The dictionary pronunciation of POTATO is  /p'-'tei-tou/
The same phonemes in Spanglish would be  pateytow

In New Spelling (circa 1910) "potato" was spelled  P O E T A E T O E
the silent e was used as a long vowel marker. /ou / was always spelled [OE]

Truespel, another reform orthography, spells POETTAETOE  almost the same way.  The double T indicates that the stress is on the 2nd syllable.

RES (Restored English Spelling) spells it POATAYTO.
RES uses positional spelling, the [owe] sound in the terminal position is spelled O.
This works for SILO and GAZEEBO but now for follow  [faalo].

Spanglish spells [potato] according to the spelling guide in the dictionary PATEYTOW  or  Pateyto or Pateyta
where [a] refers to the schwa sound.  [Alt. p'oteytow]
Spelling pronunciation can live with potaato [paw-tah-taw]

Thus Dan Quayle's spelling is not all that inacurate.  The final vowel should be a long vowel.

The trouble with spelling is that there are too many orthographic options. Potatoe is one of the options.  In fact, since the final O is a long vowel, there is a certain logic to Dan Quale's spelling.
The sounds of English are not linked with specific predictable spelling patterns.

Here is another alternative spelling of potato:
 

If GH     stands for    P   as in  Hiccough If OUGH stands for   O  as in  Dough If PHTH  stands for   T   as in  Phthisis If EIGH   stands for  A  as in  Neighbour If TTE    stands for   T  as in  Gazette If EAU    stands for  O  as in  Plateau then  POTATO could be spelled: GHOUGHPHTHEIGHTTEEAU

[enouGH] + [wOmen] + [moTIon]

English simply has too many orthographic options. 

One simple pronunciation should be spelled in no more than 5 different ways.
In ideal phonemic or alphabetic code, one simple speech sound would be spelled one and only one way. In the traditional English writing system, each sound is spelled an average of 14 different ways and most words have 1000's of different possible spellings.  [read How many ways can you spell DAY?]

The problem with Shaw's GHOTI as an alternative spelling for FISH is that English spelling does have a few positional rules .  These rules would preclude using GH in the initial position for the /F/ sound or TI in the terminal postioin for /Sh/. Of course, equally wierd ways of spelling FISH would be allowable.  e.g., PHOSH  [more]

Dan Quayle /daen kweil/ argued that if all the poor spellers in the US would vote for him he would be assured victory.  He had no problem letting all of the good spellers vote for his opponent because there were not that many of them. 

Quayle's spelling of POTATO was almost consistent with the New Spelling proposal that was promoted by the simplified spelling society in the early 1900's and which became the foundation of the Initial Teaching Alphabet [ITA] in the 1960's.

Dan Quayle was not the first politician who had trouble spelling.  When someone criticized President Andrew Jackson's spelling, he retorted that it was an unimaginative man who could not spell a word more than one way.   George Washington used many variant spellings but he lived before the dictionary
became the standard for spelling.

McLuhan argued that an alphabet could be learned in less than 40 hours.  Quayle's mispelling indicates that for most people, the English spelling system [only 40% alphabetical] is still a mystery after 40 years. 

The English spelling system does not provide a reliable guide to pronunciation and knowing the pronunciation of a word is no guarantee that one can guess the historical spelling in the dictionary. As a code, English orthography gets an F.  It is "the worst spelling system in the world" according to the literacy expert, Frank Laubach. 

English spelling, as the illustrations show, allows too many orthographic options.  Most of the options overlap as shown in the poem Chaos.  Words that are spelled the same, e.g., beard and heard do not rhyme. The memory task is about ten times as difficult as it needs to be.  It is nearly ten times as difficult as the transparent orthographies of Spanish and Italian. 

English spelling is too complex.  In 1755 it was regularized at the word level but not at the syllable or letter level.  and complicated.  There are no rules without exceptions.  This makes it very easy to get crossed up.  There are at least 14 ways to spell toe, tow, to, toa, teau, ...

One solution would be to have a parallel spelling sytem that would spell according to the dictionary pronunciation guide.  This could be achieved, for instance, by adopting a modified Spanish/Latin orthography for English [See spanglish].  To eliminate alternative pronunciations, existing spelling pronunciation could be the guide.  TOMATO = Taw-Mah-Tow not Tow-Mey-Tow.

Tow-Mey-Tow would be spelled T'OMEYTOw.
 

Visit these related pages on applied linguistics and rationalized spelling

nU @lfabets for EGliS

x simplifYd speliG sOsYeti

american litRasi kWnsL

simplifYd speliG E-list spelling ring

other buttons:  OZideas  sbett@saundspel.zzn.com 
writing systems ring

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Commentary:

What word might we spell GOLOBCH without transgressing 
the "rules" of conventional English orthography?

Answer: JERK -

G /j/ as in MARGARINE
OLO /ur/ as in COLONEL
B /nothing/ as in DOUBT
CH /k/ as in CHRISTMAS

What is the penalty for spelling the /F/ sound consistently?

Syllabary page

Masha rote, in response to Toms list of <F> for /F/ :

 No wunder I found onely 8 (11) words with 'misspelt'  f
 amung the 3000 most common wuns:

  Enough  Phone (telephone)  laugh (laughed laughing)   Rudolph
  philosophy  rough  tough  phrase  photographs.

 Makes 'consistent spelling of the F sound'  not sumthing
 tu put intu a limited but worthwile erly reform package,  I think.

 Not worth provoking much likely verry clever vennom
 for so litl benefit.

There is/was a difrnt filosofy behind the <F> for /F/ proposal
wen first put forwrd than behind that wich Masha proposes.

Masha is concerned with making chanjes that will make the life of lernrs
esir as soon as posbl, and thus starts with words that giv the most trubl to them.
A laudbl aim.

The <F> for /F/ was put forwrd as a 'startr,' a chanje that was esy,
relativly acceptbl as it was ofn alredy used, especialy in ads and industry names,
and not too big. Somthing to get us startd, and establish the patrn of chanje.
Anothr laudbl aim.

Its the priority of these difrnt aims that needs to be setld,
rathr than whethr <F> for /F/ is a betr chanje than, say, regulrizing long E sounds.

Allan

Steve, 

 The sad truth about this event in US political
 history is that it was almost certainly a put-up job
 by a spelling bee official who orchestrated it.  It
 worked because it gave a highly politicized press
 and electronic media the excuse it wanted to apply
 the label "dumb and unintelligent" to a Vice
 President who had done his job with much more
 intelligence and evenhanded political skill than his
 successor has since demonstrated.

 Jim Kanzelmeyer
 

The West Saxon Standard - Englisc   a æ e i o u 'r èr long ah eh-ah eh-ey eel awe-oh hoop her short ago æsh ej-edge ill awe* hook othèr accents à  æ è  ì ò ó ù à è

..

Why make such big changes as A=ah, I=eel, O=awe, U=ooze?  The main reason is that this set of correspondences allows learners to use spelling pronunciation.  Pronouncing all A's as ah produces understandable results.  Pronouncing Ha /ha/ as Hay /hei/ doesn't quite work.  In Saxon, [hate] is pronounced hah-tuh not heit.  [hat] is a sound between ha and heh which uses a new letter [æ]  Pronouncing all o's as awe unless in the terminal position also works better than other alternatives.

To fully restore the English alphabet, only two sounds can be associated with each vowel letter.

Rhyming Dictionary http://rhyme.lycos.com/r/gwic.cgi?Path=shakespeare&Word=potato
Find occurances in the works of Shakespear
----

Valerie,

Good answer.  I can't disagree with your position.

I think we have talked before about publicizing a series of research questions and sending them around to various schools of education.  Given the number of silly research questions, this would be a potential benefit on several levels.

So what are the key questions that we think need to be researched?

What kind of spelling system meets the needs of children?
What is the impact of "dumbed down" or "simplified" spelling?
What is the sociology of resistance to modifications of the spelling system?

What do you think about RES/QED as an initial teaching medium?  It is basically a narrower version of interspel.  The advantage is that it is fully systematic and predictable.  Its distadvantages are (1) it is not phonemic or fully alphabetic, and (2) it is complicated.

Physicists have gotten around the resistance of reviewers who don't fully read or fully understand what is being presented in a research paper.  They have a preprint service to which they submit a paper that is properly indexed but not peer reviewed.  The paper stands on its own merits - not the biases of a reviewer/gatekeeper.  Those who are interested in the topic will respond almost immediately by email generating lively discussion.  These are usually much more productive than any discussion with a reviewer who may be basically uninterested in the approach or the topic.

The preprint may be submitted to a scholarly journal and published a year later.  The paper journal is little more than an archiving service since by the time the research is published, it is old news.
--

On Sat, 22 May 1999 16:46:16   Valerie Yule wrote:
>Steve
>I hav not yet fully read your reply
>but here is one imediat comment:
>
><I am hesitant to endorse research as the road to success>
>It is not THE road to success altho it can arouse
>peple's consiusness about spelling and its reform.
>
>What I realy want mor reserch about is what sorts of
>spelling can realy meet the needs and abilities of all sorts
>of users and lernrs.  The ideal spelling is no mor garanteed
>to do this than the 'ideal' government or utopia is
>garanteed to take acount of what peple can cope with.
>
>Thanks for your magnanimous comment:
>I made a few comments before actually reading the paper.  Let me now comment on
>what was written rather than what I assumed was going to be written.
>
>I suffer a great deal from submitting papers to revewers who comment on what
>they think I would hav ritn rathr than what I actualy hav ritn!  Modrn
>litracy-teaching methods
>encuraj this prior-gessing - it is not exactly prejudice but it is as
>destructiv!
>Perhaps a new word is needed - pregessing?
>best wishes and thanks for reading it.  I look forward to reading proprly what
>u hav ritn.

What do you think about RES/QED as an initial teaching medium?  It is basically a narrower version of interspel.  The advantage is that it is fully systematic and predictable.  Its disadvantages are (1) it is not phonemic or fully alphabetic, and (2) it is complicated.   ò ò

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