Je 09.47 ptm 2007.01.21, Steve RICE skribis

>If it helps, think of our relation to Esperanto in general as being 
>like that of the spelling reformers and language cops compared to 
>all English speakers.

There's some slight quantitative difference between the two. The 
arguments of the Esperanto spelling reformers of today come down to 
saving people the five minutes necessary to install "Ek" in their 
Windows-based computers (well, fifteen minutes for the 
technologically handicapped, to whom I increasingly feel that I am 
coming to belong). (*) The arguments of the English spelling 
reformers are aimed at saving native speakers the approximately 400 
hours (from my own experience) (**) that they spend in grade school 
learning (to some degree or another) to spell English properly. (***)

Qualitatively, however, neither group has much of a chance of success 
in its efforts. (****)

There is, by the way, a cogent argument against spelling reform in 
English, recently raised by Alan Mendelawitz of Australia in the 
discussion list of the Akademio de Esperanto. English spelling (with 
minor variations) is fairly constant across all variants of English, 
most particulary American, British and Strine. On the other hand, 
differences in pronunciation can be pretty strong (and getting 
stronger; nowadays when I watch a modern British movie or TV series, 
such as "Doctor Who", on American television I find myself 
increasingly in need of turning on the subtitles so that I don't miss 
something important; and I once lived in Britain for five years, and 
at that time, a third of a century ago, noticed no such problems). 
Mendelawitz points out that the writing system, however illogical it 
may be, like the traditional Chinese ideograms (*****) serves as a 
unifying factor across such dialects, and that what might serve as a 
spelling reform for one dialect would be pretty useless for another, 
and would destroy this unity of writing. (The same argument was 
raised years ago by Mario Pei, who suggested that a necessary 
prerequisite for spelling reform in English would be the decision to 
adopt some standard variant of English across the world.)

---

(*) In principle, there's nothing wrong with the current system (in 
which you can spell a word when you hear it and recognize, when 
hearing it, a word that you've only previously seen; whereas, 
according to Rossetti's witty formula, with English when you hear a 
word you have to peruse your dictionary to find out how it's spelled 
and when you see a word you have to go to the dictionary to find out 
-- with the help of supersigned letters! -- how to pronounce it).

(**) Half an hour a day, five days a week, nine months a year, first 
through sixth grades. Well, it seems to have worked ... mostly. 
Though I suppose I should also give some credit to my parents, who 
taught me to read a year or so before I entered kindergarten.

(***) It's been a while, but I often hear about the ongoing conflict 
between proponents of "phonics" and proponents of what I believe is 
"whole word" spelling as means of teaching spelling. In Esperanto, of 
course, phonics would win hands-down; but its problem in English is 
that, while it works very well for, for instance, most words borrowed 
from the Romance languages, those words aren't in the vocabulary of 
even a ten-year-old, and for the core words of the English language, 
where spelling is much less systematic, phonics is not quite as 
successful as a way of teaching spelling. For instance, I vaguely 
remember that it was hard for me as a three- or four-year-old to 
understand that the E on the end of words was almost never a phonetic 
symbol at all, but simply an indicator that some preceding vowel was 
to be pronounced "long" (i.e., usually diphthongized, not "long" in 
the usual linguistic meaning of the word).

(****) Latest enthusiast for Esperanto spelling reform -- the first 
I've seen in some months -- is a gentleman from Portugal who started 
posting about spelling reform in the list for Greek Esperanto 
speakers (!), but, getting no joy there, transferred his attentions 
to the Academy of Esperanto discussion list, where sympathy for him 
also seemed to be somewhat lacking. Also, today I read three back 
issues of the French literary Esperanto magazine "La Gazeto" from 
early last year, where buried among articles about the Prussians (a 
people who spoke a Baltic language, not German) and Prince Teng's 
Tower in Nanchang I found a couple of letters pushing the NHA (Nova 
Helpa Alfabeto), which, however, now seems to be a dead issue since 
those pushing it have legally dissolved their organization, and 
which, despite some support from the editor of the magazine, has 
never been used in the magazine itself ...

(*****) The Chinese ideogrammatic reform of the fifties has caused 
some problems along these lines; I once asked a co-worker from 
Singapore to translate for me an article from a mainland Chinese 
magazine that was partly about me, and she begged off on the grounds 
that she couldn't understand all the new ideograms in the article. 
One of the results of the change is that Chinese literature from as 
long as two thousand years ago or more has been traditionally more 
readable for modern Chinese than Chaucer, for instance, is to use; 
but in two or three generations this will no longer be the case. 
(Though it should be fairly simple, in this computerized age, to 
simply convert this ancient literature to the new writing system -- 
simpler than translating Chaucer into modern English.)


-- Don HARLOW
http://www.webcom.com/~donh/don/don.html
Opinions (in English): http://www.harlows.org/don/opinions/
Esperanto (in English): http://www.harlows.org/don/esperanto/
Literaturo (Esperante): http://donh.best.vwh.net/Esperanto/Literaturo