Friam

QRE: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

Classic

List

Threaded

6 messages Options

Nick Thompson

QRE: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

Dear Lee,

"Grrrr!" as you used to say. And "GRRRR!" again.

If my grand-children's teachers were to say, as they taught spelling, "You
think we are teaching you spelling, but actually we are teaching you the
history of the English language.", I might be less embarrassed. But the
chaotic orthography of English is taught without humor or irony. Your point
about dialects is interesting and characteristically Quixotic, but ....
irrelevant. If there were a rational standard English, children could be
taught variants, before going on trips or into history classes.

No, Lee. I am not shaken. I am a fascist through and through on this.
One nation; one spelling. You atavists can do your deadly work on these
children beginning when they are six; before that, I get them.

So, there! Nyaaah! Nyaaah! As we used to say when we were six.

N

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]]
Sent: Monday, February 24, 2014 5:46 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'; Nick Thompson
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames

Nick,

Don't apologize--take the tack that Wayne O'Neil took in his lexicographic
introduction to (at least the first edition of) the American Heritage
dictionary:
English spelling includes a *lot* of useful information about the history
and otherwise-hidden relationships of our words. (I'd quote some examples
but all our copies of that dictionary are on another floor and I'm too lazy
at the moment.) Teach the kids that spelling is a fascinating key to hidden
history! I'm sure they're smart enough to catch on to that, given the hint.
Make it a game!

As to "blatant irrationality":

English orthography is only "irrational" if (as you, despite my urgings,
appear to continue to believe) the single measure of "rationality" is
"faithfully reflects pronunciation"--meaning *your* pronunciation and not
necessarily that of the guys in the next state, or the previous
half-millennium. Think of all those "dropped Rs"
that most of our fellow Massachusettsians have in their non-rhotic speech:
would you really want your grandchildren to drop the "r"s from their
spelling when and if they move to the East Coast? What about the "wh"
digraph? In my dialect, the first sound in words like "what" and "when" is
aspirated (and the written "h"
shows that the dialect of the people who froze English spelling was, in that
respect, like mine--though now that aspiration is quite rare): "what"/"watt"
and "when"/"wen" are so-called minimal pairs in my speech. Witch side, in
your model of rationality, whins that match? ... And so on for all the many
other examples in all the many other dialects.

I admit that there are cases where more "phonetic" spelling would elucidate
facts about English grammar that are largely obscure. For instance, there
are
*two* verbs "have" in English (historically, of course, they're one verb):
the auxiliary "have" is pronounced either "v" (as in "I've been there") or
"haff" (as in "I have to go now"), while the true verb meaning "possess" is
pronounced "havv" (as in "I havv three copies of the American Heritage
Dictionary"). Similar statements apply to "used" and other auxiliaries.
Would *that* group of spelling reforms make you happier or sadder?

> Lee,
>
> I just want to be able to teach my grandchildren to write and spell
> without having to apologize every third sentence for the blatant
> irrationality of the language they are learning.
>
> N
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]]
> Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 6:57 PM
> To: Nick Thompson; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames
>
> Nick asks:
>
> > How come other people can standardize their spellings and we can't
> > standardize ours.
> >
> >
> >
> > Damn!
>
> Well, in the first place, the case of actual Spanish-as-she-is-spoke,
> including all its dialectal differences, isn't quite as clean as the
> official Castilian standard that Frank has cited. For instance,
> Galician is (I am assured) mutually intelligible with Portuguese
> (specifically, the dialect of Portuguese spoken in the nearby parts of
> Portugal), and Portuguese is famous for the difficulty of decoding the
> written language into (any of the many and various dialects of) the spoken

language.

>
> In the second place, two desiderata are incompatible. It is evidently
> desirable to many, including you, Nick, to be able to have a written
> language that encodes the spoken language in a faithful manner. But
> it is also desirable to many (including, I hope, you) to be able to
> read texts written in one's language in earlier periods, when the
> pronunciation is
> *very* likely to have been (often, *very*) different. In one European
> country (I forget which one; it was either the Netherlands or one of
> the continental Scandinavian countries) a fairly recent spelling
> reform, designed to fulfil the first desideratum, reportedly made
> texts from even a hundred years ago totally unreadable (in their
> original form) by modern schoolchildren.
> We can at least recognize Shakespeare--and certainly Dickens!--as
> writing in something like our English, even if many of his rhymes and
> jokes don't work for us. ("Busy as a bee" was a better joke when
> "busy" was pronounced as we'd pronounce "buzzy".)
>
>

Tom Carter

Re: QRE: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

Credited on the InterWeb to Mark Twain:

A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling:

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

Thanks . . .

tom

http://www.i18nguy.com/twain.html

On Feb 24, 2014, at 9:09 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Dear Lee,
>
> "Grrrr!" as you used to say. And "GRRRR!" again.
>
> If my grand-children's teachers were to say, as they taught spelling, "You
> think we are teaching you spelling, but actually we are teaching you the
> history of the English language.", I might be less embarrassed. But the
> chaotic orthography of English is taught without humor or irony. Your point
> about dialects is interesting and characteristically Quixotic, but ....
> irrelevant. If there were a rational standard English, children could be
> taught variants, before going on trips or into history classes.
>
> No, Lee. I am not shaken. I am a fascist through and through on this.
> One nation; one spelling. You atavists can do your deadly work on these
> children beginning when they are six; before that, I get them.
>
> So, there! Nyaaah! Nyaaah! As we used to say when we were six.
>
> N
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]]
> Sent: Monday, February 24, 2014 5:46 AM
> To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'; Nick Thompson
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames
>
> Nick,
>
> Don't apologize--take the tack that Wayne O'Neil took in his lexicographic
> introduction to (at least the first edition of) the American Heritage
> dictionary:
> English spelling includes a *lot* of useful information about the history
> and otherwise-hidden relationships of our words. (I'd quote some examples
> but all our copies of that dictionary are on another floor and I'm too lazy
> at the moment.) Teach the kids that spelling is a fascinating key to hidden
> history! I'm sure they're smart enough to catch on to that, given the hint.
> Make it a game!
>
> As to "blatant irrationality":
>
> English orthography is only "irrational" if (as you, despite my urgings,
> appear to continue to believe) the single measure of "rationality" is
> "faithfully reflects pronunciation"--meaning *your* pronunciation and not
> necessarily that of the guys in the next state, or the previous
> half-millennium. Think of all those "dropped Rs"
> that most of our fellow Massachusettsians have in their non-rhotic speech:
> would you really want your grandchildren to drop the "r"s from their
> spelling when and if they move to the East Coast? What about the "wh"
> digraph? In my dialect, the first sound in words like "what" and "when" is
> aspirated (and the written "h"
> shows that the dialect of the people who froze English spelling was, in that
> respect, like mine--though now that aspiration is quite rare): "what"/"watt"
> and "when"/"wen" are so-called minimal pairs in my speech. Witch side, in
> your model of rationality, whins that match? ... And so on for all the many
> other examples in all the many other dialects.
>
> I admit that there are cases where more "phonetic" spelling would elucidate
> facts about English grammar that are largely obscure. For instance, there
> are
> *two* verbs "have" in English (historically, of course, they're one verb):
> the auxiliary "have" is pronounced either "v" (as in "I've been there") or
> "haff" (as in "I have to go now"), while the true verb meaning "possess" is
> pronounced "havv" (as in "I havv three copies of the American Heritage
> Dictionary"). Similar statements apply to "used" and other auxiliaries.
> Would *that* group of spelling reforms make you happier or sadder?
>
>> Lee,
>>
>> I just want to be able to teach my grandchildren to write and spell
>> without having to apologize every third sentence for the blatant
>> irrationality of the language they are learning.
>>
>> N
>>
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
>> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]]
>> Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 6:57 PM
>> To: Nick Thompson; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames
>>
>> Nick asks:
>>
>>> How come other people can standardize their spellings and we can't
>>> standardize ours.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Damn!
>>
>> Well, in the first place, the case of actual Spanish-as-she-is-spoke,
>> including all its dialectal differences, isn't quite as clean as the
>> official Castilian standard that Frank has cited. For instance,
>> Galician is (I am assured) mutually intelligible with Portuguese
>> (specifically, the dialect of Portuguese spoken in the nearby parts of
>> Portugal), and Portuguese is famous for the difficulty of decoding the
>> written language into (any of the many and various dialects of) the spoken
> language.
>>
>> In the second place, two desiderata are incompatible. It is evidently
>> desirable to many, including you, Nick, to be able to have a written
>> language that encodes the spoken language in a faithful manner. But
>> it is also desirable to many (including, I hope, you) to be able to
>> read texts written in one's language in earlier periods, when the
>> pronunciation is
>> *very* likely to have been (often, *very*) different. In one European
>> country (I forget which one; it was either the Netherlands or one of
>> the continental Scandinavian countries) a fairly recent spelling
>> reform, designed to fulfil the first desideratum, reportedly made
>> texts from even a hundred years ago totally unreadable (in their
>> original form) by modern schoolchildren.
>> We can at least recognize Shakespeare--and certainly Dickens!--as
>> writing in something like our English, even if many of his rhymes and
>> jokes don't work for us. ("Busy as a bee" was a better joke when
>> "busy" was pronounced as we'd pronounce "buzzy".)
>>
>>
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Arlo Barnes

Re: QRE: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

While I certainly would not try making the US (or any Anglophone country) convert, I kinda like how post-year-20 English looks. A friend of mine made a conlang called v0tgil, which uses some of the same alterations.

-Arlo James Barnes

lrudolph

Re: QRE: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Nick:

> Nyaaah! Nyaaah! As we used to say when we were six.

In 1968, my then-girlfriend (long since become a Mad Bomber at Los Alamos--her
graduate degree was in astrophysics) provided what is has just now become fresh
evidence of something-or-other relevant to this thread: having learned that
expression only from books (no, she wasn't any kind of funny furriner; she was
a good Irish-descended girl from Maryland, who had gone to Mt. Holyoke before
graduate school at Columbia) she pronounced that as "nie-ah, nie-ah".

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Nick Thompson

Re: QRE: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

In reply to this post by Tom Carter

Tom,

That is, howlingly funny. Why does it look like Russian to me!?

Yes, you are right. That is exactly the sort of thing I had in mind.

Sign me,

Won ov xi ould doderez

Nik

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Tom Carter
Sent: Monday, February 24, 2014 12:25 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] QRE: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

Credited on the InterWeb to Mark Twain:

A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling:

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be
replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of
the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch"
formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling,
so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might
well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j"
anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5
doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing
vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it
wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" --
bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch",
"sh", and "th" rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl,
kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

Thanks . . .

tom

http://www.i18nguy.com/twain.html

On Feb 24, 2014, at 9:09 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>
wrote:

> Dear Lee,
>
> "Grrrr!" as you used to say. And "GRRRR!" again.
>
> If my grand-children's teachers were to say, as they taught spelling,
> "You think we are teaching you spelling, but actually we are teaching
> you the history of the English language.", I might be less
> embarrassed. But the chaotic orthography of English is taught without
> humor or irony. Your point about dialects is interesting and
characteristically Quixotic, but ....

> irrelevant. If there were a rational standard English, children could
> be taught variants, before going on trips or into history classes.
>
> No, Lee. I am not shaken. I am a fascist through and through on this.
> One nation; one spelling. You atavists can do your deadly work on
> these children beginning when they are six; before that, I get them.
>
> So, there! Nyaaah! Nyaaah! As we used to say when we were six.
>
> N
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]]
> Sent: Monday, February 24, 2014 5:46 AM
> To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'; Nick
> Thompson
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames
>
> Nick,
>
> Don't apologize--take the tack that Wayne O'Neil took in his
> lexicographic introduction to (at least the first edition of) the
> American Heritage
> dictionary:
> English spelling includes a *lot* of useful information about the
> history and otherwise-hidden relationships of our words. (I'd quote
> some examples but all our copies of that dictionary are on another
> floor and I'm too lazy at the moment.) Teach the kids that spelling is
> a fascinating key to hidden history! I'm sure they're smart enough to

catch on to that, given the hint.

> Make it a game!
>
> As to "blatant irrationality":
>
> English orthography is only "irrational" if (as you, despite my
> urgings, appear to continue to believe) the single measure of
> "rationality" is "faithfully reflects pronunciation"--meaning *your*
> pronunciation and not necessarily that of the guys in the next state,
> or the previous half-millennium. Think of all those "dropped Rs"
> that most of our fellow Massachusettsians have in their non-rhotic speech:
> would you really want your grandchildren to drop the "r"s from their
> spelling when and if they move to the East Coast? What about the "wh"
> digraph? In my dialect, the first sound in words like "what" and
> "when" is aspirated (and the written "h"
> shows that the dialect of the people who froze English spelling was,
> in that respect, like mine--though now that aspiration is quite rare):

"what"/"watt"

> and "when"/"wen" are so-called minimal pairs in my speech. Witch
> side, in your model of rationality, whins that match? ... And so on
> for all the many other examples in all the many other dialects.
>
> I admit that there are cases where more "phonetic" spelling would
> elucidate facts about English grammar that are largely obscure. For
> instance, there are
> *two* verbs "have" in English (historically, of course, they're one verb):
> the auxiliary "have" is pronounced either "v" (as in "I've been
> there") or "haff" (as in "I have to go now"), while the true verb
> meaning "possess" is pronounced "havv" (as in "I havv three copies of
> the American Heritage Dictionary"). Similar statements apply to "used"

and other auxiliaries.

> Would *that* group of spelling reforms make you happier or sadder?
>
>> Lee,
>>
>> I just want to be able to teach my grandchildren to write and spell
>> without having to apologize every third sentence for the blatant
>> irrationality of the language they are learning.
>>
>> N
>>
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
>> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]]
>> Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 6:57 PM
>> To: Nick Thompson; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames
>>
>> Nick asks:
>>
>>> How come other people can standardize their spellings and we can't
>>> standardize ours.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Damn!
>>
>> Well, in the first place, the case of actual Spanish-as-she-is-spoke,
>> including all its dialectal differences, isn't quite as clean as the
>> official Castilian standard that Frank has cited. For instance,
>> Galician is (I am assured) mutually intelligible with Portuguese
>> (specifically, the dialect of Portuguese spoken in the nearby parts
>> of Portugal), and Portuguese is famous for the difficulty of decoding
>> the written language into (any of the many and various dialects of)
>> the spoken
> language.
>>
>> In the second place, two desiderata are incompatible. It is
>> evidently desirable to many, including you, Nick, to be able to have
>> a written language that encodes the spoken language in a faithful
>> manner. But it is also desirable to many (including, I hope, you) to
>> be able to read texts written in one's language in earlier periods,
>> when the pronunciation is
>> *very* likely to have been (often, *very*) different. In one
>> European country (I forget which one; it was either the Netherlands
>> or one of the continental Scandinavian countries) a fairly recent
>> spelling reform, designed to fulfil the first desideratum, reportedly
>> made texts from even a hundred years ago totally unreadable (in their
>> original form) by modern schoolchildren.
>> We can at least recognize Shakespeare--and certainly Dickens!--as
>> writing in something like our English, even if many of his rhymes and
>> jokes don't work for us. ("Busy as a bee" was a better joke when
>> "busy" was pronounced as we'd pronounce "buzzy".)
>>
>>
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe
> at St. John's College to unsubscribe
> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Robert J. Cordingley

English Spelling was Re: QRE: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

In reply to this post by Tom Carter

For more research into the origins of the Twain piece see The English
Spelling Society;
http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j31/satires.php
and review the irregularities
http://www.spellingsociety.org/spelling/irregularities
Nick might like to join them
http://www.spellingsociety.org/membership/lists.php
and browse the Kids Corner
http://www.spellingsociety.org/kids/index.html
Robert C

On 2/24/14 12:24 PM, Tom Carter wrote:
> Credited on the InterWeb to Mark Twain:
>
> A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling:

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com