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An alphabet represents to the eye the sounds of a language by means of written symbols. It follows that in the most rational alphabet - (1)
Every simple sound will be associated with a single distinct symbol, and
The Roman alphabet provides a very legible and distinct set of characters. It just doesn't provide enough of them: 5 letters for 12 vowels. While there is a shortage of vowel letters, the difficulty of our present English spelling lies not so much in any of the inherent defects of the Roman alphabet as in our irrational use of it. -Sweet paraphrased The immediate practical questions of Spelling or Orthographic Reform are - sounds be best represented? If we exclude new letters as impractical, we are obliged to either fall back on digraphs or two-letter combinations, such as th and ch, or to merge phonemes. The obvious objection to digraphs is that they can violate the principle of denoting every simple sound by a simple sign. [ITA avoided this by making digraphs such a ch into ligatures and thus a single symbol] Digraphs representing diphthongs are another matter. There is nothing wrong with using two letters to represent a blend of two simple sounds. What we want to avoid is unpronounced or silent letters. There is a problem when one of the letters is a silent or used as a marker. In NS [nu speling] poet is pronounced /poat/. In SP, poet would be pronounced /paw-eht/. /pou-et/ would be spelled poeet in NS. The letter string, poeet, would have two different pronunciations in NS depending on the syllable division: poe-et or po-eet. As with most northern European languages, English has 12 simple [uncombined] vowel sounds. Latin had 10 simple vowels [and 5 vowel letters] so those who adopted the Latin alphabet often had to augment it. The Saxon augmented Latin alphabet is shown below: The representation of the obscure mid lax vowel
or schwa in Saxon was almost as ambiguous as it is today. e
could be interpreted as either [eh] or as an unstressed è
[uh]. The unstressed à [uh] had the same schwa pronunciation.
The ash [æ] is the most obvious addition
to the Latin alphabet. The extended e [listen to sweete]
and extended æ are no longer used
in English. In the chart, the [ee] position is used for the vowel
in *her. Maroon
type indicates that the passage is written in Saxon-SPanglic.
Saxon-Spanglic (SP) is won of several world english (winglish) proposals tu restor alfabetic spelling. SS restors the original Saxon ogmented Latin alfabet tu unshift the vowels found in many English word pronunciations. This set of grafim-fonim (letter-sound) corespondences is yusd tu pronounce or sound out each letter in a werd. The result is a new dialect of English that is neither GA [general american] nor RP [british]. Saxon is easy to read since so few words are respelled, the phonemic version requires an adjustment. Only thos words that cannot be understood when sounded out ar respeld. The effect of this simpl reform is tu mak English wonce again clos tu 90% fonemic and consistent. SP allaus twu sounds per spelling so ther is yusually som ambiguity. Thus f=v / f, v=v/'a, s=z / s, -ce=ts/se, si=si / shi, w=w/'u, o=aw/ow, ow=/ou/ *owld bowt, a= ah / uh / ae. The 1755 spelling conventnions that SP drops include the silent e, the magic e, ph for f, g=j, a-=awe. Dobl consonants ar retained at sillabl boundaries hwer the root vowel is short. Spelling
reformers
typically want to spell according to the pronounciation guide in the dictionary.
This phonemic approach respells over 60% of the words as shown below.
It can be done but why bother except in the pronunciation guide?
Ambigious Spanglish [2 sounds /letter] is easier to read than accent clarified
Spanglish.
The addition of markers and diacritics may remove ambiguous pronunciation but it makes the text more difficult to read and less like traditional spelling. Compare the above to "...iz won ov sevral world english proposals tu restor alfabetic spelling." A little ambiguity [up to 2 related sounds per letter] is OK. 1.
Today's English orthography [TO] is only 40% alphabetic.
In the early 1800's, Noah Webster remarked, "Letters, the most useful invention that ever blessed mankind, lose a part of their value by no longer being representatives of the sounds orignally annexed to them." The effect is, "to destroy the benefits of the alphabet." Webster was aware that there was a time in English history when the language had a functional alphabet. Tenth century clerics devised a Latin based alphabet for English that made it possible to spell words as they were pronounced and pronounce words as they were spelled. This and ease of learning are the principle benefits of alphabetical writing systems. Could the restoration of the benefits of the alphabet be as simple as restoring the Saxon alphabet? Could the usefulness of the alphabet be restored by restoring the sounds originally annexed to the letters? That is the guarded conclusion of at least two spelling-pronunciation reform proposals: See Englisc. A spelling pronunciation [SP] reform differs from a phonemic reform. Instead of referencing a particular dialect, the reference is to traditional spelling. This kind of reform minimizes the number of words needing to be respelled by creating an artificial dialect that can be understood by all English speakers. Some have argued that you cant restore a sound based alphabet because English has too many dialects. The SP proposal gets around this objection. Only words that cannot be understood when pronounced according to the Saxon alphabet are respelled. The proposed reform brings pronunciation more in line with international pronunciaton and spelling more in line with international spelling. On the negative side, pronouncing words as they are spelled results in a strage dialect of English. To some it sounds something like a Middle English dialect. To others, it sounds like a foreigner trying to pronounce English words according to international conventions. For example: IDEA = ee-dey-ah rather than ai-dih-uh. The proposed reform results in at least three scripts or notations: a slightly modified traditional spelling (26 letters), a broad phonemic spelling (merged phonemes- 26 letters, 26 symbols) and a narrow phonemic spelling (26-33 letters, 34 symbols). The eight new symbols that can be used to extend the character set and reduce ambigity are all ASCII based [ae, 'a 'e 'i 'o 'u 'r o' 'v ] and available in Latin 1 [æ à è ì ò ù 'r ó û ]. SPanglic looks something like English written in a Spanish orthography. One could justifiably call it restored English alphabetic spelling or New Saxon because it is nearly identical to the system used when English speakers first adopted the Roman alphabet. The great vowel distortion aka The Great Vowel Shift Around 1400 (the end of the Middle English period), many words started to be pronounced in untraditional and unalphabetic ways. Linguists often call the change systematic and natural but not all words were affected. Some words retained their traditional pronounciation while others changed. AS hus had already been respelled hous by Norman French scribes. Around 1400 the pronunciation changed from /hu:s/ to /haus/ /hæ+ùs/ In SPanglic, house /haw-uus/ does not have to be respelled since its Saxon pronunciation is close enough. Phonemic Saxon would spell the word the same as IPA, haus. By the mid 9th century, England had a near perfect sound based spelling system known as West Saxon Standard. Old English (850-1060 AD) was written in a church Latin inspired alphabet in a way consistent with how it was pronounced in the 10th century. Anglo Saxon used grapheme-phoneme correspondences almost identical to those shown in the Spanglish vowel table. In the augmented Latin alphabet, each Roman letter was associated with a specific sound. The six vowel letters were associated with two sounds - the long and short version of the vowel. The letter [a] referenced the Roman /a/ sound [ah]. A new letter had to be added to reference the Saxon ash. The ash [æ]* provided a way to reference the sound that differed from the Italian A. When England adopted the
Roman alphabet (8th century),
they also adopted the sounds associated with the letters. To make
a 5 vowel alphabet work with a language that had 12 vowels, the Latin alphabet
was augmented. The West Saxon standard (ca. 900
AD) added several runic letters for the missing sounds.
The West Saxon alphabet had 6 vowel letters, each letter had a long and
short pronunciation as shown below:
By the 10th century, English had a highly consistent spelling system known as the West Saxon standard. The sounds that corresponded to the letters A E I O U were ah, eh, ee, awe, oo. If these letter sound correspondences were fully restored, English could once again have a functioning alphabet. Spanglish does not look like Old English because English words are not pronounced the same as they were before the Norman conquest (1066 AD). Spanglish, however, is built from the same basic set of grapheme-phoneme correspondences as Old English. This is what is being restored.
Instead of retaining the old correspondence table, the English speaking world has retained many archaic spellings. By doing so, the relationship between spelling and pronunciation has been all but lost. English went from being over 90% phonemic to being less than 40% phonemic. [proof]. The ability to spell a word is directly related to its phonemic accuracy - especially for children during the first 4 years of schooling. [K. Spencer] Restoring the alphabet makes spelling-pronunciation possible. Instead of 20 sounds per vowel letter there would be only two. Spelling pronunciation does not exactly duplicate any particular dialect. In some cases the dialect resembles Middle English because this is the way some words are spelled. It slightly distorts the pronunciation of some words, [for example -- ox becomes aux] but the distortion or mispronunciation is not so great as to prevent understanding. Many historical spellings are from Middle English. When these words are not respelled, their spelling pronunciation approximates Middle English. [time /ti:m' / is pronounced team] There are some historical spellings that do not make sense or that would make more sense if misleading letter[s] were removed. For example, [gh] is no longer pronounced in any contemporary dialect of English. Thus, the spelling pronunciation of <through> would be nearly unintelligible. The spelling pronunciation of [thru], however, exactly duplicates current pronunciation. There are 12 pure vowel phonemes in present day English. A complete alphabet would need 12 vowel letters. In addition to the 12 uncombined sounds, there are at least 12 vowel combinations. Using the Saxon, the combination of sounds is represented by the combination of letters. ai = ah + ee [the vowel in eye] The Spanglish proposal is to limit the sounds associated with vowel letters to two and to substitute new letters in traditional spellings [TS] only when the spelling pronunciation of TS cannot be understood. This approach has some fuzzy edges or boundaries since the degree to which a spelling pronunciation of a word can be understood in context varies. An alphabet is a consistent set of relations between the way a word is pronounced and the way it is spelled. In other words, in an alphabetic system, words that rhyme are spelled the same. Spanglish does a much better job of attaining this alphabetic ideal than TO. Across all English dialects, there are two ways to vocalize the word DAY. The vocalic sound in DAY can therefore be spelled two ways ay /ai/ or ey /ei/ [ah-ee or eh-ee]. Both Spanish and English orthographies prefer a y in the terminal position to mark a syllable boundary . Since the pronunciation of the traditional spelling, DAY /dah-ee/, is understandable, Spanglish does not require respelling. The only time the respelling of [day] would be required in a broad romic notation would be in a dictionary pronunciation guide where the objective was to represent a particular dialect such as General American [GA]. day /dey/ [GA] Notice that in Spanglish each letter is pronounced and the same notation is used for both quasi traditional spelling and for phonemic spelling. Except for H, there are no silent letters in Spanish or Spanglish.
The development of number words illustrates how pronunciation changes over time. According to the linguists, all of these pronunciations developed from a common pronunciation. Around 500 A.D., Anglo Saxon, Dutch, Danish, and German number pronunciations were almost identical. The word for [one] was ahn or ehn (an, en). If the word [one] is pronounced as spelled, aw-nuh, it is still close to the Anglo Saxon word [an]. The French influenced silent e was added around 1200 when the Spelling was typically [onne] so the pronunciation probably remained about the same: /ahn/. Indo European Number Words - At one time they were all pronounced the same...
Today over 600 million people in the world speak a Latin based language. More than double that number use a Latin based alphabet with Latin letter sound values. In Latin, a vowel letter has one sound which is also the letter's name. Except for the vowels the letter names are not all that much different from English. English speakers have disroted or shifted the original Latin vowel letter soundsThe vowel sounds.
To maintain the alphabet, when the pronunciation of words change, the spelling has to change.
In a related example, ice used to be spelled is and pronounced /i:s/ [ees]. After the Battle of Hastings (1066) scribes spent most of their time writing Norman French which unlike Saxon, had a highly illogical spelling system. These scribes tended to write English in a French way [Scragg, 1974]. is started to be spelled ice around 1200 A.D. Later, during the great vowel shift the pronunciation of the word changed to /ais/. Instead of respelling the word again to reflect this change in pronunciation, the spelling remained the same. English became populated with words that were spelled one way an pronounced another. England standardized their word spelling around 1755 with the publication of the first popular dictionary. No attempt was made to standardize below the word level so FIVE became one of many ways to spell the vowel in /faiv/. Before this time some people probably spelled it FYV. This vowel spelling stuck with sky, fly, and my but not with five and ice. The great vowel shift took place around 1400 when the six long vowels began to change their values in a systematic way. Chaucer would have pronounced the middle vowel in time like that in modern team. see would have sounded like say, fame like farm without the R, so like saw, and do like doe, and now like naw-oo. The great vowel shift resulted in a major barrier to intelligibility between middle and modern English. As illustrated in the chart of number words, changes in pronunciation over a 200 year period are not unusual. Other languages have coped with it and retained their alphabet by making corresponding changes in their spelling. This might have been relatively easy in the early 1800s when Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster recommended that we follow the reforms that were taking place in the orthographies of other European languages. Franklin and Webster thought this was the only chance we had of preserving what was left of our alphabet. SPanglic or Spelling Pronunciation Anglic uses the Saxon alphabet and only respells traditionally spelled words when they cannot be pronounced. The spelling pronunciation does not have to be perfect, just close enough to be understood. Unfamiliar words would be spelled the way they were pronounced rather than historically. As a result, students would still mispell some words. The difference is that most students would spell unfamiliar words the same way. When students use invented spellings, there can be 14 or more different spellings. SPanglic is systematic but not very phonemic since there are usually two sounds associated with a letter. To eliminate this ambiguity, diacritics can be added. This makes it possible to use basically the same notation for a pronunciation guide. Since 80% of the words are spelled historically and every word can be pronounced, SPanglic is very easy to read aloud. The dialect may be a little odd, but completely understandable. Known words can be and probably will be converted to their regional pronunciation as with TES. Phonemic Saxon, a related notation, is just another analog or isomorph of IPA [the International Phonetic Alphabet] - there is a one to one correspondence between the two notations. As a result Phonemic Saxon respells 60% of the words in the dictionary. Phonemic Saxon would be used as a pronunciation guide and all pronunciation guides respell at least 60% of the words. Most people using this parallel notation would probably read in SPanglic and write in Saxon. It is relatively easy to use a phonemic notation to spell a word as you pronounce it. There are three more pages
on Please send questions to Steve Bett
http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vangogh/555/Spell/sitemap-l.html wordlist
http://www.egroups.com/files/saundspel/saxon-spanglish.html |
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In
English, most of the pronunciation shifts affected the vowels. Words
such as fif /feefv/ began to be pronounced /faiv/. One of
the middle English spellings for /feefv/ or /fi:v
/
was FIVE.
After the 14th century vowel shift, this old spelling became associated
with the new pronunciation /faiv/.
