orthographic reform of English

[Dave Long]

> At some time in their lives, all eccentrics who spend a lot of time
> reading must take on the doomed project of the orthographic reform of
> their language.  Occasionally this project is not doomed; for example,
> if their scheme is backed by a king or revolutionary government, it
> may have some chance of success.

The eccentricity may lie in the top-down assumption of orthographic  
reform, as opposed to the bottom-up processes of orthographic change.

>    Of course, we would have to pick a standard pronunciation to use
>    for the phonetic spelling.

But why?  A reform of an orthography certainly requires a standard,  
but by dropping the "ortho" requirement, people could simply spell as  
they pronounce.  WWII influenced orthography in at least the  
Netherlands and Switzerland; in the former, orthographic reform, once  
viewed as the province of eccentric hypermodernists, became reality  
as the postwar dutch sought to distance their language from german;  
in the latter, the swiss dialects, once disparaged as the teutonic  
equivalents of ebonics, expected to disappear with improved  
education, became languages of pride and patriotism.

Of course, attempting to distance one's culture from a historically  
politically unappealing one may result in successful government  
backing of orthographic reform, but one must note that youth culture  
distances itself from straight adult culture without requiring  
governmental decrees.

Consider the IM style displayed in these two versions of the same  
commercial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knb6I9s8Wk8 (gsw)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLyRbZ55hw (fr)

The first, in swiss german, uses “standard” spelling rules to  
phonetically convey dialect speech.
The second, in swiss french, uses “langage SMS” digits and letters to  
phonetically convey standard speech. (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 
Nouvelles_formes_de_communication_écrites)

Neither is orthographically "correct"; adult german swiss may speak  
swiss dialects, but they are supposed to write in standard german,  
and the situation is even simpler for the french swiss.  However, a  
quick survey of internet bulletin boards reveals that -- much like  
1337 -- at the younger and more informal end there have evolved  
different, less-strict-if-more-hip, orthographies.

One problem with popular orthographies of this sort is that they may  
be too ephemeral; by being too faithful to the speech patterns of a  
particular time and place, they lose the universality that we'd like  
to see in a language and a literature.  Shakespeare, for instance,  
seems to be more accessible for the novice when printed on the page  
rather than presented on the stage.

At the opposite end of the range of timescales for change in the  
conventions of written communications, we have the display of text  
itself.  Perhaps the question of adoption of "ventilated prose"  
should be looked at, not as a matter of decades or centuries, but in  
the context of the gradual -- nearly glacial -- addition of hints for  
the reader in written material.

>    There is considerable room for debate about the best layout for
>    English text; even for simpler languages like OCaml that are
>    traditionally written indented in this fashion, there is often some
>    ambiguity about the best way to format code.  The basic principle,
>    though, is that the hierarchical structure of the sentences should
>    be reflected in a layout with the smaller parts of the sentence
>    indented further to the right.


Alphabets came in around, say, 1500 BCE.  But just as the input and  
length limits of SMS have driven abbreviations in modern  
communications, early writers were willing to displace much of the  
work of reconstruction upon the reader:

THRSCNSDRBLRMFRDBTABTTHBSTLYTFRNGLSHTXT

At least the greeks, who didn't have the regularities of semitic  
languages to fall back upon, figured they'd have enough pity on the  
reader to regularly notate the vowels as well:  (ca. 1000 BCE?)

THEREISCONSIDERABLEROOMFORDEBATEABOUTTHEBESTLAYOUTFORENGLISHTEXT

 From there it took a few millenia (to roughly 1000 CE) for the  
concept of "ventilated sentences" to catch on; there were a few  
eccentrics who added spaces and other punctuation[0] to their  
sentences for a few centuries before, and the process wasn't  
completed until a few centuries after, but in general we now consider  
it an unspoken duty of a writer to clearly separate words in phrases:

There is considerable room for debate about the best layout for  
english text

So perhaps, over another period of centuries, around the year 3000 if  
not before[1], we will expect that writers will articulate and  
subordinate their thoughts in two dimensions, and anyone who flows  
text together in dense rectangular blocks will be considered as  
eccentric as someone of our times who has chosen  
tojamallthetexttogetherwithnoregardforarticulatingindividualwords.

There is
   considerable room for debate
     about the best layout
       for english text

-Dave

:: :: ::

[0] To be fair, since early composition was primarily oral, the  
ancients took greater care to clearly signpost and articulate their  
thoughts than we do in contemporary written text.  Rhetorical figures  
are much more important when one is asking an audience to reconstruct  
a parse tree, not from a punctuated text, but from a strictly linear  
sequence of phonemes.

[1] There are many opportunities in current communications where  
presentation is sufficiently separated from content that one might  
easily experiment with ventilated prose without offending the  
sensibilities of naive end readers.

I've seen many TROFF sources that seem to have been written in a  
ventilated style.  At the time, I had thought it was just a  
reflection of the early line editors: by keeping phrases and clauses  
on distinct lines, editing at 300 -- or even 110 -- baud on a  
teletype becomes less painful.  But if ventilation were a meme of the  
60's, it may have even been the result of conscious choice.

HTML, Wikis, and the varied message board markup languages, in  
reflowing their output, also give the opportunity to write in a style  
of which Bucky would approve, yet passing unnoticed by the average  
reader.  (indeed, this may be a reasonable halfway step: although  
we'd like for a reader to quickly grasp the structure of a text, it's  
even more important for an editor to have done so)

Finally, what about format=flowed email?