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According to Michael
Quinlen, the Internet is spawning an informal global language,
free of capital letters and apostrophes but full of
abbreviartions and badly spelled words.
Why not standardize weblish?
A standardized and streamlined writing system for English would be
a new phonemic code.
It would not be badly spelled.
It is the traditional words that depart from one of the four main spelling
patterns that are badly spelled.
A bad code is an inefficient and inconsistent one.
Spelling is a way to code the sounds of English.
Some think that morphemes, etymology, and history should be part of
the code.
What weblish should be and its not badly spelled.
It should be streamlined and understandable by all.
The only mispellings that count are those that do not communicate.
kyk mi yntu krk chrrch
Efficiency means two things - easy
for beginners is not the easiest for those who are used to the traditional
code.
There is virtue in retaining visual
similarity to the traditional spelling - it makes the transition easier.
tryk byt myt fyt lyk trayk
bayt not byte.
wat wd bi d point ov r'yting dys wey. Du wi want to kip yt al thys strait.
y looks laik the ee symbol so it shuid bi yuzd for i: |
yn d byn aI saw a ded caet daet haed clowzd aiz.
wat ar yu goiq tu du
symbl thymbl jinks pinks piqks
e ey
y i
a ai
o ow
u yu
So this is d nu kaind of speling, it iz short, abreviated and consistent.
aa instead of ae ae is not hard to get to. hit the bol with the
baet.
Obfuscation in
representation
ww.vicotian.fortunecity.com/vangogh/555/Spell/ei-9ways.html
All reform notations (except
cut spelling) eliminate the ambiguity
but they do it in two different
ways.
1- One sticks with the original
Latin conventions the other
2- opts for the shifted
or mutated values mostly unique to English.
The difference between the
two approaches shows up in the diphthongs.
With an IPA/Latin based
correspondences, the component
letters in the digraph can
be pronounced. With New Spelling and mutated values,
this is not possible: e.g.,
ie
is a unique symbol with no clear connection to the sounds of the component
letters.
Code overlaps are confusing
and there is no way out.
We have experienced a vowel
shift, but it was never a complete shift. In many words pronounced
seed [seyd] became [si:d].
We just received a new orthographic proposal that uses the umlaut aei for ei i: ai.
This is similar to VY's proposal
which uses the grave accent to replace the silent e
for ae ee ie oe ue.
The diacritics are superior because the single letter spelling is
(1) more frequent
(2) more compact
The umlaut is used in German
to denote a mutated sound.
Thus umlaut aeiou refer
to ae, schwa?, ai, ? ?
This is the German solution,
which notes that aei were distorted or shifted.
But a also refers to ae
I became involved in spelling reform as a result of reading
historical papers on foreign language pronunciation,
[e.g., the sounds of ancient Egyptian and other semitic
tongues and Anglo Saxon] where it was next to impossilbe
to determine what sounds the author was refering to.
Some used the macron a i and e, but the long a and
long e in Latin and most other languages including old and middle English
was not the same as the shifted values we commonly use
today.
When trying to formalize menuspelling, it was clear that
we have no real way to
unambiguosly refer to these sounds, ee works for
i: ay ey are completelyconfused. may eye
aye they.
Mey eye say aye. They eye say aye .
mei ai sey ai. they mey say eye aye sir.
They say eye aye sir. They sey ai ai s'r.
Thay say ie ie sur.
The first task of a new orthography is to disambiguate
three sounds.
Most of them do it but
There are three obscure vowels in English. Since two
are letter names, one would think
that simply marking them with a macron or by capitialization
would do the trick. It doesn.t
In a long passage, Unifon is ugly and the notations such
as Interspel that mark the obscure
vowels id not that transparent.
The problem with markers for the traditional long vowels
| age, pay, ache | a: | bäk bAk baek | män eik meik | |
| eel, | e: | bëk bEk | mën | |
| i.: | bïk bIk b'yk | mïk | ||
| ae | baek ba.k b'ek | maek mäk | ||
We can mark ei and ai, but
it really doesn't help that much. It looks odd and is still confusing.
There is not strong association.
bak is never going to look
like bake. This is the strong argument for RITE spell. Its
systematically wrong but it looks right.
liv live late lat laat lot
loot
Saundspel and reading/writing English instruction
What is the philosophy in a nutshell
Masha Bell did a good job., Should put that on a page.
