At some time in their lives, all eccentrics who spend a lot of time
reading must take on the doomed project of the orthographic reform of
their language. Occasionally this project is not doomed; for example,
if their scheme is backed by a king or revolutionary government, it
may have some chance of success.
There is a history of some of these successful attempts in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_reform and a catalogue of
fourteen unsuccessful attempts in English at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_reform.
So I am offering these suggestions for the orthographic reform of
English without any real hope that they have any chance of widespread
adoption, except perhaps through automated translation software.
Briefly, I advocate phonetic spelling, syllable blocks, boldface for
sentence stress, and syntactic layout.
1. Phonetic spelling. There's an existing, widely-understood phonetic
alphabet, used in almost all the dictionaries of the world except
for English ones; it's called the International Phonetic Alphabet,
or IPA. Continuing to write English in the impoverished Latin
alphabet, without even using accents as most other languages do,
wastes the time of countless generations of youngsters, who could
be spending their elementary-school days on algebra, music,
literature, art, or vocabulary, rather than spelling. So we should
write English with the IPA.
Of course, we would have to pick a standard pronunciation to use
for the phonetic spelling. I propose using the dialect of English
with the largest number of speakers: Indian English, with 350
million users. It may have the disadvantage that its phonology is
somewhat less complex than that of most American, English, and
Australian dialects, which may make it difficult to infer the
English (etc.) pronunciations for words from their spelling. But
this should be much less of a problem than at present.
George Bernard Shaw famously willed much of his estate to a failed
attempt to promulgate a phonetic spelling system for English. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian for details. Other famous
would-be English-spelling reformers include Benjamin Franklin,
Melvin Dewey, Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and Noah Webster.
2. Syllable blocks. Korea's Hangul is the only script to successfully
combine the easy skimmability of Chinese logograms with the easy
learning of phonetic writing systems. So the letters used in
writing English should be similarly arranged into syllable blocks.
I have the impression that Korean has very little inflection and
consequently fewer inflection-related vowel changes, so this may
not work as well for English as for Korean, but most words in
English do not have any inflection-related vowel changes either.
For example, I think the previous sentence contains none, and this
sentence contains only "think".
Note that, according to Wikipedia, although hangul was created in
the 1400s and promoted by the king, it didn't displace the
Chinese-character system until the 20th century; from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Other_names:
Until the early twentieth century, hangul was denigrated as
vulgar by the literate elite who preferred the traditional
hanja writing system[citation needed]. They gave it such names
as:
* Eonmun ("vernacular script").
* Amkeul ("women's script").
* Ahaekkeul or ahaegeul ("children's script").
* Achimgeul ("writing you can learn within a morning").
3. Boldface for sentence stress. This *convention* is already widely
used in *comic books*, in order to facilitate *comprehension*. I
*suspect*, but have no *proof*, that it could convey *much* of the
emotional *content* that is so often *misread* in *email* today.
Conveying emotions *clearly* with only *word choice* is a very
difficult *discipline*, the discipline of *poetry*. While poetry is
a *priceless part* of our cultural *heritage*, it is a *serious
problem* that communicating emotions *clearly* through email
requires *writing poetry*.
4. Syntactic layout. Rather than being divided into paragraph blocks,
text should be divided into lines according to phrasal divisions,
and indented to show the hierarchical structure of the phrases.
This is essentially universal practice for writing computer
programs, with the partial exception of assembly language, and has
been for decades, for the excellent reason that it makes the
programs dramatically easier to understand. Buckminster Fuller
called it "ventilated prose", and used it for the same reason, but
the unfortunate effect of his writing in this format was that his
work was often dismissed as "poetry":
Though the preparation for that mid-nineteen-thirties
presentation had been developed under the close observation of
the corporation's Director of Research, my final written
presentation of it was declared by the Direcdtor to be
incomprehensible. Disgruntled, I re-read it carefully and
returned to the Director saying, "Please listen to this," and
proceeded to read in spontaneously metered "doses" from my
manuscript. As I read I also watched for expressions of
comprehension on the Director's face. The Director pondered
each verbal dose, and when his face signalled "that is clear"
I would intuitively measure out the next portion. Finally, the
Director said, "Why don't you write it that way?" I said, "I
am reading directly and without skipping from my original
text"; so the Director said, "It just doesn't read that way."
The explanation was that the intuitive doses did not
correspond to conventional syntax.
When the re-written report was submitted, the Director said,
"This is lucid, but it is poetry, and I cannot possibly hand
it to the President of the Corporation for submission to the
Board of Directors." I insisted that it was obviously not
poetry, since both he and I knew how I had chopped up a
conventional prose report. The Director said, "I am having two
poets for dinner tonight and I will take this to them and see
what they say." He returned the next day and said, "It's too
bad --- it's poetry."
(That's according to
http://webhome.cs.uvic.ca/~vanemden/zzVentProse.html which has no
visible authorship information, but it is on Maarten van Emden's
home page, and it is supposedly a quote "from the preface of No
More Second-Hand God" by Buckminster Fuller, Southern Illinois
University Press, 1963.")
Here's an example, supposedly from "Intuition", via
http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9411&L=geodesic&T=0&P=5919
And wherever they came from,
The thoughts arranged in this book
Are discoveries
Of its author
Since he first came in 1913
To think
That nature did not have
Separate departments of
Mathematics, physics,
Chemistry, biology,
History, and languages,
Which would require
Department head meetings
To decide what to do
Whenever a boy threw
A stone in the water,
With the complex of consequences
Crossing all departmental lines.
Ergo, I came to think that nature
Has only one department --
And I set out to discover its
Obviously
Omnirational
Comprehensively co-ordinate system,
And thankfully found it.
Fuller's "ventilated prose" fails to take advantage of indentation.
More recently, a group of researchers have written software to
parse and automatically reformat text in this format, under the
name "Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting" or "Live Ink", and
conducted numerous experiments to measure its effect on
readability. They found that it improved readability
substantially. For more details, see
http://www.readingonline.org/articles/r_walker/ "Visual-Syntactic
Text Formatting", by Stan Walker, P. Schloss, C. R. Fletcher,
C. A. Vogel, & R. C. Walker, 2005-05, via Reading Online 8(6), ISSN
1096-1232; their software online at
http://phil.red-castle.com/cgi-bin/HtmlClipRead80.exe rendered
Fuller's text above as follows:
And wherever
they came from,
The thoughts arranged
in this book are discoveries
of its author since he first
came in 1913
to think that nature
did not have
separate departments
of mathematics,
physics,
chemistry,
biology,
history,
and languages,
Which
would require department
head meetings
to decide what
to do whenever
a boy
threw a stone in the water,
With the complex
of consequences
crossing all departmental lines.
The parsing contains some errors; this would be more accurate:
And wherever they came from,
The thoughts
arranged in this book
are discoveries of its author
since he first came
in 1913
to think
that nature did not have
separate departments
of mathematics,
physics,
chemistry,
biology,
history, and
languages,
which would require
department head meetings
to decide what to do
whenever
a boy threw a stone
in the water,
with the complex
of consequences
crossing all departmental lines.
There is considerable room for debate about the best layout for
English text; even for simpler languages like OCaml that are
traditionally written indented in this fashion, there is often some
ambiguity about the best way to format code. The basic principle,
though, is that the hierarchical structure of the sentences should
be reflected in a layout with the smaller parts of the sentence
indented further to the right.
These changes to English orthography would make English much easier to
learn, read, write, and even speak. But there is no chance that they
will ever be adopted, even if people came to believe that I was some
kind of super-genius; the obstacles to orthography changes are simply
too great.
