If I don't get to be the boss I ain't playin'.

vejktoro:playin'.

Oh, yeah. Much less g-dropping in the "-ing" words these days, too.

Bruso:I don't know if anyone else has noticed anything like this. I live in the NE USA.

But I think that, noticeably over a period of decades, the pronunciation I hear is actually getting closer to the spelling. As a child I don't remember hearing anyone pronounce the "t" in "often" or "soften". Now I hear it all the time, mostly from younger people.

I also notice fewer schwas, especially in words ending in "-ing". More and more I hear a clear short "i" sound. Again, mostly from younger people.

(Want phonetic spelling? Wait a while. Maybe someday we'll all be pronoucing the now-silent e's. Like in Chaucer's day ...)

That's very interesting.

My language (Brazilian Portuguese) works like this: the spelling is almost phonetic, with some quirks here and there. When spoken, some sounds change a little (ou can be pronouced as oŭ or o; -ês can be pronounced as es or ejs), but if you pronounce the words exactly as written, nobody can say it is wrong, it just sounds funny (with a few exceptions, where it would sound really wrong).

English is not like this, as far as I know. If you pronounce the B in debt, the S in island, the T in castle, or the E in game, it is just plain wrong, not only "funny" or "archaic" (but you must pronounce final E in "apostrophe"). Same problem if you try pronounce "minor" and "miner" differently. They have the same pronunciation, and you cannot get hints from the spelling. This is what I think is weird.

Bruso:I also notice fewer schwas, especially in words ending in "-ing". More and more I hear a clear short "i" sound. Again, mostly from younger people.

I come from Michigan where it has always been very uncommon to drop the final g of -ing. I knew that people who did probably had family origins elsewhere. I've heard the national media aims for the "Ohio Valley" accent where the g's are pronounced. Perhaps this has had an effect on the rest of the country over time. I remember hearing one national anchorman who's from Texas say that he had to learn to carefully pronounce the g's and to alter his pronunciation of some other words (e.g. "ten" not "tin"). Hearing such pronunciation over the decades is bound to have some effect.

http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/stuff/english-pro...

acdibble:http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/stuff/english-pro...

Even more proof that English is not a good choice for an international language!

OK. So to me there appear right now three main problems to changing English spelling on a large scale.

First, there is the obvious problem of making such a change official. There are many millions of readers and writers already invested in the current spelling, and any kind of drastic change would reduce literacy to essentially zero. Furthermore, there is the danger that some jurisdictions adopt spelling reform while others choose not to, compounding the compatibility problem.

Second, there is the very real problem of regional variants. First, everyone knows that British English and American English sound very different. Not so well known is that there are a huge number of variants in accents within each of this. But besides, there is the problem of words that have more than one pronunciation even given a particular accent (think ‘pecan’). English does have a few words with alternative spellings; this is slightly inconvenient. Introducing purely phonetic or even phonemic spelling would introduce many more variants, as the number of spoken variants is greater than the number of written variants. There are a great many words with more than one pronunciation even within a given general dialect of English (sometimes even within a family!). Especially in this technology-filled age, such multiplicities of variants would make search, sort and collation more difficult than necessary.

Third, there is a deeper linguistic problem—that of morphemes versus phonemes. Take the word ‘telepathy’, for example. If this were spelt telépəθi (to adopt just one possible phonemic orthography), the connexion between it and téləpǽθık isn’t nearly as apparent—but the morphemes tele and path remain unchanged. In layman’s terms, what this means is that meaning should be just as important as sound when considering a writing system, and to think otherwise is just to ignore part of the equation. There’s often a reason why writing systems, though they may appear unintuitive and illogical at first, evolved the way they did.

Another side point to bring up is that people often slur sounds together in speech. Since words would presumably normally be written out in full, this would mean that spelling wouldn't correspond to sound anyway. Plus, as any linguist can tell, precisely transcribing sounds is difficult, not easy.

I do not think that such a revision would work. Making the spelling phonetic would run into a large amount of problems due to regional pronunciation. I've driven across the US a few times so I have heard a large number of accents that would need their own spelling. For example Pennsylvania would need a minimum of three different phonetic spelling systems for the state. Worldwide you might need to learn to spell every word in the english language a minimum of 5-10 different ways in order to communicate in written form.

By the way I am just a noob hear but shouldn't this discussion be in the other languages section of the esperanto forum.

palamon:
By the way I am just a noob hear but shouldn't this discussion be in the other languages section of the esperanto forum.

If it were in Esperanto, yes...

English spelling has been changed by decree.
I remember when the word inflammable was changed to flammable in order to remove potentially dangerous misunderstanding.

As for which dialect or accent to base a phonetic spelling on, I would vote for the accent of County Cork in Ireland, it is very pleasing to the ear and sounds almost as though a person is singing as they speak.
Before someone accuses me of bias, I am not Irish, and I am not connected in any way with the Irish. However I have mixed with people from many places and have heard accents from many places.