Pretty much since the dawn of modern English in the 1500s, there's been a steady stream of advocacy for English spelling reform, some of which was successful (it is a sinne to ghossip), some of which wasn't (I hav to gard the iland). But for every dozen or so spelling reformers, there were one or two oddballs who suggested that the real solution is to change the alphabet. Ben Franklin was a proud member of this cabal, too. I think his suggested letters and ligatures are particularly pretty...
George Bernard Shaw had his own phonetic script, too. In My Fair Lady, Henry Higgins uses it when trying to make sense of Eliza Doolittle's speech. There were some other fascinating phonetic alphabets proposed in the 1700s and 1800s, but I'll save those for future posts.
Fast forward to this past century, and we see a few more phonics reforms in schools that had their own alphabets.
This always struck me as a bit weird, since the goal is to have students eventually unlearn those alphabets and replace them with regular English.
Starting in the 1950s, there was one last attempt to get everyone to switch to something more logical and modern than those hoary old Roman letters. UNIFON may have gotten its start in the post-war Jetsons era, but it didn't really get much publicity until the dawn of the personal computer age in the 1980s. It does have a very Apple ][, Bits and Bytes kind of feel to it, don't you think...?
I'd be delinquent if I didn't also mention the International Phonetic Alphabet, which was designed by linguists to be able to accurately record the exact sounds made by a person saying something in just about any language. With 107 official phonemic symbols plus hundreds of other variants, diacritic marks, and so on, you can distinguish clearly between the accents of Jersey City and Staten Island...
...which, in some situations, might just save your hide! :-)
I guess growing up in a language that has an alphabet has made me wonder what it must be like to have grown up speaking a language that is not alphabet based. I wonder if it changes the structure of your thought?
ReplyDeleteSure... that's probably another aspect of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis I talked about in the previous post.
DeleteI know a lot of people from China and Japan, but there's a pretty strong "selection effect" against getting an unbiased sample: they all speak English, and most of them probably learned it quite early in life... :-)
As a former English-as-a-second-language teacher, I really love this post. I didn't realize that Ben Franklin worked on improving the alphabet! I like what he did (there is no reason for a "c") & think it makes more sense than the international phonetic alphabet, or UNIFON. Nobody can read that stuff easily. Ben Franklin, you crazy old lech, you were a genius.
ReplyDelete"Ben Franklin, you crazy old lech, you were a genius."
DeleteThis might be my favorite quote about Ben Franklin ever. :-)
I've been a proponent of the Unifon Alphabet since I read an article about it in the early '80s. Hmmm. Maybe I should start mentioning it to people again.
ReplyDeleteI do think that many of the choices for symbols in Unifon were quite intuitive. The backwards-Z for "zh"; the strikethroughs on S and C for "sh" and "ch." Simple and easy to remember, definitely.
DeleteOne big shortcoming, as far as I can tell, is a lack of lower case. Fair enough, though, since Franklin's and the ITA seemingly had no upper case. Maybe having just one case is an intended feature, not a bug? :-)
'UNIFON may have gotten its start in the post-war Jetsons era, but it didn't really get much publicity until the dawn of the personal computer age in the 1980s.'
ReplyDeleteWhy then?
I first discovered it featured in a science magazine in the early 80s. Prior to that wider publicity, the inventor may have only been "shopping it around" in academic circles...
DeleteI thought maybe it had something to do with PCs.
DeleteFuhgetaboutit... I love IPA
ReplyDeleteIt's worth noting that many languages have had successful spelling reforms: German, Italian, Russian and Japanese (at least as long as you stick with the kana) have all managed it. The real problem with English, I think, is the Anglophone diaspora. I don't really speak the same English that's spoken in India, Jamaica, Ghana or even Boston. Are we all going to standardize to the Queen's English first? Not bloody likely!
Laoch brings up an interesting point. As far as I know, Chinese is the only purely ideographic language left in the world. Japanese and Korean both have phonetic scripts but Chinese has none. I asked a Chinese speaker once, how do you even look words up in a dictionary? "Well," he said, "it's complicated..."
As a music teacher, do you have to be familiar with IPA transcriptions of choral pieces in other languages? I have a friend whose spouse is in a choral group, and they're always pushing the envelope with weird foreign pieces... even old English polyphonic stuff like Thomas Tallis can have some nasty phonetic challenges.
Delete"Not bloody likely!" And a good thing, too. I hope that my appreciation for the reformist alphabets above doesn't make it seem like I don't also love the quirkiness and unique history behind the English language. Did you ever see the BBC/PBS series "The Story of English?" Really good.
I learned IPA in grad school and these days, it's part of any decent vocal music program. English is actually one of the harder languages to sing. Latin and Italian are a piece of cake once you understand how they work phonetically. German's tricky but, unlike English, it's wonderfully consistent. French - that's the real bear.
ReplyDeleteI have not seen "The Story of English" but we both love that stuff. I'll keep an eye out for it.
Oh I loved this - really interesting! Sometimes I think the way people draw together words in an sms is a new language/alphabet - well: nothing exactly that, more abbreviation or code - too.
ReplyDeleteWe had recently a spelling reform in Germany too - with lots of heated discussions - in the end it doesn't seem quite stringent. But on the other hand: the purist forget that language is changing forever, and they remind me very much of those people who loudly cry out for "pure original English plants" - forgetting how meagre their garden would look when you take away dear old magnolia, camelia, and other 'invaders' where the origin is only forgotten by the purists.
Thanks for stopping by, Britta! Yes, your "ess tset" is now a thing of the past, is that right? :-(
DeleteEnglish is pretty much indebted to its invaders, I think. The language would be just a minor variant of Frisian without William the Conquerer's Norman additions...
We still have the "ß" - thankfully - but with 4 different rules to use it or not (that's what I meant with 'not stringent'). You write "Gruß"(after a long vocal), but in capitel letters you have to write "GRUSS". (The others rules I will spare you :-).
ReplyDelete