[famous spelling error] After viewing some flash cards where toe was the keyword for the /ou/ sound, a student was asked to spell potato.  The student spelled it correctly but V.P. Quayle suggested potatoe. [more] [spelling test]
[more inventented spellings: what does GHOUGHPHTHEIGHTTEEAU spell?] 

[pronunciation error] President Clinton addressing Navy dignitaries aboard a new cruiser referred to the front of the ship as the bow [rhyming it with slow rather than cow]. [SB] I am not sure if this was an offhand remark or something read from notes.  Spanglish: [bau of a ship, bo in reference to how we tie a ribbon] [heterographs]

[pronunciation error] British Member of Parliament Hyde in his address to parliament pronounced [cacophony] as /cack-o-phoney/ [more detail].   Would the error have been made if we used pronunciation guide spelling such as Spanglish where the word is spelled [cacoffany] or IPA [k@ 'kof @ ni]? 

Pronunciation guide spelling would eliminate gaffs of this type. [more]  In fact, these errors would not be made if the English writing system were more phonemic and all words were spelled as they are pronounced.  About half of the words in the dictionary do provide a guide to pronunciation.  All of them could if they were spelled according to the rules governing the consistent half.  [see RITE]

RITE is a proposal to respell nearly half of the words in the dictionary.  SPANGLISH is a proposal to teach a parallel pronunciation guide spelling.  No major change would be made in the traditional system until most people had mastered pronunciation guide or alphabetical spelling. The initial changes would be with respect to words that cannot be pronounced according to the alphabet such as the "ughly" words: through, though, thought.  The replacements are already recognized variant spellings [thru, tho, thot/thawt].  See the [o] in English spelling.

"Potatoe" and other English spelling irregularities  -  history -  jokes

The dictionary pronunciation of POTATO is  /p'-'tei-tou/
The same phonemes in Spanglish would be  pateito
In U2 it would be  pctAtO 

In New Spelling (ca 1910) "potato" was spelled P O E T A E T O E
..where the silent e was used as a long vowel marker. /ou / was always spelled [OE] 

Truespel, another reform orthography, spells POETTAETOE  almost the same way.  The double T indicates that the stress is on the 2nd syllable. This effectively makes the initial [oe] an unstressed vowel similar to schwa.

RES (Restored English Spelling) spells it POATAYTO.
RES uses positional spelling, the [owe] sound in the terminal position is spelled O. 
This works for SILO and GAZEBO but not for follow  [Sp. faalo]. 

Spanglish spells [potato] according to the spelling guide in the dictionary P A T Ei T O  or pateita
where [a] refers to the unstressed schwa sound.  [M-Webster p&'tAt&] &= schwa

Thus, Dan Quayle's spelling is not all that inaccurate.  There is no need to mark a terminal vowel since it has to be free and long.  The terminal [e] is unnecessary.  The traditional system sometimes marks them anyway [fallow].

The final vowel in POTATO is a free vowel [not a short checked vowel].  If the pronunciation was /p&'tAto/, it could be assumed that the final vowel was either an unstressed O or an unstressed mid lax vowel. 

Only free vowels can occur at the end of a word in the English writing system so the only reason to mark the vowel would be to distinguish it from another free vowel.  A terminal O sound can also be found in words such as slow and follow where a marker is used.  slo and follo would be sufficient.  In one syllable words, a silent e is added to distinguish the word from o used as [u].  to toe tow towing towed - Spanglish: tu to to towing towd

English created a problem for itself when it adopted the practice of changing u's to o's.  The pronunciation of  to changed to tu.  It then became necessary to mark terminal o's to distinguish them from u's.  e.g., tow or toe.  In Saxon, [the writing system for Old English] to would be pronounced taw or tow.  [more] 

The trouble with spelling is that there are too many orthographic options. Potatoe is one of the options but it is used only in the plural Potatoes .  In fact, since the final O is a long vowel which is usually marked in words with fewer syllables [low,  follow, foe, toe], there is a certain logic to Dan Quale's invented spelling. 
The sounds of English are not linked with specific predictable spelling patterns. The better writing systems such as the ones for Italian and Spanish are over 90% predictable.  If you how to pronounce a word, you know how to spell it.  English is about 40% phonemic and 40% predictable.  There are patterns and regularities in English.  If you know the regularities then you have an 85% chance of spelling a word correctly in four tries.  Several writers have equated this with 85% predictable. 

For instance, if you knew that the most economical spelling would be used and where the syllable breaks were in POTATO, the spelling would be almost 100% predictable:  po-ta-to.  Any verb that terminates a syllable is long so the most economic spelling would be potato.  pot-a-to would require a different pronunciation.  'paa-t&-tO

The most logical spelling would indicate primary stress:  potayto.

Other words ending with a long-O sound [oh] are not as economic.   follow should be spelled follo.   The w vowel [a short u] usually adds nothing.  The w is a syllable boundary marker and also indicates rounding. The double consonant [ll] indicates that the stress is on the first syllable and that it has a short vowel.  

aloe would be allo if it followed pattern of shallow and had the most economic spelling.  If pronounced as spelled, aloe would be similar to alone [Spanglish aloan].  According to the Merriam Webster dictionary pronunciation guide aloe = /@ 'lO/.  In Menuspel  / uh-low /

The chart on the blow lists all 14 of the pure vowel sounds of English.  The 5 short vowels are I E AE ^ [turned A] and U and. 

The International Phonetic Alphabet - vowels

The Sounds of English By 1900, linguists had isolated the sounds of English speech.  The consonant sounds were relatively straight forward.  The vowel sounds were complicated by the fact that the writing system tries to represent 14 pure vowels with 5 letters.  It can be done with digraphs if these are used consistently.  As the English writing system evolved, however, the consistent use of written symbols declined.

As can be seen in this phono-graphic alphabet:  With a symbol for every sound in the language, there are almost as many vowels [yellow cells]  in English as there are consonants [green  cells].  The chart lists 18 with a couple of the unstressed vowels [A & Y marked in white] merged with their stressed counterpart. Some pure vowel, ei and oa are shown as diphthongs due to the shortage of vowel letters.  The 3 true diphthongs or blends are in the beige colored cells: ai, oi, ou. This list of 42 phonograms includes two redundant ones [C] and [X].  c = k or s and x = ks or gs. egsammpl - the pronunciation guide spelling of [example]

The Complete Alphabet 42 phonograms not 26

In English there is some confusion between two free vowels: [aloe alow/shallow allow].  To avoid code overlap, Spanglish always spells law and [all] as [law and ol] and low and [oat] as [lo and oat], and cow and [out] as [cau and out].  The first spelling is the terminal spelling. The second is the marked spelling used before a consonant to distinguish the free vowel from a short vowel.  [allow] would be spelled alau and [aloud]  wold be spelled aloud. 

Pronouncing the word [allow] as spelled would produce [ael-lo] or [Al]+[low] with the stress on the first syllable. 

While [low] is spelled [lo] in Spanglish.  The w is used to indicate plural and past tense of the root word: ro rowz rowing rowed.  This preserves the distinction between rose [roaz] and rows [rowz] which can be lost in purely sound based notations such as Truespel where both words would be spelled [roez]. 

Advocates of truespel would argue that there is no distinction in speech between rose and rows so there should be no aversion to creating homophones in writing. 

There is a distinction in speech between arrows and arose [SS arrowz aroaz] and this is captured in the truespellings [airoez and urroez].

bow and arrow [SS bo and arro] is truespelled [boe and airoe]
bow of a boat [SS bau av a boat] is truespelled [bou uv u boet]

A bow and arrow or crossbow was mounted on the bow of the boat.
A bo and arrow or crosbo waz mounted on the bau av the boat.
U boe and airoe or crausboe wuz mountid aun thu bou uv thu boet.
across acros ukkraus

More Inventive Spellings

Here is another alternative spelling of potato:

GHOUGHPHTHEIGHTTEEAU

If GH     stands for P   as in  Hiccough If OUGH stands for   O  as in  Dough If PHTH  stands for   T   as in  Phthisis If EIGH   stands for  A  as in  Neighbour If TTE    stands for T  as in  Gazette If EAU    stands for O  as in  Plateau then  POTATO could be spelled: GHOUGHPHTHEIGHTTEEAU

What does GHOTI spell?
 
 

GHOTI spells fish

[enouGH] + [wOmen] + [moTIon]

English simply has too many orthographic options. 

One simple pronunciation should be spelled in no more than 5 different ways.
In ideal phonemic or alphabetic code, one simple speech sound would be spelled one and only one way. In the traditional English writing system, each sound is spelled an average of 14 different ways and most words have 1000's of different possible spellings.  [read How many ways can you spell DAY?]

The problem with Shaw's GHOTI as an alternative spelling for FISH is that English spelling does have a few positional rules .  These rules would preclude using GH in the initial position for the /F/ sound or TI in the terminal postioin for /Sh/. Of course, equally wierd ways of spelling FISH would be allowable.  e.g., PHOSH  [more]

Dan Quayle /daen kweil/ argued that if all the poor spellers in the US would vote for him he would be assured victory.  He had no problem letting all of the good spellers vote for his opponent because there were not that many of them. 

Quayle's spelling of POTATO was almost consistent with the New Spelling proposal that was promoted by the simplified spelling society in the early 1900's and which became the foundation of the Initial Teaching Alphabet [ITA] in the 1960's.

Dan Quayle was not the first politician who had trouble spelling.  When someone criticized President Andrew Jackson's spelling, he retorted that it was an unimaginative man who could not spell a word more than one way.   George Washington used many variant spellings but he lived before the dictionary
became the standard for spelling.

McLuhan argued that an alphabet could be learned in less than 40 hours.  Quayle's mispelling indicates that for most people, the English spelling system [only 40% alphabetical] is still a mystery after 40 years. 

The English spelling system does not provide a reliable guide to pronunciation and knowing the pronunciation of a word is no guarantee that one can guess the historical spelling found in the dictionary. As a code, English orthography gets an F.  It is "the worst spelling system in the world" according to the literacy expert, Frank Laubach. 

English spelling, as the illustrations show, allows too many orthographic options.  Most of the options overlap as shown in the poem Chaos.  Words that are spelled the same, e.g., beard and heard do not rhyme. The memory task is about ten times as difficult as it needs to be.  It is nearly ten times as difficult as the transparent orthographies of Spanish and Italian. 

English spelling is too complex.  In 1755 it was regularized at the word level but not at the syllable or letter level.  and complicated.  There are no rules without exceptions.  This makes it very easy to get crossed up.  There are at least 14 ways to spell the [oe] sound: toe, tow, to, toa, teau, teaux, tough ...

If you enter any of these options in the latest Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary, it will make some educated guesses reagarding what you were trying to spell.  Unfortunately, if you enter tow, it will not give you the other options. toa as in toad, however, will generate some estimates since toa is not a complete word.

One solution would be to have a parallel spelling sytem that would spell according to the dictionary pronunciation guide.  This could be achieved, for instance, by adopting a modified Spanish/Latin orthography for English [See spanglish].  To eliminate alternative pronunciations, existing spelling pronunciation could be the guide.  TOMATO = Taw-Mah-Tow not Tow-Mey-Tow.

Tow-Mey-Tow would be spelled TOAMEITO.
Taw-Mey-Tow would be spelled TOMEITO
 
 

What word might we spell GOLOBCH without transgressing 
the "rules" of conventional English orthography?  [answer]

Dr. Yule's 16 Word Spelling Test - most of the answers are in the list below
While you may be able to spell potatoe, chances are you will not be able to 
corretly spell over 60% of the words on this list. [see spelling demons page]

acomodate	exessiv	remembrd	unparaleld
miniture	professr	gardian	disapoint
mischivus	psycollajy	sovren	disiplin
inocuus	recomend	ocasion	tecnicly

Visit these related pages on applied linguistics and rationalized spelling

nU @lfabets for EGliS

x simplifYd speliG sOsYeti

american litRasi kWnsL

UnifOn transkripshan sistam spelling ring

other buttons:  OZideas  sbett@saundspel.zzn.com 
writing systems ring 

Commentary:

"Children have better luck spelling words that are spelled the way they sound."

In an asociated articl 
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/education/newsid_1122000/1122038.stm) 
which is dated 2001 janury 17, ther is th foloing paragraf:

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), which oversees the tests sat by some 600,000 pupils in their final year at primary school, says most problems were caused by words "where the letter patterns have to be remembered".

"The children did better where the spelling more closely followed the sound of the word."

An English MP received some bad press stemming from his mispronunciation of cacophony.  He pronounced it "cack-o-phony."  This prompted Alan Campbell to write the following letter. 

Dear Mr Hyde

I can sympathize with you in your ‘cacophony’ incident. English spelling does not always tell us how to pronounce a word.

I remember thinking, until I was about 20, that Penelope was pronounced ‘penny-loap’.

English-speaking foreigners tell me that they cannot be sure of the pronunciation of an English word until they’ve heard a native English speaker say it; nor can they be sure of a spelling of any English word that they’ve heard but not read.

Our Society maintains that if English clarified and followed its spelling rules - its does have them! - these problems would not arise, or would occur much less frequently. For instance, if the spelling was ‘cacoffony’ (or maybe ‘cacoffiny’), where a doubled consonant showed an accented short vowel, would you have stumbled over it?

We made a submission to the Select Committee on Education and Science in its recent inquiry into reading. We asked that, to make literacy learning easier for children, it begin the slow process of updating English spelling by asking the Government to call an international conference of English-speaking nations and organizations to look at the idea. Other European alfabetical-language nations that keep their spelling up to date generally are ahead of English in the literacy table. 

The committee seemingly was not impressed.

Sincerely

Allan Campbell
 

Ms Liz Gordon MP 
Chairperson, 
Education and Science Committee 

Dear Ms Gordon and Committee Members 

Thank you for notifying us of the publication of your report.  A massive document - a massive amount of work! 

We are naturally disappointed that you did not deal with a major cause of illiteracy that we brought to your attention - spelling - despite all the strong evidence we presented. Not even a mention! 

When we began our time-shortened presentation of our submission in Christchurch the chair commented that ours was different from the others. We were and are very aware of this. We are dealing with what we see as a basic cause of much of the illiteracy that we all complain of; we were looking for ways to make learning, as distinct from teaching, easier and effective. Obviously we have failed to convince you of this. Or perhaps you were convinced and didn't see a way to deal with it, or were not prepared to accept our invitation to step outside the square. 

We offered as evidence in our submission the 1991 study of Italian and British children's literacy standards, by Gwenllian Thorstad. 

You asked us for more examples of how spelling affected literacy. We supplied: 
[date] A Guardian article by Ken Spencer (Hull University) Illiterate English children would be successful in other languages, and the studies he mentioned in that article: 
1984: Oney and Goldman: Decoding and comprehension skills in Turkish and English: Effects of the regularity of grapheme-phoneme correspondences. 
1997: Landerl, Wimmer, Frith: The impact of orthographic consistency on dyslexia: A German-English comparison. 

In addition we found a more recent one: 
2000: Nature neuroscience, Paulesu, McCrory, et al: A cultural effect on brain function. 

Then there was the review of the book Learning to read and write: A cross-linguistic perspective. 

Recently we alerted you to the study reported in Science magazine in March this year which found that Italian dyslexics had only half the reading problems of English and French dyslexics, the researchers putting this down to the more transparent Italian orthografy. 

We also sent a report of the reply our then secretary, Masha Bell, made to the House of Commons Education Subcommittee on its report. 

We provided an article by one of our members, Tom Shanks, a retired primary teacher from Oamaru, who described how, with the greatest motivation in the world, he still could not master our spelling. 

Other anecdotal evidence we provided was by three expatriates (in the Czech Republic, Indonesia, and Wales(!) ) who recounted how their children were learning to read and write the local language more easily than their native English. 

So, where did we fail in our endeavors to convince you? 

We accept that effective change cannot come overnight. But we have to start, or it will never come. All we are asking at this stage is that we, thru those (like yourselves) who have some influence, make a start. The start may not be very dramatic. It may be, as we sought, a decision by some body, such as the New Zealand Government, to call a meeting to discuss the idea. 

One avenue you may like to follow in relation to this is to compare the acquisition of literacy in Maori by Maori speakers at kura kaupapa. As you are aware, written Maori is fonetic. If our contention is correct, literacy acquisition should be easier than in English, if most other factors are equal. In your report you note that the qualifications required of teachers at these schools are not as high as for mainstream teachers. So any comparison should be of pupils being taught by qualified teachers. 

We thank you for your consideration of our submission, but we remain bewildered by its lack of impact on your thinking. 

The Web of On-line Dictionaries  Explore an index of dictionaries, thesauri, and other word resources. Includes foreign language and technical dictionaries, guides and resources. ww.yourdictionary.com

Dictionary.com  Access a thesaurus, medical and language dictionaries, and links to grammar, writing and vocabulary materials. http://www.dictionary.com/

Wordsmyth - Integrated dictionary and thesaurus that connects you to related concepts. Search for exact or approximate matches. http://www.wordsmyth.net/

An alphabetical listing of common legal terms defined in simple language. Maintained by World Wide Legal Information Association. http://www.islandnet.com/

Kamilaroi / Gamilaraay Web DictionaryThe Kamilaroi/ Gamilaraay language belongs to the Kamilaroi people and to Kamilaroi country, northern New South Wales, AustraliaTo Dictionary © 1998 Peter Austin and David Nathan This electronic dictionary was la coombs.anu.edu.au 

LEO - English/German On-line Dictionary translates words or phrases between the two languages. Includes a vocabulary list and query archive. dict.leo.org

Clausthal University - Web-based translation service contains more than 124,000 commonly used German words and phrases with their English equivalents. search.tu-clausthal.de

UC San Diego - Hypertext Webster Gateway. Search engine finds dictionary definition for the exact or approximate selected word. Hyperlink to related words. work.ucsd.edu

What is the penalty for spelling the /F/ sound consistently?

Syllabary page 

Masha rote, in response to Toms list of <F> for /F/ : 

 No wunder I found onely 8 (11) words with 'misspelt'  f  amung the 3000 most common wuns: 
Enough  Phone (telephone)  laugh (laughed laughing)   Rudolph   philosophy  rough  tough  phrase  photographs. 

 Makes 'consistent spelling of the F sound'  not sumthing  tu put intu a limited but worthwile erly reform package,  I think. 

 Not worth provoking much likely verry clever vennom  for so litl benefit. 

There is/was a difrnt filosofy behind the <F> for /F/ proposal 
wen first put forwrd than behind that wich Masha proposes. 

Masha is concerned with making chanjes that will make the life of lernrs 
esir as soon as posbl, and thus starts with words that giv the most trubl to them. 
A laudbl aim. 

The <F> for /F/ was put forwrd as a 'startr,' a chanje that was esy, 
relativly acceptbl as it was ofn alredy used, especialy in ads and industry names, 
and not too big. Somthing to get us startd, and establish the patrn of chanje. 
Anothr laudbl aim. 

Its the priority of these difrnt aims that needs to be setld, 
rathr than whethr <F> for /F/ is a betr chanje than, say, regulrizing long E sounds. 

Allan 

Steve, 

 The sad truth about this event in US political  history is that it was almost certainly a put-up job 
 by a spelling bee official who orchestrated it.  It  worked because it gave a highly politicized press 
 and electronic media the excuse it wanted to apply  the label "dumb and unintelligent" to a Vice 
 President who had done his job with much more intelligence and evenhanded political skill than his 
 successor has since demonstrated. 

 Jim Kanzelmeyer 

G /j/ as in MARGARINE
OLO /ur/ as in COLONEL
B /nothing/ as in DOUBT
CH /k/ as in CHRISTMAS
 

The West Saxon Standard - Englisc   a æ e i o u 'r èr long ah eh-ah eh-ey eel awe-oh hoop her short ago æsh ej-edge ill awe* hook othèr accents à  æ è  ì ò ó ù à è

..

Why make such big changes as A=ah, I=eel, O=awe, U=ooze?  The main reason is that this set of correspondences allows learners to use spelling pronunciation.  Pronouncing all A's as ah produces understandable results.  Pronouncing Ha /ha/ as Hay /hei/ doesn't quite work.  In Saxon, [hate] is pronounced hah-tuh not heit.  [hat] is a sound between ha and heh which uses a new letter [æ]  Pronouncing all o's as awe unless in the terminal position also works better than other alternatives.

To fully restore the English alphabet, only two sounds can be associated with each vowel letter.

Rhyming Dictionary http://rhyme.lycos.com/r/gwic.cgi?Path=shakespeare&Word=potato
Find occurances in the works of Shakespear
---- 

Valerie, 

Good answer.  I can't disagree with your position. 

I think we have talked before about publicizing a series of research questions and sending them around to various schools of education.  Given the number of silly research questions, this would be a potential benefit on several levels. 

So what are the key questions that we think need to be researched? 

What kind of spelling system meets the needs of children? 
What is the impact of "dumbed down" or "simplified" spelling? 
What is the sociology of resistance to modifications of the spelling system? 

What do you think about RES/QED as an initial teaching medium?  It is basically a narrower version of interspel.  The advantage is that it is fully systematic and predictable.  Its distadvantages are (1) it is not phonemic or fully alphabetic, and (2) it is complicated. 

Physicists have gotten around the resistance of reviewers who don't fully read or fully understand what is being presented in a research paper.  They have a preprint service to which they submit a paper that is properly indexed but not peer reviewed.  The paper stands on its own merits - not the biases of a reviewer/gatekeeper.  Those who are interested in the topic will respond almost immediately by email generating lively discussion.  These are usually much more productive than any discussion with a reviewer who may be basically uninterested in the approach or the topic. 

The preprint may be submitted to a scholarly journal and published a year later.  The paper journal is little more than an archiving service since by the time the research is published, it is old news. 
-- 

On Sat, 22 May 1999 16:46:16   Valerie Yule wrote: 

<Steve wrote:  I am hesitant to endorse research as the road to success> 

>It is not THE road to success altho it can arouse peple's consiusness about spelling  
Meeting the needs and abilities of a wide range of users
>What I realy want mor reserch about is what sorts of 
>spelling can realy meet the needs and abilities of all sorts 
>of users and lernrs.  The ideal spelling is no mor garanteed 
>to do this than the 'ideal' government or utopia is 
>garanteed to take acount of what peple can cope with. 
 
>I suffer a great deal from submitting papers to revewers who comment on what 
>they think I would hav ritn rathr than what I actualy hav ritn!  Modrn 
>litracy-teaching methods encuraj this prior-gessing - it is not exactly prejudice but it is as 
>destructiv! Perhaps a new word is needed - pregessing? 

What do you think about RES/QED as an initial teaching medium?  It is basically a narrower version of interspel.  The advantage is that it is fully systematic and predictable.  Its disadvantages are (1) it is not 100% phonemic or fully alphabetic, and (2) it is complicated. 


Animal Alphabets - animcl alfcbets [ritcn in UnifOn]
ò unifon transcriptions

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