Talk:SoundSpel

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[edit] "Disadvantges"

Those so-called disadvantages don't sound bad to me.

1.The phonetics is primarily based upon "General American" and differs slightly from the British "Received Pronunciation." There may be other small differences from Australian, Indian, South African, Canadian and other regional accents.

Well at least it's based on a modern accent and not Old English.

This is the same dialect (NBC English) found in dictionaries published for the U.S.

Most people are familiar with broadcast English even if they don't speak it.Steve bett 19:24, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

2.Approximately half of the words in common use are respelled.

Isn't that the point of a spelling reform, to make stuff easier to spell?

SR is supposed to accelerate literacy and to save 2 years of primary school.

After 12 years of practice, most people can spell high frequency words as logograms or word-signs.

Steve bett 19:24, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

3.It is easy to read, but significant effort is required to learn to write it directly. Computer software is currently available to perform the respelling.

It'l probably take less time to learn this than our current system, and the technology part is an advantage.

If you teach the correspondence chart first, kids could over-learn SoundSpel in 4 months or less.

The converter (listed under links) serves as a spell checker for learners. Just as 2nd year students of Spanish, German, Italian, etc. can spell in a foreign language better than they can in English, you would probably spell better in SoundSpel that traditional spelling after 30 minutes of study. Take the 16 word spelling test Steve bett 19:24, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

4.It is one of many proposals. There is no common agreement upon which proposal should be adopted.

There is common agreement on some respell proposals (e.g., thru for through) but not on total schemes. Members of the spelling society agree that superfluous letters should be dropped and over 50% agree that high frequency :spelling patterns are preferred over low frequency spelling patterns.

Between 1910 and 1930, over 50% of the members of the spelling societies endorsed NuSpelling. However, less than 10% endorse it today. This is because spelling reformers have different spelling preferences. As you suggest, members would probably go along with what ever a quasi-official English spelling commission decided. Steve bett 19:24, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

So, who cares? It would be great if we had any spelling reform.

Cameron Nedland 00:14, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

The issue with #1 is that it essentially makes spelling incredibly harder for anyone outside of the General American dialect. English is spoken and written around the world in hundreds of regional dialects and accents, and a glance at the talk pages for General American and other related pages will tell you how much people fail to agree on what it is. Also, GA is always undergoing changes in pronunciation - chain shifts and mergers. How does one SoundSpel "cot" vs. "caught", for example? Is "marry" spelled 'mairy' or 'mary' or 'marry' and is "merry" spelled 'mairy' or "merry"? I consider what I speak quite close to GA and I hear no distinction between SoundSpel's notations "air", "err" and "arr".

Soundspel simply retains the traditional spellings with respect to /eIr/-/Er/-/ær/

as in airy, Mary, merry, marry. In cases where differences in pronunciation are recognized by ::some and not by others, Soundspel does not try to spell by sound. Steve bett 19:24, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

While it is probably a poor argument, another reason non GA speakers will dislike this and other spelling reform attempts that are based on a specific dialect is that spelling and reading words written more phonetically as they are heard in GA could be likely to slowly wither away the different regional accents. Non-rhotic dialects may disappear if they begin reading everything phonetically and "over" is spelled "oever" and not "oevu" or however one would phonetically spell using this standard if a non-rhotic dialect were used. Matches10 05:47, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Wow! - this sounds ace. I really like the idea, and completely agree with what the user above says about the "disadvantages" not really being disadvantages.
--Just The Q 01:25, 18 November 2006 (UTC)