Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I don't really understand what you're proposing. It is indeed traditional terminology to identify 5 "long" and 5 "short" vowels in English. They are the sounds that are regularly spelled _VC and _VCE, where V represents the particular vowel you're talking about, C is any consonant, and E is the letter E. (For example, you have a "short E" in "bet", which ends in _eC, and a "long E" in "mete", which ends in _eCE.)

The fixed word-final E that marks "long vowels" has the special name "silent E". (If it's not word-final, it won't appear at all. Thus "mating" has a silent E overridden by the -ing that follows it, and in order to spell a "short A" in the same context you need to divorce it from the following syllable by doubling the syllable-final consonant: "matting".)

But you can't use this as a basis for English spelling reform, because - to choose only the most obvious problem - English uses a lot more than 10 vowels.

So, when you write réad, am I supposed to understand /ɹi.æd/, a two-syllable word with a long E followed by a short A? When you write "had a", am I supposed to understand that both words are pronounced with identical vowels? When you write "lives", am I supposed to understand that this is a two-syllable word in which the first syllable contains a short I and the second contains a short E?

What problem are you trying to solve? How would you spell "put"?

Phonetic spelling reform in English seems intractable due to regional accents and resistance to change. There’s no point in trying.

But it would be possible to add minimally invasive context to the ambiguous spellings which are a big road block to the billion+ people learning English as an additional language from mostly text-based sources.

This could be done by adding a single accent and not modifying any existing spellings, so that accented words can always be cast down to ASCII only and they’ll still be valid pre-reform spelling. It wouldn’t solve the question of phonetics but it would help non-native speakers understand how words are meant to be pronounced because there’s almost always just two reasonable options for a given word or syllable in its context.

So “put” is still put. There’s nothing that could be disambiguated with an accent for this word.

Well, again, what problem are you trying to solve?

It sounds like your reform is specifically targeted at people who already know English and are therefore aware that "lives" has only two candidate pronunciations, neither of which is more than one syllable long.

But people like that don't need help. The reason there are only two pronunciations of "lives" is that one is the regular plural of the noun "life" and one is the regular pres-3sg form of the irregularly-spelled verb "live". Anyone who's aware of the two words should have absolutely no trouble determining whether a word in an English sentence is a noun or a verb!

But your scheme will do nothing for people who aren't already very familiar with English, because it does nothing to indicate the pronunciation of the word being spelled. It limits itself to reminding the reader which of two options was desired. The spelling isn't what was restricting you to two options. (Also, you added an accent to the word "she", where there was only one option to begin with.)

Note also that an accent is already used in formal written English to disambiguate between written vowels that might or might not be pronounced at all: thus you have learned and blessed (one syllable, verbs or participles) and learnd and blessd (two, adjectives).

> So “put” is still put. There’s nothing that could be disambiguated with an accent for this word.

Of course there is. "Put" does not use any of the ten vowels traditionally described as "short" or "long". It still has a vowel in it. It still theoretically needs to be disambiguated from the vowels of "hut" and (according to you, though English spelling rules don't really allow for ambiguity here) "hoot". Accents can do whatever you want.

I think they tried to make a compromise with the closer to phonetic transcription they could get with the least invasive spelling change they could impose. Not something 100% accurate

I actually like this proposal

Reply on news.ycombinator.com