XKCD

[Sleaw]

Fair enough. It's striking how often xkcd comics are of the same level of funny/clever as other people's tweets. Even more ironic when just a few comics ago the xkcd characters were wondering how people could be so funny in tweets.

[OrangeAipom]

I don't get it.

[Descriptor]

It's an algorithm for loling.
Using that algorithm, one can form any valid chain of lols, being either of the form lol or olololol, never repeating letters directly, such as llol, or never ending in o, such lolo.
It's fool proof!

[Kíeros]

Is it sad that I agree with the one on display now about the alphabet's order? Seriously, get rid of 'c'; it's redundant. I don't need it; this post proves that. It's not there, save in the quotes.

[Sleaw]

You just want to use the word 'krazy' more often. :P

[Namboto]

Is it sad that I agree with the one on display now about the alphabet's order? Seriously, get rid of 'c'; it's redundant. I don't need it; this post proves that. It's not there, save in the quotes.

Certainly you may think it useless, but I'd contend that it's removal could cripple the language.

[DevilEd]

I wanna get rid of e. Just for a laugh.

[Kazerad]

Sertainly you may think it useless, but I'd kontend that it's removal kould kripple the language.

The post is much better this way.

EDIT: assuming we adopt the former Spanish practice of treating CH as its own consonant.

[BRPXQZME]

You cannot get rid of C or K without ruining the title of this comic!

[Miff]

Can we just make ə a letter and call it good?

[Softspoken]

Can we just make ə a letter and call it good?

Yes

I want that so badly

the schwa messes up more spelling for me than probably any other noise.

[BRPXQZME]

I would be in favor of using ɔ instead (or at least as an accepted variant form), if the introduction of a schwa letter were the only matter at hand. The amont of motions needed to write the letter e in various hands is unacceptably high relative to how often it must be written.

[Softspoken]

I would be in favor of using ɔ instead (or at least as an accepted variant form), if the introduction of a schwa letter were the only matter at hand. The amont of motions needed to write the letter e in various hands is unacceptably high relative to how often it must be written.

That's something to consider. Mostly I just want a noise for the schwa sound because I think it can be represented by various vowels in the English language.

[BRPXQZME]

Well, the problem with every English orthographic reform is that we tend to dislike making sacrifices. Much like the strength of English is packratting vocab from everywhere, the weakness is in getting rid of junk.

Even something as uncontroversial as representing a schwa doesn’t necessarily fly on its own; because different speakers may or may not actually use a vowel as written (e.g. the ‘i’ in medical; some people say it more like “med-i-cull”, some people say “med-uh-cull”), somebody still has a problem.

My (stupid) pet project, of course, is to get everyone to recognize rhotic R as the semi-vowel it is (check the username). Despite the pronunciation guides having that schwa+r thing, it’s just the r, used as a vowel. Therefore, there is no reason, best I can tell, for many words to have a vowel in from of r. Doesn’t even mess up non-rhotic dialects as far as I can tell; they can just use their non-rhotic vowel version of r to pronounce it. I’d have to check this with way more words, and transliterations would suffer, of course, but imagine a world where butter is buttr, and curds are crds! A... a lot of people would think they died and went to Iceland or Croatia or something, actually :| Oh, and the English speaking world would no longer have two spellings for colr, finally settling one of the dumbest big Internet arguments (well, it would have three whoops)! I wouldn’t be too surprised if some forms of shorthand already do this as a shortcut (as opposed to a spelling suggestion).

I, for one, love the English language as the ugly, reprobate mutt it is. I figure English spelling will get fixed eventually, but never entirely due to how darned useful it is to talk across different Englishes and how enriching it is to still be able to read writers as far back as the 17th century (albeit with some difficulty), and the fact is that more conservative reforms do sneak into the language slowly despite all resistance.

Man, what a pointless post

[Sleaw]

I liked your post! I give it a solid 8 out of 10 - there, now it's no longer pointless.

[Miff]

Here's my solution then: Written English as we know it is now deprecated. Instead, everyone now will use spoken English, transcribed phonetically using an alphabet adapted from written English.

[OrangeAipom]

rhotic r

We've got a new typing quirk!

How would you spell quirk? qurk?

[Kíeros]

Undoubtedly you may think it useless, but I'd argue that it's removal may weaken the language.

Might; not for sure. I just want an alphabet where every letter makes one sound.

Can we just make ə a letter and call it good?

Like this. Fully support.

[unbridledExüberance]

We should make written language just be a transcription of spoken language. By that I mean, be purely phonetical. If you can read it, you already know how to say it and vice versa.

I know languages like this exist, but I can't think of any. Ancient Greek is pretty good about that, but it still has groups of letters that combine to form a completely different sound, and there are still exceptionsn to the redundancy rule.

[BRPXQZME]

It’s reminding me of something... a couple years back I had a dream about making a spelling reform video game, which would rate your reforms on a level of what they do well and what they do poorly (things like phonemic consistency, teachability, not screwing over particular dialects, closeness to historical spellings and etymological roots, ease of use, etc.). The sheer mechanics of it are mind-boggling! In my dreamagination, it’s possible that we could use AI heuristics to just tell us good ways to reform our spellings that wouldn’t end up annoying us too much. Not that it wouldn’t fail in the way most attempts have; most people aren’t incredibly keen on being told what to do, unless, say, they were tricked into thinking it was their idea in the first place or there’s some sort of pressure/incentive to actually do it.

How would you spell quirk? qurk?

With only this change, yes.

We should make written language just be a transcription of spoken language. By that I mean, be purely phonetical. If you can read it, you already know how to say it and vice versa.

Phonetic transcription as a written language is nice when it can be done, but IMHO phonemic orthography is significantly more practical for actual usage, particularly when morphophonemics comes into play.

Or in layman’s terms, the particular “idea” behind a word with a rough hint at its pronunciation (which may or may not be derived from easy, regular rules) actually works a lot better than always having the sound to go on. For example, not that many people have trouble with -s plurals being pronounced /s/ or /z/ since it’s fairly regular when it does happen. But with a purely sound-based system, you would have to actually write s or z (or whatever symbols are chosen to represent those sounds); in the many places in English where sounds change for only slightly different words (usually due to inflection), such a system complicates where it was intended to simplify.

[Miff]

I know languages like this exist, but I can't think of any. Ancient Greek is pretty good about that, but it still has groups of letters that combine to form a completely different sound, and there are still exceptionsn to the redundancy rule.

I think Korean is one. Also Japanese is if you only count hiragana and katakana.

[ThereWillBePayne]

I like the english language as is. It's complex, redundant, confusing and impossible to learn, but it's also very open, advanced and I like the way it sounds really. I wouldn't change it if I had the power, but maybe it's just because I'm an english nerd and I've only ever known it. Still, the only other language I tried to learn was Mandarin, and that was really hard, I could never get those pronounciations right.

[BRPXQZME]

Neither of those languages count. I just happen to know a little bit about one and a little bit more... well, considerably more about the other.

Hangul as it is used in Korea today is more or less a very good phonemic orthography (disclaimer: I’m blood related to the Joseon dynasty so I’m pretty sure I’d be breaking a family code or something if I said Hangul is less than perfect), but not a phonetic one; the voicing of the unaspirated consonants for natura-sounding speech depends on where they are in a word. Moreover, you have words like 닭 (it means chicken) that map out perfectly how the word should be pronounced in certain situations, but you could not arrive at from the pronunciation of that syllable on its own (닥); the ㄹ only comes into play when following syllables demand it, like 닭이 (pronounced 달기). The rules are 100% consistent as to how the pronunciation changes in certain situation, and it is a very good representation of spoken Korean because of this. But it is not phonetic, and you are not guaranteed the written language from the spoken language going on phonetics alone, nor vice versa.

Japanese kana do not correspond to everything you need to know to pronounce it (you need to know grammar to know whether は is pronounced ha or wa and whether へ is pronounced he or e, for starters). And even though you won’t be misunderstood if you’ve studied well and pronounce every syllable correctly with immaculate grammar, the Japanese pitch accent is only documented in a handful of dictionaries and yet its lack or misapplication is a noticeable sign that you haven’t been speaking the language your whole life.

[NotEgbert]

We should make written language just be a transcription of spoken language. By that I mean, be purely phonetical. If you can read it, you already know how to say it and vice versa.

I know languages like this exist, but I can't think of any. Ancient Greek is pretty good about that, but it still has groups of letters that combine to form a completely different sound, and there are still exceptionsn to the redundancy rule.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography

The biggest thing to remember is that you don't need a new language to have this trait; just an alternate writing system for an existing language.
That said, Lojban is almost-phonetic (with a few exceptions), although you guys may not be willing to count it a "real language."

Slightly off-topic, I thought this was really interesting:
"Languages with highly phonemic orthographies often lack a word corresponding to the verb "to spell", or rarely use such a term, because the act of spelling out words is rarely needed (careful pronunciation of a word is generally sufficient to convey its spelling)."

[Nimz]

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I don't get it.

The part of this that bugs me is that the finite state machine produces the indicated lols, but the set notation does not produce the same results. The set notation produces doubles of intermediate Ls, as in OLOLLOLLOL (for n=3), and also produces O (as well as the empty string) as valid lols. None of these are valid lols in the finite state machine picture. I think a more accurate set notation would be L(M) = {(OL)ⁿ⁺¹, L(OL)ⁿ | n = 1, 2, 3, ...}

Yeah, I know. Late reply is late, but this had not been addressed yet!

Also, BRPXQZME, your 'pointless post' has the merit of being the drect cause for my being able to parse your usrname. Huzzah! I suspect fewr people would resort to things like, "Bla bla bla BRMZXQ or w/e (you know who I mean) bla bla bla" if more people would read that post. I recall seeing something like that once, so I suspect you have seen it at least that often. >_>