Semantics Prove that English Spelling is Morpho-Phonemic
“The European Commission have just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the EU, rather than German, which was the other possibility. In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump for joy… During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters…ZE DREM VIL FINALI KUM TRU!” an Urban Legend
The mechanics of English spelling would seem idiotic to an average village dwelling Slav, Hindu, or Sikh whose writing system is phonemic (arguably even phonetic) and who has only heard English on television, but never seen it written down. In the above languages, there is a strict one-to-one correspondence between the sounds and the letters of a word. Russian and Punjabi even lack the verb “to spell”. If a Russian encounters an unusual foreign last name in a telephone conversation, he/she would ask to “pronounce it by letters”. Upon seeing English “spelled”, a typical Slav (whose language went through a reform to eliminate the non 1:1 sound-letter correspondence) would immediately suggest an English spelling reform similar to the quote above. Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain and Noah Webster also proposed various spelling reforms. However any reform would be extremely difficult to achieve due to two major obstacles: 1) children would have to learn the old system as well as the new system to read all the literature of the past (unless all of it would be reprinted anew) and 2) there are many dialects of English whose speakers would have to agree on one phoneme to represent different sounds that their dialect makes or spell one word differently (Bostonians would write far as fa, because they do not pronounce the /r/).
While in Slavic and Sanskrit-based languages, a particular final phoneme that a plural word has depends on the word’s gender, number and case; in English there is a simpler rule of attaching the [s] phoneme at the end of a singular word, with some documented exceptions. For example, the plural of cat is cats, cactus-cacti, mouse-mice, child-children, and leaf-leaves. Thus the [s], [i], [-r n] phonemes are not mere phonemes, but morphemes as well, meaning, specifically, plurality. There are cases when English provides a single spelling for roots with different pronunciations, for example: electric – electricity where [k] and [s] are represented by “c”; right – righteous where [t] and [tf] are represented by “t”; impress – impression [s] and [ſ] as “ss”; chaste-chastity [ej] and [æ] as a; please – pleasant with [i] and [ε ] as “ea”. This allows children to comprehend that the meaning of derivatives of a particular root stays inviolate and has something to do with that root. A child who does not know the spelling of a certain word would be taught to look for related words, especially those where the unknown syllable is stressed. Additionally, children and foreigners alike are taught that certain morphemes in English have meanings, the suffix “- ness” specifies a property of something, i.e. greatness, emptiness. The suffix “-ian” signifies a performer of whatever noun it is attached to, i.e., music – musician, history – historian. The prefix “verb” means “word”, i.e., verbose, verbal. From the above discussion, one can conclude that since English does not have a one sound – one letter correspondence, yet it takes into account not only the sounds, but the meanings of words and morphemes – it has a morpho-phonemic spelling system.
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