has a completely different accent than America. Thanks for sharing though !!
This is a very interesting idea and I’d like to see it used!
I know this is an old video but, since you mentioned Italian, I thought you'd appreciate that Italian also has optional diacritics
You can use graves and acutes within words (they're only mandatory at the end of words)
There are also Ï, which indicates that ⟨i⟩ is /i/ and not /j/, and Î, which doesn't make a separate sound but is used when a morpheme ends with /j/ and the next one begins with /i/. For example "principi-o" /printʃipjo/ pluralizes to "principi"/"principî" /printʃipi/
I guess Ü and Û would be possible following the same logic but there's no word where they'd be useful
This is actually good because its not really a reform to spelling. Its just adding notations that make understanding how to read the word so much easier.
Its also optional. So it can vary person to person. But could be universally understood.
For example, if it varys person to person, because someone might like the normal english spelling, the breve form, and schwa form for using whatever vowel to represent a schwa sound. It can be written 3 different ways but still universally understood.
əbout
ăbout
about
not sure if others commented this already, but Hebrew implements a similar system. niqqud marks are little dots and lines around letters, and they are used to convey vowel sounds, which are quite lacking in regular writing - due to the script being an Abjad. niqqud is used in children's books, and sometimes to disambiguate between two words which otherwise will be written in the same way.
this is very true, and i think hebrew very much supports the idea proposed in the video; the system works. by around age 10, spelling mistakes are extremely rare in the writing of an average child.
the only thing which slightly complicates the system is that some niqqud which originally had different pronunciation are indistinguishable in modern hebrew. there are however still set rules about when you use each kind. this makes it somewhat difficult to actually learn to write correctly - but to be honest the only people who really need to know that are those publishing children’s books.
Name Explain and K Klein: both support adding accents to English orthography.
And I wouldn't really mind... although typing it out would be a problem...
These diaccrittics remmind me of my native language's writing system. We don't write short vowells at all, which can make some texts a little ambiguous and hard to read- so when comprehension is key (like govt doccuments or textbooks), we use accents and other markers to disambigguate, and I feel this wouldn't be a bad addition to english. As an asside, i've been using your suggested idea of using doubled consonnants to distinguish vowell length based on a little guideline I've been unconscioussly devellopping
Double consonnants only after short/unstressed/monothong vowells, unless it is followed by an obstruent or is in a triple consonnant cluster.
spelling will deppend on indivvidual pronounnciation/ textual emphassis, so spelling may even vary within a block of text. This might pressent some ambiguity, but i believe this versatillity within the set rules can quite effectively accommodate English's diverse pool of speakers
ofc the guidelines i set here are very limmited so feel free to help expand on them as you see fit- and also point out where this ammendment falls short. K.Klein, I'd love to hear your thoughts and crittiques as well
man I love having to spend more time writing more letters
Yeah ever since I saw the meme about English with furigana I think that's a really good idea and they should try to implement it.
No, I think we have to accept that english latin based script used to spell words phonetically, but with adding new words from other languages, and natural evolution of language, words act more as kanji, and every dialect has a specific way of saying it. When your read a word, you look at the image/shape of the word, you don't read it syllable by syllable unless you are leaning to read. The image of the word carries the meaning, the same way a chinese character does, and then you have in your memory the way to pronounce the word you see, depending on your dialect. The shape of the word is more important than the sound, you can't say "needle" and "kneedel" evoke the same meaning.
As for leaning, then the only way is to listen to English speakers and imitate them until the sound is associated with the word in memory. A reform like the spanish one to make words phonetic would totally change the shape of the words, people would have to relearn how to read. The accents are a good idea, but they might corrupt the shape of the word you have to recognize without later on.
I agree that this could totally make people reliant on accents. They would have to practise speaking and listening with the word a lot in order to avoid going back to square 1 when you take the accents away.
In my opinion, the main points of conjecture are "who makes the standard", "how do we implement this", and "Who is the reform based on?". I think that the issue is less to do with "how worthy is the reform", but more to do with the fact that nobody wants to implement a complete overhaul to our spelling. We complain about it, but the moment it comes to changing anything we chicken out because the changes look alien to us, as will always be the case. This is also why a complete spelling overhaul will never happen given current trends. What's worse than spelling one word differently? Spelling every single word differently. To go back to words looking weird tho, If I started to spell "I" as "ay" people would think that ay am spelling that word in a way that makes no sense and looks rather odd. But ay beg to differ, it only looks weird because u aren't used to seeing it written that way. Ultimately the thing holding us back from reform is ourselves. No governmental board or anything else, it's societal and internal pressure keeping change from occurring. However, at the same time, changes are still occurring. Other than spelling "I" differently, I also spelled "you" as "u" and it most likely didn't cross your mind, it's normalized to spell you as u, and to nail in my point, you probably also missed me spelling "though" as "tho", another normalized new spelling. Ultimately spelling reform is actually occurring, just slowly and by the average person. If u think back to when English was first codified, it was thru the printing press, which ultimately made us have the standard that we have today. In a way, it was mostly formed through a small group of printing press users and through the work of grammarians, rather than how English used to be spelled, without one specific standard. Now, I don't think that we should just stort ty spiel werds eny wey tha we wont, with full veracity all the time. But instead to suggest something that is already in process. Just let the internet have it's way with english spelling. Through popular vote, IE which spellings people choose to use en masse, it'll become more regular and apt for the modern era. We just need to open the floodgates and make it normalized to spell things "wyrdlig" as they so choose, if people start to feel that using umlauts or breves or grave/acute marks is nice then they'll use it, if dhey like to use dhe "dh" digraph then dhat is something dhey should be able to get away with without immediately being assumed to be stupid, or perhaps if dhey want to do away with dhe "ph" digraf and solely use dhe letter f for the /f/ sound. I think it would be more fun to see people spell things how they want to, and we can always use the current standard for formal writing and just make small changes as the internet finds common usage of micro-reforms. In short, if someone wants to use thorn and eth, that's cool, but if you want others to use thorn and eth in their own writing, don't try to force them to do it, it's rude. If someone wants to start using the letter æ, then that's cool, but they should not assume that everyone should use it. Basically, just give people more freedom in informal contexts, but also not to push a specific spelling reform onto the masses with force. Ultimately whichever spelling changes we make as a society in the English speaking world is going to be arbitrary and shaped by what we need and through ongoing history, so at least that arbitrary usage should reflect what people are comfortable with using.
Sounds like a good idea!
Omg biff chip and kipper books that takes me back, I'd completely forgotten about them xD
I say use the Diaresis for schwa like in Albanian, use the breve for stress, and an acute for long vowels (aka when e means /i/, or when a means /ei/) and when a vowel is both stressed and long, use a circumflex, unless there is only one syllable, in which case only an acute is used.
Also I know these might be even more of a longshot, but I suggest using x as sh and c as ch from now on with k being used for hard c and s for soft c, with ks or z for x depending on if its a xylophone x or a excellent x
This reminds me of system called Annotated English, which uses diacritics to achieve a similar thing, though it's presented more as a learning tool than a reform.
I have a suggestion for this. Why don’t we take a look at all the vowels that appear in English according to the IPA and use studies to determine what letters are most associated with that sound. Then we take some inspiration form the Dutch do and use different letters for the same sound. Like how in Dutch ei=ij we can do something like this with letters only like å=ä (this å=ä example is what I mean when I say different letters for the same sound. We can have even more like 3 or 4 if needed).
The using the results to see what are the top 2-4 letters associated with the sounds and when we change the spelling of the words we take a look at the IPA and when we find the vowels we replace them with the one that looks the most similar to the current English spelling and replace whatever mumbo-jumbo is there with that vowel.
For example, lets take “together” and “tough”. The o=ou (to me anyway) and let’s assume that the studies show that this sound is associated with both o and u by English speakers across the world. And it has been decided that ō and ū will be used for this sound. With this in mind we look at how the words are spelled and we spell “together” as “tōgether” and “tough” as “tūgh”. This doesn’t have to be a formula. We can use ō for both, or allow people to spell these words as “tōgh” & “tūgh” and “tōgether” & “tūgether” and consider both forms of the two words correct since they use the same sound.
If we can remove the vowel BS from English then its spelling would be so much better since English doesn’t seem to abuse consonants as much.
We can also merge words together and use the same word for multiple things, like “red” and “read” (like in “she left me on read”) be merged into “red”. This would most definitely help reduce spelling BS if we merge within the limits as many same sounding words as possible into a single one, and rely on context to differentiate. Kinda like how in Dutch the word for “haar” means both “her” and “hair” since they both sound the same and decided that is better to use the same word for these two concepts rather than mess up their spelling system and invent different words for both concepts.
In early primary school we wrote ō for long o in our spelling workbooks (& similar for other vowels).
Stress in English is completely systematic. Your example of "incite" vs "insight," shows the very common noun/adjective vs. verb stress pattern. Some people call this "lexical stress" because just a change in the stress can change the meaning of the word, but it's not lexical stress, because the stress is not deciding the meaning of the lexeme, rather it is derived from its grammatical function. In a language like English where word order is very strict, grammatical function of a word defines where it is used in a sentence, so you can imagine that different grammatical categories of words will take on different stress patterns based on their place in the overall rhythm of an English sentence. Although the rules of English stress are so complicated people have literally written whole books on them, they are not random, and we can and do as native speakers naturally guess the stress of unfamiliar words very well, because we do intrinsically know them. They differ by dialect, they can differ based on how the speaker interprets the phonology of the word, but the rules do exist and seldom need to be made explicit to native speakers. Only when dealing with foreign words and place names, unfamiliar place names that use a more local stress style, etc, do we as native speakers get tripped up. "Incite" vs "insight," or "permít," vs "pérmit." or "objéct" vs "óbject" or "presént" vs. "présent" etc, all native speakers will know how to pronounce as soon as they know what part of the sentence it is.
Vowel reduction to schwa is also COMPLETELY defined by stress. Only unstressed vowels become schwa. If you know the stress, or the stress is marked for you, you know which vowels become schwa. Actually, whether they become schwa or a short [ɛ] or [ɪ] etc. depends on dialect. The basics of it is that schwa is not phoneme, and writing systems only have to be phonemic. You do have the vowel /ʌ/ which is close to [ə] but not the same. That's the short-U sound, or the O in words like "love" or "money." If you meant marking when an O is actually the short-U sound, then that makes sense. Also when a U is not /ʌ/ but /ʊ/ would be useful, and for that matter when OO is /ʊ/ vs /u/. When EA is /ɛ/, that's another annoying one. Read vs read (past) is just so stupid of a spelling that not even etymology can justify it.
I've been working on reforming the English writing system for years. Will publish it someday, not that I expect a single person to take any notice of it. But that's beside the point. Really the only issue I'm not totally sure how to resolve is the concept of compound consonants. In English we don't use "ks" as a single consonant but in Greek it has its own letter ("ksi"). In English we don't use "ts" at all but in Hiragana the Japanese treat it essentially as a variation of the consonant "s" as in the syllable "tsu". So there is clearly some dispute about what is a compound consonant or just a normal consonant. Yet I think most would agree that the compound consonant "spl-" as in "split" is clearly composed of "s"+"p"+"l". But only certain consonant combinations are allowed/possible at all. So should we have a letter for each compound consonant? Or have an argument with the Greeks and Japanese about how to write things like "ts" and "ks"? Anyway... if English simply reintroduced the thorne (as in "the", "this", "that", "then") and adopted the "theta" from Greek for words like "thin", "thing", "thirst" and took some other Greek/Cyrillic letters to use for "ch" and "sh", as well as standardise the pronounciation of vowel combinations ("ee", "ea", "ie", etc) that would already solve a lot of problems.
In Farsi & Arabic there are optional accents to voice unwritten vowels ّ, ٔ, َ, ٕ ُ, ِ and it's super helpful for learners
it's kind of similar to how we deal with stress in russian. since there aren't really any rules to where stress falls in a word (there is one letter that is always stressed unless it sometimes isn't but that's about it) reading can be hard to learn for children as they struggle to recognize words they know & may accidentally learn new words with wrong stress. so in children's books and textbooks, and also in dictionaries and russian textbooks that teach it as a second language, an acute accent is placed above the stressed vowels. for children's books there usually exists two variants - a version for smaller children with stress markings above every word (and sometimes every word is broken into syllables too) and a version for older children with either no stress markings or with markings only above difficult/new words. in elementary school textbooks you can see stress markings slowly going from being above literally every single word to only being above some to disappearing completely. stress markings are not used in everyday russian or in literature aimed at middle schoolers and older, russian keyboards (mobile or computer) don't even have a way to type with acute accents as they are only used when writing for tiny children or writing a dictionary.
that's really cool, I didn't know that :)
not that I expected this to be an entirely original idea aha
My idea on the basis of this:
â, ê, î, ô, û - > /ə/ sound
ē (or è, but i prefer è) = e when it is pronounced as /i/
á, é, í ó, ú -> stressed vowel; Diphthongs are marked on the first letter except for when the second vowel is the stressed one of the two
the hat on the reduced vowels because it is on just about all keyboards already (Merci beaucoup á le français pour quel idée and a deeply felt sorry to any and all french speakers who may have to read this)
i chose the accent that faces right for stressed syllables because on my keyboard, both accents are on the same key with the right facing one being the 'default' accent on there.
And because e is often pronounced as e and i hear many people i know accidentally confusing when e is pronounced /ε/ /e/ and when it is pronounced /i/
and maybe the /ou/ (i don't have the ipa 'inverted omega u thing(TM)') could be written as ò, but that is a big, big maybe
and finally, the ì could be used dor that reduced i sound /ı/ (i don't have the proper ipa sign on my keyboard)
Good idea!
Let's get this video trending!!!
I say we add one consonant for every consonant sound except for the th sounds. Including winning Waters that don't have a unique sound. Although allowing a few diphthong sounds like KW and KS to retain a letter. Add one vowel letter ' for both stops and mid vowels and just approximate everything elwe