English spelling sucks and we all know it,
and I've talked about this before in my spelling reforms video.
Now, in that video, I made a brief suggestion about how to improve
English spelling, by taking inspiration from the German spelling system...
which was, I think, pretty impressive!
Impressively bad, that is.
So it's time for attempt two. Unfortunately, English spelling is really hard to reform.
There are a lot of barriers: some of them are linguistic, like the interconnectivity
of the system, or differences which exist in some dialects but not in others - others are practical.
English is a language spoken in an official and non-official capacity all over the world.
Do we have to make all these governments agree on a spelling reform, or do we just do our
own one wherever we happen to be, and not care about the other English speakers in the world?
I mean, English spelling already does vary from place to place,
but how far can we go before Americans can no longer read Scottish writing?
Surely, since we're lucky enough to have a spoken language that's
so similar in so many places... we'd like to maintain that in the written language?
And, I've done it. I've solved English spelling.
Well... I haven't actually solved it. But i'm still pretty proud of it,
so let me introduce you to... how to kind of solve english spelling
a little bit by making it optionally marginally easier and thereby hopefully
making children suffer a little less when learning to read and write...
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Thank you to World of Warships for the sponsorship.
But now we get to this video about English spelling... so let's talk about Japanese.
There are plenty of videos out there about how much Japanese
writing sucks... so I'll try to keep this brief.
Japanese writing is made up of two types of character: firstly,
there are kana, which are from syllabaries.
The two in use in modern Japanese are hiragana,
which is used for grammatical particles and native Japanese words, and katakana,
which is used for scientific terms, loanwords, and transcriptions of foreign words.
These can actually write any Japanese word phonetically! But Japanese uses a second type
of character anyway... kanji, the borrowed logographs from the Chinese orthography.
There are thousands of kanji, and how do you know how to read them?
Well, you don't... you just have to learn it.
Just like when learning a Chinese language! I mean... right?
It couldn't... actually be harder... right?
Most kanji have multiple readings because of the way they've been loaned into Japanese,
with some readings being Japanese which sounds roughly like the Middle Chinese pronunciation...
and some readings taking the Japanese translation of the meaning of that character.
Some characters can have up to 10 or more readings... and I haven't
even scratched the surface of the worst parts of this system!
This video is not about Japanese. There are justifications for keeping kanji alive...
and I'm not going to take a stance either way!
I just don't know enough about the language.
But what I WILL say, pretty uncontroversially, I hope... is that this is a hard system to learn.
Kanji are hard to learn.
But don't worry, because we have furigana!
This is where we have kana, typically hiragana, written in smaller print above kanji. You can
see this at train stations to clarify the pronunciations of locations, over rare kanji
or kanji being used in non-standard readings, or in learning materials, like books for children.
If you don't know how to read the kanji, there's the pronunciation right there above it.
Some of you might have guessed by now where this is going.
No, I'm not saying we should write a phonetic transcription of every
word above that word, that would be ridiculous.
But... but...
You know what's missing above English letters? That loads of other Latin-based scripts have?
Yeah! We have some really nice, easy space above all these vowel letters for some accents!
Let's include accents, helping you pronounce things,
just like how furigana is used in Japanese - when we have rare words,
clarifying the pronunciation of names or locations, and in educational resources.
The more common a word is, the faster its pronunciation will naturally be learnt,
and you can stop adding accents to these words as learning progresses.
As such, this spelling reform idea would be optional... which means
you could argue about whether or not it should even be called a reform...
I haven't worked this system out completely... surprise surprise,
this is a K Klein video, no conclusive answers here...
But with this base idea of adding accents, we can build the system out through discussion.
Just bear in mind that every accent added is a new accent that children have to learn.
For now, I want to make two main proposals to get us started...
Some english words are only differentiated by where the stress falls... like "insight"
and "incite"... and there is no consistent way of telling what syllable should be stressed!
So teach it using a grave accent like in Italian.
Secondly, pretty much all vowel letters can
be used to represent the schwa sound in English orthography... that /ə/ sound...
and it would be helpful to know which vowels are doing this.
I messed around with a few different accents for this one... but ultimately I decided on the breve,
which is used over the letter "a" in Romanian to represent this sound.
Here, I've quickly put together a few other examples of possible accents as well,
and to answer the question I posed at the beginning of the video...
Well, with this reform, each individual country,
even each school and publishing company, can implement it on their own.
We just need learning materials to use it,
and the readability of this writing in places without the reform shouldn't suffer at all...
On the face of it, I realise how anticlimactic this feels...
but given how widespread the use of English is, this kind of patching up
its orthography is really the only thing I could ever imagine being implemented.
And I genuinely believe using these accents to teach children
and English second-language speakers will improve pronunciation and reading skill!
The voluntary nature makes this kind of reform, in my opinion, a no-brainer.
I can just imagine how much easier those damn Biff, Chip and Kipper books would have been,
if they'd only had a few little grave accents here and there!
And our children deserve a brighter future.