Oh Say Can You Si

Nota Bene can't handle it all. So I've decided to throw in an extra blog. It's another thought that I want to turn into an essay. It starts with a list whose meaning, if it doesn't become obvious, I'll explain shortly.ⁱ

Apostasy, C (the computer language), Caesar, cease, cede, coelacanth, emcee, exequial, fancied, fanciful, fantasies, lunacy, prescient, psephite, receive, scene, sea, secant, see, seize, Seymour, sierra.

Got it? The list was compiled by my younger son (an English teacher) and me, and all of the words in it contain a syllable that sounds like “si.”ⁱⁱ And in all of the words the sound is spelled (spelt?) differently.ⁱⁱⁱ Admittedly some of the words have multiple published pronunciations and all of them don't correspond to the sound, but in every case there is at least one valid pronunciation that does.

It's pretty confusing and inefficient. In a world in which I ♡ U and emoticons are replacing traditional text, it's getting harder and harder to justify what seems to be chaos.^iv In speech, where no one sees the spelling, the discrepancies are invisible and pronunciations don't confuse us. We usually use the words that we've always used^v and we understand what they mean even if we can't spell them. Spelling has become less important to those growing up now, and abbreviations abound in cyberspace. Some shortening of (written) speech has been around for a long time – not just shorthand, but messages like xxx or, more recently, B2B – but it's really blossomed with recent technological advances. And spelling bees are becoming less popular than in the past. Perhaps it's time to revisit the idea of phonetic English. Because ours is a large language, and one that has accepted and adopted the words and spellings of most of the world's cultures, written English has come to contain many variations of the same sounds – just as it has accepted the words themselves.

Attempts to institute phonetic English have been around at least since the nineteenth century.^vi One of the most famous proponents was George Bernard Shaw, but the effort predates him. People have been making fun of our orthography for a long time. Perhaps the best known example is ghoti. “Fish” is the pronunciation you'll have when the “gh” is rendered as in “rough,” “o” as in “women,” and “ti” as in “motion.” That pronunciation was first recorded^vii in 1855, the year before Shaw was born. Ten years earlier, schiesourrhce was facetiously proposed for “scissors,” along with some other ridiculous spellings, but I leave them to you. And there have been many other critics and parodists.

Ignoring the satire that is part of some of the proposals, it is difficult to argue with the idea that English is unnecessarily confusing for our own natives, and extraordinarily difficult to learn for new Americans. For this reason I favor the use of symbols to replace some of the sounds we use. For example, the letter “o,” which currently represents, among other letters and groupings, “eau,” “o,” “ou,” “owe,”and “ough” might be replaced by 5, alth5 I admit this is arbitrary. $ could represent “si”^viii sounds in words like “$t,” “$nosure,”^ix “prophe$ (the verb), and $ence. And, as an extension, other symbols could replace some of the other sounds in th5se words, making a truly ph5netic language.

Taking the original example, “si,” pronounced as it is in Spanish to recognize the increase in Spanish-speaking Americans, and using “3” in its place in the words noted above, we have aposta3, 3 (the computer language), 3sar, 3se, 3de, 3lacanth, em3, exequial,^x fan3d, fan3ful, fanta3s, luna3, pre3ent, 3phite, re3ve, 3ne, 3, 3cant, 3, 3ze, 3mour, 3erra. I'm sure you'll note both the savings in space and the ease of reading the new script. Admittedly there is some 5verlap of words,^xi but context will clarify m5st of the issues. And it's unlikely that the Vatican will be confused with the trinity, alth5 b5th might be written out as “H5ly 3.”

$...... Maybe that's not the way to g5.

I        Actually I'll explain it whether or not it becomes obvious.

ii       Meaning, among other things, “if” in Latin. That's the pronunciation in the word list I've presented.

iii      I suspect there are more, but we're tired of looking.

iv       Kos?

v       Usually, but not always. It's easier to say “goodbye” than “TTFN,” but somehow the latter has caught on. Some acronyms do, in fact, save time, but that's not the subject of today's effort.

vi    Spelling variants have long been common. Writers showed no great concern for consistency in orthography until dictionaries were well established. Since they weren't around in serious numbers or of great significance before he eighteenth century it's not surprising that people didn't take spelling too seriously and there was no standardization of sounds.

vii     See http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=81 for this and the next example.

viii    As in “psychosis.”

ix      More accurately, “$n5sure.”

x       Exequial presents a special problem since the “x” is pronounced with both a k and an s sound. Perhaps it would be written “ek3quial.”

xi      Like 3 and 3. And, for that matter, 3. But that's what homophones are all about.