fOnetiks

this kuntrE nEds a fOnetik alfabet. nO wun wad hAv to lern to spel, U cad just s?nd ?t wards.

It would save years in learning spellings that only make historical sense. Granted, you would probably need more letters, as several 2 and 3 letter combinations are essentially used as a single letter (like 'ou' in would)

The 'new' letters could mostly be made by capitalizing existing letters, since capitalization is rarely anything but decorative. 'a' could be 'short' a, and 'A' could be long a (ie: bAke), this would remove the need to add an e to make a vowel long, so 'bake' would be 'bAk'. make would be mAk, steak would be stAk.

So simple, why is there no movement to update our crappy written language?

So language would look like a hard to read text message?

Mark me down as "opposed". cn

cannabineer said:

Mark me down as "opposed". cn

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That would be OpOzed

no. for the love of god.

cheechako said:

That would be OpOzed

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EXACTLY! You learned to spell after reading 4 sentences - compared to YEARS of pointless memorization.

Even if it was turned into a full-fledged system with new characters, odd-cases, ect. it would only take a few days to learn - you'd just be mimicking with letters the sounds you make with your mouth.

One interesting idea I had for the system was to allow for several 'spellings' to be correct. Essentially, if the letters pronounced made the correct world, the world would be correct. (korect, korekt)

This would also help america in the global marketplace. People from other countries would enjoy learning american, because it would be really fucking easy. Not only would it be easy to write, it would be easy to read - every word would essentially be it's own pronunciation key.

Not that the education system would ever adopt it - there still teaching cursive, and that Columbus proved the world was round.

Because learning english is too hard

fb360 said:

Because learning english is too hard

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Yep. It takes years to learn to spell, just because the spelling system is unintuitive. Hell, I can't spell the word 'unintuitive', after TWENTY+ years. No one can spell every word, most people probably can't spell half - if you pull from the entire dictionary and not just the most common couple thousand.

Wouldn't it be easier to replace the current system with a sensical one, instead of having 50,000,000 some people a year struggle to learn a shitty one?

tibberous said:

Yep. It takes years to learn to spell, just because the spelling system is unintuitive. Hell, I can't spell the word 'unintuitive', after TWENTY+ years. No one can spell every word, most people probably can't spell half - if you pull from the entire dictionary and not just the most common couple thousand.

Wouldn't it be easier to replace the current system with a sensical one, instead of having 50,000,000 some people a year struggle to learn a shitty one?

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I tend to disagree. I do think their are more "sensible" languages out there; call me old fashioned but I like a formal language, even if it requires struggle to learn it effectively

My answer would be to step yo game up.

how about instead of trying to rewrite an entire language you learn some greek and latin so you can understand the spelling better? 10 year olds do it all the time. having a "streamlined" spelling system is going to do fuck all for comprehension, understanding context, distinguishing homonyms, etc.

you may as well just say, "having homonyms is too complicated. let's replace the word 'steak' with 'brilajig' because too many people confuse it with 'stake'". how in hell is rewriting an entire language easier than just learning to read the way most people do by the time they are 10 years old? it's both completely lazy and needlessly complicated at the same time.

we won't even switch to metric in the states and you think we should rewrite an entire language?

tibberous said:

This would also help america in the global marketplace. People from other countries would enjoy learning american, because it would be really fucking easy.

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The sad fact is - it is usually the Americans that don't learn a second language. I'm guilty too - a couple of years in high school to meet a requirement and that was it.

In fact, English is widely taught and spoken as a second language throughout the rest of the world. Almost 90% of European Union school children study English. In many non-English speaking Euopean countries, more than half the adults are fluent in English. It is the official language of the United Nations and the International Olympics Committee It is spoken by more people than any other language, including Mandarin (Chinese).

So yeah - this idea is pretty much crap. Or, if you prefer, krap.

homonyms are words with the same spelling and meaning - you can't distinguish them now, except in context.

And even if you did address the problem of words with different meanings (which you wouldn't have too, since it would still be the same as the spoken language), it's hardly "rewriting" the language - it would be a few words out of hundreds of thousands.

Wouldn't hurt comprehension at all. Right now it's almost like we learn 2 languages, 2 writing styles and typing. My way would make it so just being able to speak would let you be able to spell, and just knowing the sounds letters made would let you be able to speak.

Don't picture the states will ever switch to anything better. Education seems to be more about teaching what has always been taught than anything practical / useful.

cheechako said:

The sad fact is - it is usually the Americans that don't learn a second language.

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I've heard that Chinese people tend to like writing English better than writing Chinese. While English has a piss-poor spelling system, China's is way worse - you just draw the symbol for the word you want; if you don't know the symbol, then you can't make the word.

tibberous said:

homonyms are words with the same spelling and meaning - you can't distinguish them now, except in context.

And even if you did address the problem of words with different meanings (which you wouldn't have too, since it would still be the same as the spoken language), it's hardly "rewriting" the language - it would be a few words out of hundreds of thousands.

Wouldn't hurt comprehension at all. Right now it's almost like we learn 2 languages, 2 writing styles and typing. My way would make it so just being able to speak would let you be able to spell, and just knowing the sounds letters made would let you be able to speak.

Don't picture the states will ever switch to anything better. Education seems to be more about teaching what has always been taught than anything practical / useful.

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I don't know why you have to distinguish a word with the same spelling and meaning - that's just same word.

Homonyms are words that have the same spelling and pronunciation, but different meanings. You can eat a bowl of cereal. You can bowl a strike. You can strike a match and smoke a bowl.

This is one of the many confusing things about English. If you start browsing through a dictionary, you'll find that there are more than just a few homonyms, heteronyms, homophones, and so on.

While your solution seems like a simplification, it would probably double our alphabet. I can't even imagine how many new words would be needed to avoid homonyms and the like. More importantly, it does not matter what the lackluster American education system teaches. The fact is, English is a language of the world - long established, with widespread use and acceptance.

You complain about learning two languages. It makes me thing you know nothing of French or Chinese or a number of other languages. And that isn't to mention that many people who live in France or China learn one or more additional languages beyond their native tongue.

By teaching English as it is now, I think this is one thing our education system does right.

p.s. For the record, if fOnetiks ever becomes the official language of RIU, I'm out of here.

cheechako said:

. It is the official language of the United Nations and the International Olympics Committee It is spoken by more people than any other language, including Mandarin (Chinese).

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That is incorrect. Mandarin has nearly 2-3 times as many total number speakers than does English according to most estimates. Ethnologue....


[TABLE="class: wikitable"]
[TR]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TH][/TH]
[TH]Language[/TH]
[TH]Native speakers[/TH]
[TH]Secondary speakers[/TH]
[TH]Total[/TH]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]1[/TD]
[TD]Standard Chinese[SUP][13][/SUP][/TD]
[TD]845 mill. (2000)[/TD]
[TD]178 mill.[/TD]
[TD]1,013 mill.[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]2[/TD]
[TD]English[SUP][14][/SUP][/TD]
[TD]328 mill. (2000-2006)[/TD]
[TD]167 mill.[SUP][15][/SUP][/TD]
[TD]495 mill.[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

tibberous said:

I've heard that Chinese people tend to like writing English better than writing Chinese. While English has a piss-poor spelling system, China's is way worse - you just draw the symbol for the word you want; if you don't know the symbol, then you can't make the word.

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Lol, no they don't. It's quite easy for children to learn a language. Especially when you're immersed in it. Hanzi actually has a rhyme and reason to it. If you don't know the character there are numerous ways of finding it.

neosapien said:

That is incorrect. Mandarin has nearly 2-3 times as many total number speakers than does English according to most estimates. Ethnologue....

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I should have cited my Wiki source: World Language. But the links there are not all up to date, and some of that Ethnologue stuff is confusing.

The Wiki article I referenced uses the same Ethnologue native values, although it lists more speakers of Mandarin for a grand total of 1345 mil. But it also claims 1500 mil as secondary speakers of English. So there are more secondary English speakers than there are of all Mandarin speakers. I really think your source uses a value for the population of countries where English is the primary language but speak it as a secondary language. In other words, I don't think it accounts for any country where English is not the primary language.

If that's not confusing enough, things get worse when looking at the numbers for secondary speakers. However, I found a 2006 study from the EU (source PDF) which says, "English remains the most widely spoken foreign language throughout Europe. 38% of EU citizens state they have sufficient skills in English to have a conversation. In 19 out of 29 countries polled, English is the most widely known language apart from the mother tongue."

The study puts the population at 450 mil - 38% of that is about 170 mil. I'm not going to find stats to back up the 1800 mil total in my source, but it only took the EU to beat the number from your source. I'm sure there is data for South America, Africa, and so on. Even many native Mandarin speakers also speak English. So I think the numbers will add up to a lot. More importantly, the bulk of Mandarin speakers are native. English as a secondary language is a world language - it has become the choice (ex: the UN) for someone native to France, someone native to Germany, someone native to Russia, someone native to China, etc. to all communicate as a group.

Thanks for keeping an insomniac occupied. And a special shout out to Google.

There is a really good article talking about why Chinese is hard compared to English - I can't get it to load, but here is a condensed version:

http://www.at0086.net/news/Top-Nine-Reasons-for-Why-Chinese-is-Difficult-to-Learn.html

Most the differences come down to the lack of alphabet (might technically be an alphabet, but since it's huge and non-sequential, it doesn't have the advantages of a typical alphabet) and spaces.

Would be kind of nice if the world could agree on, if not a single language, at least a few. The internet is doing a lot in this regard - imagine if your language was Romanian or Serbian, you could read .01% of the internet, you'd almost have to get good at English (i mean, you could use German or French, but you'd be close to England, and English is more dominant on the web)