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From Robert A. Hall Jr's book, Leave Your Language Alone!:
"Correct" spelling, that is, obedience to the rules of English spelling as grammarians and dictionary makes set them up, has come to be a major shibboleth in our society. If I write seet instead of seat, roat instead of wrote, or hite instead of height, it makes no difference whatsoever in the English language, i.e., in my speech and that of others around me; yet we are all trained to give highly unfavorable reactions to such spellings, and to be either amused or displeased with people who know no better than to "misspell" in such a way. This shibboleth serves, as does that of "correct" speech, as a means of social discrimination: we can class people among the sheep or the goats according as they measure up to the standards we set in spelling. Spelling which is more nearly in accord with speech, and which we might logically expect to be considered better than the conventional spelling, thus comes to be not praised, but blamed. Spelling "phonetically" comes equivalent to spelling incorrectly. I once came across a reference to "phonetic" pronunciation, which at first puzzlerd me, since pronunciation can by definitions never be anything but phonetic; it later turned out that the writer was referring to inaccurate pronunciation of a foreign language, such as French est-ce que vous avez "have you?" pronounced in a way which he transcribed ess-ker-vooz-avay. He had come to use the term "phonetic" as equivalent to "incorrect", through the folk use of the term phonetic spelling in the meaning "incorrect spelling".
And before anybody accuses Professor Hall of being some whinging gauchiste from Bolshevik U. trying to destroy the majesty of the English language, I would remind him that he received his doctorate at the University of Rome in 1934, and was quite sympathetic to Italian Fascism.
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Good for Prof. Hall! What's right is right, and what's incorrect, isn't. I would argue with him on two points, though: 1.) Yes, we can judge people based on how well or poorly they spell; but not everybody does; 2.) I don't think I can agree at this point with his statement, pronunciation can by definitions never be anything but phonetic : I thought phonetic meant that you base your pronunciation on the way a word looks--which means I would never pronounce my friend dgeigh's name as Jay, based on phonetics alone.
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It's all the fault of the Brits! They started it ! What can you expect of a group that pronounces the name Cholmondley as Chumley .. I mean....c'mon!  
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It's all the fault of the Brits!
Interestingly enough, all alphabetic writing systems start out, more or less, by transcribing sounds phonetically (or more accurately, phonemically). But, as I and others have constantly said, language changes. Unfortunately, some societies treat their orthographies more conservatively than others do, and as the years pass you get whacky spelling systems like the English, French, Gaelic, or Tibetan, where the actual sounds of the language and how they are written get more and more out of sync.
For the record Cholmondley was probably pronounced closer to its spelling about a thousand years ago.
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I've thought since high school that we should have and use a phonetic alphabet. However, it's silly to think that this is directly related to class or that correct spelling amounts to a "shibboleth." This is the sort of idiotic nonsense I've come to expect from some of the modern critics.
(This reminds me of the blather a few years ago about why black students weren't performing at math. See, there's this conspiracy against them. We have numbers like thirteen which makes no sense, but in the chinese system they say one 10 and three! See! that makes all the difference in the world! )
The article assumes that everyone who is a poor speller is necessarily good at spelling phonetically. I doubt very much that this is the case. Spelling is not the major issue - it's vocabulary and thought process.
A while back I read an interview with Edward Braithwaite - the guy who wrote "To Sir, With Love." I can't recall the details, but he was appalled at the poor vocabulary of students he met on campus (at Howard University). The problem isn't that these students couldn't spell, it's that they don't know their own language.
Problems don't get solved by wishful thinking, magical incantations, sloppy scholarship or dumbing things down. There is no guarrantee that any particular problem will ever get solved. But one thing I feel confident in saying is that problems don't get solved by accident. And another is that problems don't get solved until they get defined correctly. In that brief extract, it seems Mr Hall is content to give us a pole and excitedly point us to the side of the pond where we can find the plentiful red herring.
k
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we can judge people based on how well or poorly they spell
But we risk ignoring good resources if we do so indiscriminately. We need look no further than our own ledasdottir, of troy. Her spelling is atrocious, at times bordering on the incomprehensible, yet few here could hope to match the breadth of her knowledge.
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Nah, I can always understand Helen. I will say, though, that I hope I didn't cause offense to anyone with that statement. It is my opinion that someone who demeans another over something like that is in truth demonstrating that they feel inferior.
Everybody has something they can contribute for the betterment of the world; and nobody can be perfect in all things.
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totally off-topic, but the schwa disappeared in Fald's subject, replaced by a "no character" square. anybody else getting that?
formerly known as etaoin...
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totally off-off-topic: you meant jheem's subject line, right?
and yes, I'm getting that (in both IE and netscape)
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