If you graduated before they implemented this or aren’t American, the system they started to use to teach kids how to read is called three cuing. They teach kids to identify unknown words by guessing based on clues in pictures with the sentences, what word would ‘make sense’, and whether the answer they came up with looks right based on the first letter.
As you may have noticed, none of that is reading a word. These are strategies that borderline illiterate people will use to try to understand words, and for decades it’s been the method used by many schools across the country.
So that person you’re arguing with online who keeps going off on bizarre rants barely related to anything you said might not be a troll, they might just be functionally illiterate due to having never been taught to read. Yaaay!
Here’s the comment I made last time this idea popped up in a thread:
Even if we were to adopt something like the Shavian alphabet, it would only work for a few generations at most until sound change and dialect divergence built up enough to once again strongly divorce spelling from pronunciation. Not to mention the fact that it’s impossible to come up with a phonetic* alphabet that accounts in a useful way for dialect differences, even just in American English.
This has already happened with hangul, probably the paradebeispiel for successful intentionally designed phonetic systems: spellings that were once phonetic (though, again, in only certain dialects) have now become conventional due to sound change.
So, in addition to the dialect problem, you’d end up having to either completely replace the alphabet again every hundred or so years, or you’d be right back where we currently are. Plus, interventions into the spelling system will a) make older publications harder to read without mass-translating them all into the new systems every few decades which b) will create reading difficulties for the generations that end up having to switch with each new update.
Not to mention the fact that spelling things the way we currently do preserves etymological information (though imperfectly) about the words in question.
That isn’t to say our current system is perfect, but rather that any such system is arbitrary, and will eventually become conventionalized either way without active, persistent intervention that comes with its own significant downsides.
*Used here in the lay sense, not the linguistic sense
When that happens, you just do a rechtschreibreform.
As a Spaniard this is bonkers. We have dialects but everyone is taught how each letter sounds and that hasn’t changed in a long while. Even when there have been changed, there’s a central institution that records them. Our language is consistent withing it’s ruleset. It’s crazy how inconsistent English is. Just don’t change the sounds each letters do, why is it so hard?? It’s so weird.
If someone wants to pronounce a word differently (not shorten, just straight up different) hit’em with a stick and yell them to speak properly at school. Ffs.
Your comment shows an ignorance of how language works.
As a Spaniard you should know that a) Spanish is one of the most diverse modern languages, and b) it has seen a large number of structural changes in both pronunciation and grammar since even Cervantes’ Early Modern Spanish.
Spanish spelling also follows general etymological principles, and has similar inconsistencies with English for the same reasons, though it doesn’t have as many sources for loanwords, and so it doesn’t have quite as many subregularities in its orthography as English does.
Languages don’t care whether there’s a “central institution” recording it, because language is constantly negotiated between speakers, and so we will continue to see exactly the same sort of divergence of arbitrary orthographic practices from pronunciation that we see in English, along with all of the already-existing dialectal differences.
/c/badlinguistics
There’s a difference between a spoken dialects existing and everyone being taught as a kid how to sound letters the same way. There exists a unified way of speaking the language in Spain that if you do everyone understands you.
About the link you linked on inconsistencies with written to spoken.
Then it describes inconsistencies that don’t exist in Castilian. In Castilian X is always ks, using x as sh is something only done in regional dialects or languages. They even use Mexican as an example when in Spain Spanish, it’s written and pronounced Mejicano and Méjico, with the hard J that our grammatical rules would force you to say when reading that word. We now use the x to write Mexico but that’s similar to how in English you now write Türkiye, because it’s a given name and for respect. Same for Ximenez, I believe that’s in Catalan/Valencian and they do pronounce it as sh, but that’s another language now is it? In Spanish that surname is written and pronounced Jimenez.
Sure, having a common ruleset doesn’t help when negotiating /s
The fact that y’all have so many loan words that make your everyday life and you have to learn in a case by case basis of how each word is “supposed” to be pronounced is crazy. In Spanish and other similar Latin based languages we automatically know how to pronounce words we have never heard because the language is unambiguous from written to spoken, no one will look at you weird or tell you you spelled stuff wrong if you follow the ruleset. We even have the ` to indicate the syllable that needs to be stressed so that it’s obvious for a reader how to pronounce words.
Yeah the language has changed, sure. But dismissing a central organization that records them and maintains a strong ruleset that incorporates changes is silly.
Nothing beats shorthand. Gregg Centennial is the most versatile. Capitalism is why shorthand barely praxis today.
cc @abbiistabbii@piefed.blahaj.zone
A quick look at Gregg shorthand and I’m not too sure how it would work. I mean it’s great shorthand but as an everyday writing system on things like signs and books it fails because a lot of the glyphs look the same.
Avatarian does a similar thing but with distinct glyphs and putting them into blocks creates something that can be considered symbols for easier reading, especially considering the most common words tend to be the shortest.
if you’ve ever used an abudiga, you were already shorthanding. Gregg was designed for over a 100 years to abudiga IndoEuropean phonetics. What “signs” do you see incapable of being abudigad? Entire libraries already came and went in Gregg.
I’ve read Bryan Konietzko’s conlang. I am literally a conlang.
I just prefer logograms over abjads.