Take a look at the way children spell as they are learning to write. The majority of mistakes they make are actually the logical spelling of words based on how they sound ;-)
True but the problem with that is that we will then have to change the spelling every time the pronunciation changes. For example in America:
"solder" should now be spelled "soder" or "sodder"
"mirror" should be spelled "murrr" (or some such, I can never catch that American pronunciation.)
"Smile" should be spelled "***". Oh wait, it is.
And so on.
Now imagine we have to adapt the spelling to the pronunciation of all the other English speaking people of the world, India, China, God forbid Australia and so on.
Soon we are in a world of a hundred different languages derived from English all diverging constantly and before long they won't understand each other in speech or writing.
Children of the future would love that.
P.S. I have never understood why people who program computers are often so insistent on the idea that sloppy spelling, grammar and punctuation is quite OK.
They will say things like "It doesn't matter you understand me anyway"
Well, no, sometimes things are so careless I don't or it takes a few readings to make any sense of it. I'd say it's rude to expect me to work so hard.
Programmers deal with programming languages where everything has to be just right or the program fails. Human languages are far more tolerant in expression but why the rapid defense of being really poor at it?
Just treat me like a compiler, make an effort to get your spelling and grammar right and I might stand a chance of understanding you. Things will move along more smoothly and quickly anyway.
You've got a point about all the different pronunciations creating some problems for standardized spelling of words. On the other hand I think English as spoken in the US and Canada has become more homogeneous as a result of radio and television. Yes, there are still regional accents and some differences in pronunciation, but they seem to be converging rather than diverging.
On the spelling and grammar front I have to agree with you 100%. Some of it is so bad that reading anything they write makes me wince. The saddest thing about that is that the worst offenders were born and raised English speakers.
Interesting, over in Blighty I see no diminishing of regional accents and certainly the British population has been glued to TV for decades. In fact Britain is regaining whole languages. Welsh for example has blossomed in my lifetime.
I do agree with you about the sate of literacy among the Brits. State education was appalling when I was subjected to it. It only seems to have gone down hill since then.
If people are like compilers, most need more options to control their output and many I know need "-verbose" removed completely!
Present company excluded, of course!
What's interesting about British and US spelling differences is that they are largely the result of the efforts of Noah Webster. His "Webster's English Dictionary" and "The American Spelling Book" were a vehicle to advocate his ideas about spelling reform of words like colour versus color. It caught on because of an underlying mood within the US of self consciously separating itself from Great Britain.
I agree that within the US regional accents have diminished noticeably in my lifetime, and most notably among younger speakers. In general the inland North and Midwest dialects are expanding their range, while the southern and coastal dialects are becoming more muted. For example I have an inland north accent and I say "park my car" while older speakers in the Boston area are nonrhotic and say "pahk my cah". But among younger speakers the accent has generally become rhotic and sounds more like inland north dialect. When I travel to the south I've noticed a similar effect with the southern drawl.
Here's a fun video of Amy Walker who's an actress doing her 21 different English accents:
Many of them are close, but you can tell she's putting on an accent, but some of them are spot on.
...
Here's a fun video of Amy Walker who's an actress doing her 21 different English accents:...
That's amazing. I could detect only the slightest slips in some of her US accents. Most amazing is her ability to switch so quickly from one to another. Even her eyes change from one accent to another.
I've always been puzzled by the Boston accent - why the R gets dropped from words like "car," but then ends up at the end of words like "idea."
I've always been puzzled by the Boston accent - why the R gets dropped from words like "car," but then ends up at the end of words like "idea."
"I have no idear where we pahked the cah."
That's called intrusive R (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrusive_R) and occurs in many non-rhotic varieties of English. The non-rhotic US east coast accent is supposed to be due to immigration from the British isles after the non-rhotic accent developed there (generally post 1800). The US inland North dialect is more indicative of how English was spoken in the UK prior to 1800, but I probably won't convince Heater of that.
"The pronunciation of educated Americans is in many respects more archaic than that of educated Englishmen." This should be no surprise, he said, since "the phonetic basis of American pronunciation rests chiefly on the speech of Englishmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries." And those Englishmen sounded much like the Americans of today. The "English accent" that we now associate with educated British speech is a relatively new phenomenon and didn't develop until after the American Revolution.
Whatever happened to that nice American speech we used to get in all those old black and white movies?
That's an interesting story in and of itself. That was a cultivated dialect called Mid-Atlantic English (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_English ) which was taught in prep schools and used by stage actors. It was never a regional dialect and no one grew up speaking like that. It was supposed to make you sound posh, but fell into disuse post 1960. I actually like it too, but speaking like that now would make people think you're a lunatic.
Mid-Atlantic English? How can you have a regionally spoken dialect that designates its location as the middle of the ocean? or two disimilar regions blended together?
I thought it was just a term for a cross-over of what the Beatles and the Rolling Stones produced phonologically in lyrics due to adopting rhythm and blues influences from the USA.
Neither fish nor fowl.. can't swim and won't fly.
It is kind of like Esperanto, a language which everyone envisions... but nobody knows.
Yes, but Spanish is a different language. You are right that Americans will never get back to spelling colour the English way, and so I just wish they would stop calling their language English.
American English is an open language. It is perfectly acceptable for it to use 'color' from Spanish and Won Ton from Chinese. Besides, the USA doesn't have any official language.
If Americans stopped calling there speech English, what would those Aussies have to do?
American English is an open language. It is perfectly acceptable for it to use 'color' from Spanish and Won Ton from Chinese.
Well the British actually started this as English language is a creole language. It's a mixture of a Germanic language (Old English) with French after the Norman invasion. An enormous number of words in the language are loan words from other languages, and follow pronunciations rules from the language of origin, not the rest of the language. The word garage for example is a classic French loan word. It's my understanding that the words bungalow and shampoo are Hindi loan words from when India was part of the British empire.
Aye, the gudde ole days before English was corruptified bye the skoudrels of the vorld:
A cook they hadde with hem for the nones
To boille the chiknes with the marybones,
And poudre-marchant tart and galyngale.
Wel koude he knowe a draughte of londoun ale.
He koude rooste, and sethe, and broille, and frye,
Maken mortreux, and wel bake a pye.
But greet harm was it, as it thoughte me,
That on his shyne a mormal hadde he.
For blankmanger, that made he with the beste...
I had been resisting the temptation to bring up Chaucer so thanks for that.
English of course is a dog's breakfast mixed up of ingredients from the French, the Germans, the Vikings, Arabic, Latin, Hindi, God knows what.
And now it is feeding back on itself with influences from American English, Australian English and so on. How else on earth could such an abomination as "wysiwyg" get into the Oxford English dictionary or the perversion of "gay" from it's original meaning?
What is this about an "open language"? All languages are mutable all the time. Sometimes people try to lay down the law, usually a conquering power or such, but it does not work as they would like.
And what's this about the USA not having an official language? I'm sure you guys converse with your tax collectors in English or perhaps Spanish and such. Try to deal with them in Welsh and find out what "official" means.
I guess I should clairify what I mean by an 'open language'
First, phonetic spelling is not stanardized. In Spanish, if you can say right, you can spell it right; and vise vera. But in English, the vowel sounds are a horrible mess. There are somewhere between roughly 24 and 26 vowel sounds represented by roughly 105 combinations of a, e, i, o, u; and sometimes y and w.
So, the spelling side of a British standard spelling is just as unpredictable as the American side.
And English is open to accepting words from any foreign language that can be spelled in the manner that that culture might choose to phonetically represent its phnology with a through z.
For instance, Al Qaida in the Gulf of Aqaba. Whatever happened to 'u' following 'q'.
Both the U.K. and American spell Paris similar to French, but pronunce violently apart from the French.
+++++
If we go to the other side of the planet and want to discuss movie actresses in Chinese, Ni Ke Jin Man is their proper phonetic translation for Nicole Kiddman. (Poor Arnold Schwartzeneger gets hit even worse.)
Chinese is a phonentically closed language without a genuine phonetic spelling that allows phonology from foreign words and names to creep in. So poor Nicole is sliced, diced, and butcher to fit the available phonology. Chinese has to translate both their phonologic representation and the written representation of every foreign term that manages to get into their language... just inserting a spelling with a to z confounds the average Chinese reader... they don't know where to begin.
Japanese lies somewhere inbetween with both Chinese characters representing Japanese and a Japanese phonology character scheme, but is mostly closed; and so is Korean even though their characters represent only the phonology
Try to program a 'universal translator' across these barriers and you just might die from frustration.
++++
I hadn't consider the possiblity before. But if English was considered to originate as a creole; it might just be best to accept that it is still a creole.
If find it very curious that the story of Tower of Babel is merely one short paragraph in the Bible. So much of the world presumes to understand other cultures via their translators.
Comments
True but the problem with that is that we will then have to change the spelling every time the pronunciation changes. For example in America:
"solder" should now be spelled "soder" or "sodder"
"mirror" should be spelled "murrr" (or some such, I can never catch that American pronunciation.)
"Smile" should be spelled "***". Oh wait, it is.
And so on.
Now imagine we have to adapt the spelling to the pronunciation of all the other English speaking people of the world, India, China, God forbid Australia and so on.
Soon we are in a world of a hundred different languages derived from English all diverging constantly and before long they won't understand each other in speech or writing.
Children of the future would love that.
P.S. I have never understood why people who program computers are often so insistent on the idea that sloppy spelling, grammar and punctuation is quite OK.
They will say things like "It doesn't matter you understand me anyway"
Well, no, sometimes things are so careless I don't or it takes a few readings to make any sense of it. I'd say it's rude to expect me to work so hard.
Programmers deal with programming languages where everything has to be just right or the program fails. Human languages are far more tolerant in expression but why the rapid defense of being really poor at it?
Just treat me like a compiler, make an effort to get your spelling and grammar right and I might stand a chance of understanding you. Things will move along more smoothly and quickly anyway.
"Two countries divided by a comman language." Isn't that what Churchill said about England the the U.S?
-Phil
Mirra, Mirra, onda woll
whodda fairest av dem awl?
Where do you get that endless supply of not so beautiful images from?
And how do you sleep at night with all that swirling around your brain?
You've got a point about all the different pronunciations creating some problems for standardized spelling of words. On the other hand I think English as spoken in the US and Canada has become more homogeneous as a result of radio and television. Yes, there are still regional accents and some differences in pronunciation, but they seem to be converging rather than diverging.
On the spelling and grammar front I have to agree with you 100%. Some of it is so bad that reading anything they write makes me wince. The saddest thing about that is that the worst offenders were born and raised English speakers.
I do agree with you about the sate of literacy among the Brits. State education was appalling when I was subjected to it. It only seems to have gone down hill since then.
Present company excluded, of course!
How about "-o /dev/null" ?
My daughter is in the "-i /dev/null" stage!
I agree that within the US regional accents have diminished noticeably in my lifetime, and most notably among younger speakers. In general the inland North and Midwest dialects are expanding their range, while the southern and coastal dialects are becoming more muted. For example I have an inland north accent and I say "park my car" while older speakers in the Boston area are nonrhotic and say "pahk my cah". But among younger speakers the accent has generally become rhotic and sounds more like inland north dialect. When I travel to the south I've noticed a similar effect with the southern drawl.
Here's a fun video of Amy Walker who's an actress doing her 21 different English accents:
Many of them are close, but you can tell she's putting on an accent, but some of them are spot on.
That's amazing. I could detect only the slightest slips in some of her US accents. Most amazing is her ability to switch so quickly from one to another. Even her eyes change from one accent to another.
I've always been puzzled by the Boston accent - why the R gets dropped from words like "car," but then ends up at the end of words like "idea."
"I have no idear where we pahked the cah."
That's called intrusive R (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrusive_R) and occurs in many non-rhotic varieties of English. The non-rhotic US east coast accent is supposed to be due to immigration from the British isles after the non-rhotic accent developed there (generally post 1800). The US inland North dialect is more indicative of how English was spoken in the UK prior to 1800, but I probably won't convince Heater of that.
Of course it depends on whose English you are referring too. I doubt the range of varied accents in Britain was less in that time than it is now.
Whatever happened to that nice American speech we used to get in all those old black and white movies?
Unfortunately the best I can offer is this New York Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/books/chapter-origins-of-the-specious.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 which contains the quote below from a linguist.
That's an interesting story in and of itself. That was a cultivated dialect called Mid-Atlantic English (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_English ) which was taught in prep schools and used by stage actors. It was never a regional dialect and no one grew up speaking like that. It was supposed to make you sound posh, but fell into disuse post 1960. I actually like it too, but speaking like that now would make people think you're a lunatic.
I thought it was just a term for a cross-over of what the Beatles and the Rolling Stones produced phonologically in lyrics due to adopting rhythm and blues influences from the USA.
Neither fish nor fowl.. can't swim and won't fly.
It is kind of like Esperanto, a language which everyone envisions... but nobody knows.
American English is an open language. It is perfectly acceptable for it to use 'color' from Spanish and Won Ton from Chinese. Besides, the USA doesn't have any official language.
If Americans stopped calling there speech English, what would those Aussies have to do?
Well the British actually started this as English language is a creole language. It's a mixture of a Germanic language (Old English) with French after the Norman invasion. An enormous number of words in the language are loan words from other languages, and follow pronunciations rules from the language of origin, not the rest of the language. The word garage for example is a classic French loan word. It's my understanding that the words bungalow and shampoo are Hindi loan words from when India was part of the British empire.
A cook they hadde with hem for the nones
To boille the chiknes with the marybones,
And poudre-marchant tart and galyngale.
Wel koude he knowe a draughte of londoun ale.
He koude rooste, and sethe, and broille, and frye,
Maken mortreux, and wel bake a pye.
But greet harm was it, as it thoughte me,
That on his shyne a mormal hadde he.
For blankmanger, that made he with the beste...
I think your example has already been corrupted by foreign tongues!
Maybe this?
I had been resisting the temptation to bring up Chaucer so thanks for that.
English of course is a dog's breakfast mixed up of ingredients from the French, the Germans, the Vikings, Arabic, Latin, Hindi, God knows what.
And now it is feeding back on itself with influences from American English, Australian English and so on. How else on earth could such an abomination as "wysiwyg" get into the Oxford English dictionary or the perversion of "gay" from it's original meaning?
What is this about an "open language"? All languages are mutable all the time. Sometimes people try to lay down the law, usually a conquering power or such, but it does not work as they would like.
And what's this about the USA not having an official language? I'm sure you guys converse with your tax collectors in English or perhaps Spanish and such. Try to deal with them in Welsh and find out what "official" means.
First, phonetic spelling is not stanardized. In Spanish, if you can say right, you can spell it right; and vise vera. But in English, the vowel sounds are a horrible mess. There are somewhere between roughly 24 and 26 vowel sounds represented by roughly 105 combinations of a, e, i, o, u; and sometimes y and w.
So, the spelling side of a British standard spelling is just as unpredictable as the American side.
And English is open to accepting words from any foreign language that can be spelled in the manner that that culture might choose to phonetically represent its phnology with a through z.
For instance, Al Qaida in the Gulf of Aqaba. Whatever happened to 'u' following 'q'.
Both the U.K. and American spell Paris similar to French, but pronunce violently apart from the French.
+++++
If we go to the other side of the planet and want to discuss movie actresses in Chinese, Ni Ke Jin Man is their proper phonetic translation for Nicole Kiddman. (Poor Arnold Schwartzeneger gets hit even worse.)
Chinese is a phonentically closed language without a genuine phonetic spelling that allows phonology from foreign words and names to creep in. So poor Nicole is sliced, diced, and butcher to fit the available phonology. Chinese has to translate both their phonologic representation and the written representation of every foreign term that manages to get into their language... just inserting a spelling with a to z confounds the average Chinese reader... they don't know where to begin.
Japanese lies somewhere inbetween with both Chinese characters representing Japanese and a Japanese phonology character scheme, but is mostly closed; and so is Korean even though their characters represent only the phonology
Try to program a 'universal translator' across these barriers and you just might die from frustration.
++++
I hadn't consider the possiblity before. But if English was considered to originate as a creole; it might just be best to accept that it is still a creole.
If find it very curious that the story of Tower of Babel is merely one short paragraph in the Bible. So much of the world presumes to understand other cultures via their translators.