DRE (Diacritically Regularized English) is an improved spelling system
for English. It borrows heavily from two other spelling systems:
Axel Wijk's Regularized English,
and Bob Boden's SRS.
The concept
of using diacritics to clarify English pronunciation comes from SRS;
much of the respelling methodology comes from Regularized
English. Additionally, DRE draws heavily from Wijk's research
into English spelling and phonology presented in his book on
Regularized English.
DRE is intended to meet certain goals. In brief, the goals are as
follows:
Certain goals of many alternate English spelling systems are explicitly
not goals of DRE.
I have assembled a list of moderately common words and their DRE
spellings. The spellings are based on American pronunciation, as
described by several American dictionaries, with input on British
pronunciation from the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. I refer
to DRE as defined by this dictionary as the "Tentative American
Reference for DRE", reduced to the acronym TARDRE. TARDRE is
emphatically not intended to represent my own pronunciation.
Further, the existence of the dictionary should not inhibit anyone from
using DRE to represent their own pronunciation whenever that
pronunciation is felt to be more correct or representative than my
"official" one.
Presently, DRE is nothing more than an amusement of the author.
However, I am pleased with it, and am gradually coming to think it
might actually have some practical value or merit. DRE was
designed to accommodate variance in pronunciation, and those with
interest in it are free to use it as seems right to them. If, as
seems most unlikely, DRE were to see widespread use, I would have
little control over its evolution, and one expects that the TARDRE
dictionary would be superseded by one or more professional dictionaries
of larger scope. Americans do love their rules, and I
anticipate that there will always be books defining right and wrong
ways to spell despite, or perhaps because of, the variety of accents in
which American English is spoken.
I do urge users of DRE to start by adhering to the spellings in the DRE
dictionary until they are fluent enough with the way the system works
to become part of its evolution themselves. The spellings in this
document are all TARDRE spellings, except where alternate design
choices or British spellings are shown.
More information on the DRE dictionary may be found here.
Given the size of this portion of the document, you may
well question whether it is in fact an "overview". Nevertheless,
while the broad outlines of DRE are presented here in some detail,
there are some aspects which are omitted or barely touched upon.
The actual definition of DRE is in this document;
while it is considerably terser than this presentation, it is the final
authority for the rules of DRE.
One of the characteristics of English spelling is the
association of multiple vowel sounds with the same letter. DRE,
to some extent, organizes the chaos with the use of diacritics.
In DRE, the unadorned form of each vowel represents its traditional
short
sound, or the schwa: hat, banana,
bed, rivet, sin, devil, hot, lemon, bug, album, myth, analyst.
Additionally, unaccented y is used at the end of words for an
unstressed long e sound, as in: silly.
When a vowel is used with an acute accent, it indicates the regular
long sound of the vowel: báby,
léthal, tíger, tótal, fúneral, pýthon.
The letter e is normally silent if unmarked at
the end a word. As in
traditional spelling, silent e is used to indicate the previous vowel
is long, or to give a preceding c the sound of s, as in: ráte, sauce. In strict
DRE, the presence of the silent e does not allow the acute accent of
the preceding vowel to be omitted.
When a vowel (other than y) is used with a grave accent, it indicates a
different free vowel sound associated with the vowel: fàther, sèànce,
rádìó, dòg, trùth. The
case of ù requires a bit of explanation. Many
words, such as <duty>, are pronounced by some speakers with the
ú
sound (with an implied y) and by others with the ù sound
(without one). The
ú spelling is used for such words if the pronunciation with y is
considered the primary spelling for either British or American
English. Thus, <duty> is spelled dúty, but <lute> is
spelled lùte, since
the /lju:t/ pronunciation is not the most common for either variety of
English. (See Design Issues
below for an extended discussion of the ú/ù dichotomy.)
When certain vowels are used with a circumflex accent, it indicates
either a specific unusual short sound, or a schwa. The circumflex
form is often used to indicate a schwa in situations where otherwise
the vowel would be assumed to be stressed. Examples: âny, furnâce, prêtty,
kíndnêss, ôven, purpôse, pûsh.
The vowel ë indicates the regular short e sound or a schwa.
It is used most commonly in vowel combinations. Examples: belovëd, dúët.
The vowel ü indicates a shortened long u, as in linóléüm, regülar
or ampütáte.
The vowel ï is used in words
such as aprécïáte;
this rather special usage is described later in the discussion of -ci-
in part (e) below.
The interpretation of many of the above vowels changes when they are
followed by the letter r. An unaccented vowel followed by a
single r has one of the two vowel sounds of the word <murder>,
depending on stress. (These two sounds seem pretty much the same
to Americans.) Examples: saròng,
permit, dirt, actor, burden. "yr" is an exception,
pronounced as in pyramid.
Some long vowel letters (plus one short) are altered in a regular
fashion when followed by r: vèry,
mìracle, wôrk, cúre, rùral.
Also, vowels preceded by a double r do not have a diacritic, but,
except for u, are pronounced differently from their "single r" sound: marry, terrible, irritáte, horrid,
current. For many speakers, the sounds of "arr" and
"âr" are the same. When a word is commonly pronounced with
/{r/ (as in
marry), DRE spells it with "arr" when possible.
Two additional vowel symbols, ä and ö, are used in
association with the letter r. The ä appears, for instance,
in the word polärity,
and the ö appears in the British spelling of förest. These letters do
not occur all that often, and the reasons for their existence are
somewhat
obscure. They are discussed further under Design
Issues.
The above rules are perhaps more complicated than one would like.
But they have two important characteristics: they allow most English
words to escape respelling, and they use the accent marks in a way that
is systematic and easy to master.
Like traditional English spelling, DRE augments its vowel
repertoire by using two letters to indicate a single sound. Some
digraphs have more than one interpretation, distinguished by the use of
diacritics. This part of the overview will not attempt to
describe all the digraphs in detail, but rather explain the principles
behind them.
The digraph "oo" is rather special. In essence, it is treated as
a sixth short vowel. The long form of "oo" is "oó"; in
contrast to most vowel digraphs using an accent, the sound is unrelated
to the component "ó". Examples: hook, boót.
All the digraph sounds of DRE can be spelled equally well
with a single, possibly accented, vowel. But without the use of
digraphs, it would be necessary to respell a huge number of words, and
it would be impossible to distinguish many homophones.
Most digraphs without accents are pronounced in a way you would expect
from traditional spelling: hurrah,
bait, play, maul, flaw, seat, feed, vein, they, sleuth, crew, brief,
coat, toe, toil, boy, house, cow. As with the single
vowels, these digraphs may be shortened in sound when followed by an r:
fair, dear, beer, their, pier, soar.
In general, i and y have the same effect as the second element of a
digraph, as do u and w. That is, "ai" and "ay" have the same
sound, as do "ou" and "ow".
Most digraphs with accents are pronounced the same as the accented
letter, as in: bazaàr,
antennaé,
samuraí, kaýak, heàrt, matinèe,
steín, eýe, kéy, líe, bròad,
sóul, lów, còurt, soùp, cúe,
trùe, guíde, buý, dýe. The
digraphs éu and éw are used like ú, as in éuréka, féw.
The accent is placed over the e because of the oddity (and
unavailability in computer fonts) of an accented w.
(Unfortunately, the requirement to accent the e rather than the w leads
to trouble for a number of words containing an unintentional éw
digraph, such as préwoshed
and réwínd.
This ambiguity seems unvaoidable.)
One might question why diacritics are not used in some of the
unaccented digraphs. áy, ée, èi, ìe
and óa, among others, would parallel the digraphs of the
previous paragraph nicely. The reason is to facilitate spelling
vowel combinations. If the word <seen> is written as séen, how then are we
supposed to spell préeminent?
Besides, since the use of digraphs with English is unusual, it is
probably best to minimize it. Since we all know how to pronounce
ee now, without any accents, why make things complicated?
All the above digraphs occur in stressed syllables. DRE also has
two vowel digraphs used in unstressed syllables, and pronounced as the
schwa. These are âi, as in mountâin, and ôu, as in
pòrôus. The
digraph eû, used before r in both stressed and unstressed
syllables, as in saboteûr,
is also an
exception.
Finally, DRE has two innovative vowel digraphs, which are not used in
traditional spelling: aa (saamon)
and oû (shoûd).
I attempt to justify these constructions in later
sections.
DRE's handling of consonant spellings is simpler than its
handling of vowels because there are no consonant diacritics. As
with vowels, consonant letters may be combined into digraphs with a
different pronunciation than their constituents. This section
discusses the single consonants, while the next discusses the digraphs.
DRE, like traditional English spelling, allows consonants to be
doubled. With the exceptions of -cc- and -rr-, doubling a
consonant implies no change to the sound of the consonant. Use of
a double consonant implies the preceding vowel is stressed, except
where the circumflex diacritic is used. DRE generally undoubles a
consonant in words where this pattern is not followed - see Double Consonants below.
DRE allows silent consonants only in a few specific cases, notably
initial kn-, ps- and wr-. These exceptions are made primarily to
facilitate the preservation of different spellings for homophones.
While the use of most consonants in DRE is unsurprising, a few require
special commentary.
In addition to the i/j combinations discussed in the
previous section, DRE uses the following consonant digraphs and
trigraphs: ch, ck, cq, cqu, dj, jh, kh, ng, ph, qu, sc, sh, tch,
th,
tz, wh, xc.
Most of these are familiar combinations, used in DRE exactly as in
traditional spelling. A few of them call for additional
commentary.
One of the more illogical conventions of written English
is the change in the pronunciation of c, s and t (and occasionally x)
before a (usually) unstressed syllable beginning with i or u (or
occasionally e). In the case of i (or e), the vowel is usually
not pronounced; in the case of u, it is. Examples (traditionally
spelled): vicious, ocean, conscious,
appreciate, vision, measure, passion, pressure, donation, question,
ratio, righteous, torture, noxious, luxury.
DRE classifies such words into four sorts, and applies a consistent
spelling to each. The first sort is composed of those words in
which the consonant is followed by an i which is not pronounced
(leaving out words in which ti is pronounced as ch). In this
case, the
English spelling of this part of the word is retained, except that s is
replaced by z if the sound is voiced: viciôus, consciôus, vizion,
passion, dónátion, noxiôus. The second
sort is
composed of words in which the consonant is followed by a u, or when ti
is pronounced as ch. In this case, the letter j is inserted
before the u (or replaces the i in ti), again with s changing
to z if the sound is voiced, or with the j replacing the second s when
s is doubled: mezjur, presjur,
questjon, tòrtjur, luxjùry. The third sort
contains words where the following vowel is an e. These words are
respelled as if the vowel were an i: ócian,
ríetjôus. Finally, the fourth sort is
composed of words where the vowel is an i pronounced as long e
(ì). In these words, the i is spelled with an umlaut: aprécïáte,
rátïó.
Note that the same process of sound mutation that led to these
spellings also led to words in which du is pronounced as ju, such as
<procedure> and <gradual>. These words are respelled
with dj rather than simply j to emphasize the parallelism with the
above spellings: procédjur,
gradjùal.
Some of the reasons for these design choices are as follows. The
system above is more precise than traditional spelling about indicating
the pronunciation. (The only ambiguity is really the handling of
words like <mention>, which some speakers pronounce with sh, and
some with ch. DRE chooses the sh spelling in such cases, to avoid
respelling.) While the use of the letter j is an innovation, its
resemblance to the letter i makes it less jarring than one might
anticipate. The fact that the normal j sound is a voiced ch also
helps to make the notation seem natural.
Finally, the ï symbol was introduced to improve parallelism
between related words, as with aprécïáte,
aprécïátion and apréciativ. A
previous version of DRE wrote the first two words above as aprécjìáte and
aprécjìátion
which, while consistent, obscured the relationship with apréciativ. Note that
the existence of words like asócìátion
and pronuncìátion,
where c continues to represent the s sound, precluded the use of
ì in the role of ï.
Like traditional spelling, DRE makes heavy use of the
silent e, to indicate that the preceding vowel is long, to soften a c,
or to distinguish a final s sound from a plural marker. Purists
may protest that when long vowels are marked, as they are with DRE, the
silent e is unnecessary, and could be dropped. DRE does not do
this, for two reasons. One is that very many words would be
respelled as the result of such a change. The other is that DRE
is intended to remain reasonably readable even when all the diacritics
are removed. After removal of the DRE diacritics, the silent e is
vital to distinguish plan from plane, bit from bite and slop from slope.
Traditional spelling does contain, however, a number of words where a
silent e is used even though the previous vowel is not long, such as
valve, some, college, imagine, accurate, native, culture. DRE
drops such e's, except after c, s, or r (other than in
-ure pronounced as -oor). Thus, the DRE spellings valv,
sôm, collej, imajin, accürat, nátiv, cultjur.
When a silent e is used after a short vowel and a single c or s, the
vowel is marked with a circumflex unless it is i or u, in which case
the e is dropped (and c changed to s). If more than one consonant
separates the short vowel and -ce or -se, the e is retained.
Thus: menâce, penance, malis,
prince, purpôse, response, lettus, repulse. See
"Ending -s, -ce, -se and -ss"
below for more discussion of this logic.
One of the features of traditional spelling which makes
using it correctly so difficult is the inconsistent use of double
letters. Consider pairs like addition/edition, balloon/ballot,
cannibal/animal. There is no order. Often, a double
consonant serves to indicate that the syllable is stressed, but
counterexamples abound: announce, cassette, offensive, satellite,
dandruff.
It is way more than DRE can do to repair this inconsistency in English
spelling. It has been suggested that consonants should be doubled
exactly when the syllable contains a stressed short vowel sound, but
this requires respelling many familiar words. It is also hard to
double digraphs in words like mythical or singular without having the
spellings look silly. And finally, using consonant doubling to
show vowel shortness leads to undesirable spelling differences between
related words: add/adition, astronnomy/asstronommical,
capptiv/captivvity, etc.
DRE does ameliorate the double consonant problem in one way. If a
double consonant is used following a schwa, the double consonant is
replaced by a single consonant, thus: anounce,
casett, ofensiv, satelíte, dandruf. There are two
exceptions to this. First, the doubling of consonants in closely
related words is kept consistent, so that âddition continues to be
spelled
with a double d to preserve the relationship with add, and the second m in
<commendation> is removed to preserve the relationship with comend.
Despite the fact that DRE limits itself to a timid, partial solution to
this problem, this particular change is one of those with a large
impact on the overall appearance of transcribed text.
DRE can be written in one of three modes. Up to this
point, I have been discussing strict DRE, which is to say, DRE with all
diacritics used, even for extremely common words or when the
pronunciation is completely obvious to the reader familiar with
English. There are two other modes of DRE, which may be more
practical. Stripped DRE is DRE using no diacritics at all.
One of the goals of DRE is for stripped DRE to be readable, no more
ambiguous than traditional spelling, and generally superior to
it.
Intermediate to strict DRE and stripped DRE is reduced DRE. This
is DRE with many diacritics removed. Reduced DRE removes
diacritics from (1) extremely common words, (2) extremely common
suffixes and (3) long vowels with an acute accent preceding a single
consonant and a silent e. In practice, this reduces the number of
diacritics substantially.
Here is an example text, the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, in
strict, reduced and stripped DRE to illustrate the differences:
Wé,
the peaple ov the Úníted Státes, in òrder
tu fòrm a mòre perfect únyon, establish justis,
insjùre domestic tranquility, províde fòr the
common defense, promòte the jeneral welfâre, and
secúre the blessings ov liberty tu ourselvs and our
postèrity, dù òrdain and establish this
Constitútion fòr the Úníted Státes
ov Amèrica.
We, the
peaple ov the Únited States, in òrder tu fòrm a
more perfect únyon, establish justis, insjùre domestic
tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the jeneral
welfâre, and secure the blessings ov liberty tu ourselvs and our
postèrity, du òrdain and establish this
Constitútion for the Únited States ov Amèrica.
We, the
peaple ov the United States, in order tu form a more perfect unyon,
establish justis, insjure domestic tranquility, provide for the common
defense, promote the jeneral welfare, and secure the blessings ov
liberty tu ourselvs and our posterity, du ordain and establish this
Constitution for the United States ov America.
When one transcribes a new word into DRE, one or two steps
are required. First, one must determine if the word can be marked
with accents to indicate the correct pronunciation. This step is
simple and mechanical. If the word cannot be so marked, it must
be respelled. Respelling is an intuitive process, not readily
reduced to rules. This section offers some of the guidelines I've
developed as I work with the system to choose the best respelling for a
variety of words.
The following are the basic requirements for a respelling:
Beyond that, there are the following guidelines:
One final principle is that, while it is sometimes
necessary to think "out of the box", it is also usually best to have a
prosaic spelling rather than an innovative one, if either will get the
job done.
These guidelines help make the appearance of DRE natural and
self-consistent, even when many words have to be respelled.
Here are some examples of application of these guidelines.
Mostly, DRE respells words so that they resemble the
regular spellings of similar-sounding words. Nevertheless, DRE
introduces a certain number of novel spellings without any traditional
precedent. Such spellings have not been introduced casually, and,
when possible, they have been introduced into the spellings of common
words, so that readers will become accustomed to seeing them.
Some of these innovations have already been explained and justified,
and are only briefly mentioned. The remainder are discussed in
more detail.
The digraphs sj, tj, xj and zj are used in words where the
consonant preceding j is followed by a (usually) unstressed syllable,
and the normal sound of the consonant has been softened: insjùre, nátjur, Cristjan,
luxjùry, plezjur. This change is discussed in
detail above.
The digraph jh is used for the French -ge sound, as in garàjh, neglijhèe and
jhonrë. Other
options for this sound were zh or gj, but I feel that jh is the best
guide to the pronunciation.
The digraph kh is used for the k sound in place of ch in
scientific and technical words. This is justified in more detail
above. Note that, traditionally, kh
is
often used to represent the
ch sound of <loch> or <Bach>. DRE uses the spelling
qh in the few English words where this sound occurs, e.g., loqh.
The digraph aa is used in a number of words for the sound
of short a, mostly in cases where other respellings are
less than satisfactory. Some words using this digraph are caash (cache), daam (damn), laam (lamb), plaad, saamon and, in American
English, haaf, haav (halve), laaf and moraal. (In British English,
these would be spelled haàf,
haàv, laàf and moraàl.)
In its rare uses in traditional spelling, aa represents the broad a
sound, becoming aà in DRE (e.g., bazaàr). To my
knowledge, aa representing short a occurs in a single word,
<baa>, and there in American English only. See below for a justification of this unorthodox
spelling.
One of the minor peculiarities of DRE spelling is its
fairly frequent use of the letter q without a u, as in conqer, etiqet, liqor,
mosqìtó, plaq, qìshe, únìqe,
and so on. These spellings come from dropping the u from qu when
it is not pronounced. These words could generally be spelled with
k instead, but the q establishes a link with traditional
spelling. Besides, I think English should be fun, and I like the
air of playfulness that these spellings add.
It is worth taking a few paragraphs to admit that DRE is
not perfect, and does not make English spelling easy or
trouble-free. This section discusses seven particular criticisms
that might be made of DRE.
Ideally, a spelling system will be phonemic, which is to say that the pronunciation of a word is completely predictable based on its spelling. DRE fails to achieve this, for reasons both great and small. The key reasons that DRE fails to be phonemic are:
See below for
further discussion of these points.
Quite apart from its tolerance of silent e, and its
half-hearted stance on double consonants, DRE fails to even address
some of the most annoying problems of English spelling. For
instance, the fact that some English words ending in o have an e in
their plural (<heroes>) and some do not (<burros>) is quite
absurd, and easy to remedy by simply picking one way or the other and
sticking to it. DRE could do this, but doesn't. Similarly,
why do we have farmer
but actor, or dominant but different, or changeable but convertible? What a waste of
good
brain cells to remember all this, and it would be so easy to fix!
This is hard to answer. As the objection notes, it would be easy
for DRE to just pick one form or another. The reason may in fact
just be timidity. I feel like I have my hands full with DRE's
changes already, and trying to fix all the irregular inflections and
suffixes of English seems a bit much to ask. However aggravating
it is to have to consult a dictionary whenever I want to use an
-able/ible word, I also doubt that a large percentage of the spelling
errors that mar English writing are of this sort. See below for further discussion of
these difficulties.
This is the other side of the coin from the previous
complaint - DRE is a failure because it is too unlike traditional
spelling. One way in which DRE is unlike traditional spelling is
all those diacritics, but this can be remedied by using stripped DRE,
at the cost of much of its precision.
Alternately, the complaint may be that while one is perfectly happy
with diacritics, too much respelling is required anyway. Apart
from the diacritics, there are four predominant reasons that words are
respelled in DRE: unnecessary silent e's, unnecesssarily doubled
consonants, replacement of g by j, and replacement of s by z.
There is nothing to be done about the silent e's, in my opinion - these
spellings need to be fixed. The unnecessary consonant doublings
could be retained, as DRE's efforts in this direction are not nearly
enough to solve the problem. It is interesting to note that the
last two reasons could be dealt with, for those not offended by
diacritics, by adding two consonant diacritics
to DRE,
say ĝ, pronounced as j (/dZ/), and ŝ, pronounced as z.
Regrettably, these letters are not present in many computer codes and
fonts, making their use somewhat difficult.
This is the the argument that, while resemblance to
current English spelling is desirable, DRE takes it too
far. The main issue here is the retention by DRE of
seldom-occurring
or foreign letter combinations. Why shouldn't the DRE words bròad, shófeûr
and matinèe instead be
braud, shófer and matinay? DRE is not doing
spellers any favors with spellings such as these.
This is indeed a quite valid argument. Rather than
attempt to refute it, I will just say that, in part, DRE was an
experiment to determine how close a better spelling system could remain
to
current spelling, and the answer is "very close". It is quite
possibly that some of DRE's slavish fidelity to traditional spelling is
counterproductive. If DRE were ever to gather enough interest to
evolve, this would be a likely area for change.
This one can be summed up as: There is no way to
systematically spell DRE. Unless you know traditional spelling,
there are no rules to guide one to the spelling to be used for each
sound. And even if you do, the respelling system is too arbitrary
to allow one to predict accurately how a word will be respelled.
There's really no way around it - this complaint is quite valid.
In addition to the basic arbitrariness of allowing many spellings for
some sounds, there are other factors which make DRE even more arbitrary.
All these problems are essentially inherited from
traditional spelling, and they are worse there. We learn
traditional spelling through an arduous process that combines pattern
recognition with memorization of exceptions. Because DRE refines
traditional spelling, it would have to be mastered by those new to
English spelling by the same kind of extended process, learning to
recognize patterns and memorizing exceptions. I believe that in
DRE the patterns are more visible and the exceptions fewer, and that
therefore the process of mastering DRE spelling, though still
non-trivial, should be somewhat easier than for traditional
spelling. And I also believe that those already familiar with
English spelling will probably find the patterns of DRE respelling can
be mastered in a matter of days or weeks, not years.
It may not be heaven, but at least it's a much cooler section of hell.
This argument would claim that, even though DRE is
systematic, it is too complicated. The number of diacritics and
digraphs is too large to be easily mastered. In particular, the
umlauted vowels, which are only used occasionally, and which are not
defined in a particularly natural or consistent way, are a strong
indication that the whole thing is too baroque.
Again, this is a hard argument to refute. I don't find DRE too
complicated to use and remember. But I must admit, I've been
working with it for quite some time now, and I also have a knack for
mastering complicated systems of rules. I have some doubts that
the goals can be achieved via anything less complicated, but this could
be taken as evidence that they were never the right goals to begin with.
I will point out that Vietnamese orthography uses more diacritics than
DRE, and people somehow master it. I will also admit that the
tonal nature of the Vietnamese language presents special problems in
use of the Latin alphabet which English is spared, and that there is
nothing about the English language which would force a completely
rational Latin-based spelling system to contain such a plethora of
markings.
This argument is generally made in the context of reduced
DRE. Reduced DRE allows diacritics to be left out in certain
cases where the pronunciation is obvious to those familiar with
English. But even in reduced DRE, many obvious diacritics are
required: càr, pòrk,
fáble, enuncìate, obvìous. DRE would
be more accessible if its use of diacritics were limited to words where
they were truly necessary.
I consider this argument to be the converse of argument f
above: DRE is not complicated enough. I personally have
made my peace with diacritics, and no longer look at them as unsightly
typographic blemishes. It is true that more rules would allow
more diacritics to be eliminated, but I don't feel the cost in
complexity is worth it. If one holds vowels with diacritics to be
first-class alphabetic citizens, then why should we go out of our way
to shun them? The present rules for reduced DRE are both
extremely simple and quite effective. Is it not better to use
diacritics fairly often than to have to think really hard about whether
each one is needed before writing it?
DRE's handling of the uncertainty of pronunciation of
"long
u" is problematical. Many English speakers pronounce
<tune> as /tju:n/, others as /tu:n/. The DRE solution is to
prefer the pronunciation with /j/, whenever it is the most common
pronunciation in either British or American English. An
alternative was just to allow each speaker to spell it as he says
it. After all, DRE allows Americans to dance, but Englishmen to dànce.
My reasons for designing DRE this way are:
I will end by noting that any English speaker who feels
strongly about the preferability of the /j/-less pronunciation is free
to write the word tùne
in DRE, and no harm will come to him.
The standard pronunciation of ei/ey could be long a
(<vein>) or long e (<seize>). In his Regularized
English, Wijk chooses to treat the long a sound for ei/ey as standard,
and one sign this was a good decision is the fact that the spelling of
<their> is so reasonable, while <weird> is a spelling
problem. In fact, one suspects that the whole "i before e"
spelling issue stems from the fact that both ei and ie are frequently
pronounced as the long e.
The trouble with this decision comes from the existence of words like
<being>, <deity>, and <reinforce>. There is
little choice but to use spellings like déity for these words,
which means that éi cannot be used for the plain long e.
This in turns means that either the unmarked ei must be long e after
all, or that the spelling ei for long e must be abandoned
altogether. In the former case, we would have spellings like vèin and thèy. In the latter
case, all the ei words with long e have to be respelled. One
problem here is the existence of many words with very natural spellings
in which ey is pronounced as long e: key, monkey, alley, honey.
If we
preserve these spellings, we have to break the symmetry between ei and
ey, which is preserved for all the other i/y digraphs.
Nevertheless, the
final resolution is to do exactly that: long a remains the standard
sound of ei, the ei words with long e are respelled using ee (seeze, receet), and ey with the sound of
long e keeps the éy spelling.
There is still some feeling that the long e sound for ey is more
natural than the long a. This is one reason for the decision to
respell certain common words with ey (such as greyt, weyr, eyt). These
familiar words should increase the reader's comfort level with this
pronunciation for ey.
The use of s as the plural ending causes a number of
problems. Life would be so much simpler if we just used z instead!
Words ending in s, but not ss, are generally assumed to be plurals,
with the s pronounced as /z/ unless preceded by a voiceless
consonant. So how should you spell words that end with /s/?
Traditional spelling sometimes uses an s anyway (alas, atlas, axis,
cosmos, campus, etc.). More often, it uses one of -ce, -se or -ss
instead. All of these workarounds present problems. -ss
tends to imply that the syllable containing it is stressed, while -ce
and -se imply that the preceding vowel is long. Sometimes, these
assumptions are false: furnace, purchase, compass, princess, goodness,
justice, promise, purpose, lettuce. These spellings collide with
the DRE solutions to the misuse of silent e and of double consonants.
DRE's handling of these words depends on the vowel preceding the
/s/. In the case of -ice, -ise or -uce, an ending s cannot be
misunderstood as a plural, since no English nouns end in short i or
short u. Thus, we get the DRE spellings justis, promis, lettus. We
cannot use a naked -s in words with the other vowels, due to the
likelihood of confusion with words such as sofas, bottles and phótós. For
these words, we use the circumflex accent over the preceding vowel, to
cancel the implication of the silent e or double letter: furnâce, purchâse,
compâss, princêss, goodnêss, purpôse.
This convention is also used in words where an unstressed a or o is
followed by a single s pronounced as /s/, such as atlâs and thermôs. Finally, for
the few words where an ending s would be inappropriately pronounced as
/z/, the spelling is changed to use one of the other endings, as in gass, cáoss and yess.
The English language is blessed with several classes of words that have the form of plurals, but which are not. Some examples are:
Two sets of similarly spelled, extremely common words are
quite challenging to respell in DRE: could/should/would and
done/none/one. The first set needs to be respelled due to the
silent l. The obvious respellings are cood/shood/wood, but unfortunately,
wood clashes in the obvious
way. DRE also allows û for this sound, but cûd, shûd and wûd look like attempts to
transcribe a backwoods dialect, and cûd
is a homograph too. My solution here was simply to drop the
silent l, and write coûd,
shoûd and woûd.
The resulting words are so similar to the traditional ones that there
is no doubt what they are. That the ou digraph already has
several
other forms (ou, óu, and où, not to mention òur
and ôus) is unfortunate, but I don't
feel that this usage really introduces any new problems.
The -one words are even harder to deal with. <one> can
easily be respelled as wun,
but the other two are not so easy, thanks to the existence of the words
don, dun and nun. It is also desirable to
spell <done> with a u vowel, to relate it to the verb dù
(the form duen would be
grammatically ideal), and equally desirable to spell <none> and
<one> similarly to emphasize their related meanings. One
possibility was dône,
nône and wône,
making use of the property of the circumflex vowels that they are short
even when they would be interpreted as long in the absence of the
circumflex. The biggest problem with this solution
is that, in stripped DRE, it is hard to read wone as <one>, rather than
as some unknown word pronounced /woUn/. I attempted to solve this
by inventing the digraph ôe: giving dôen, wôen and nôen. This proved too
ugly to endure. My current solution is to spell them dunn, wunn and nunn. This is not ideal, but
seems to be less grating than any other solution I've tried. A
related issue is the spelling of <once>. Logically
speaking, it should probably be spelled wunnce,
but I think wunce is
adequate.
O and a are not the only vowels to be troublesome when
followed by r. When one takes the differences between British and
American English into account, they are all troublesome. By and
large, however, they are not very troublesome, because current
spelling, which DRE imitates, already serves both varieties of English
quite well in this area. There are a few words whose spelling
does not accurately reflect the British pronunciation, which DRE
respells. These respellings are worth explaining, because they
seem somewhat mysterious and pointless to Americans.
In addition to the vowel differences, British English
differs from American English in being non-rhotic, that is, not
pronouncing r in some contexts, as following a vowel and preceding a
consonant. This difference presents no issues for DRE. The
rules for pronunciation of r in traditional spelling can be used
unchanged.
Here is a summary of the remaining differences:
The American sound /Er/ can be pronounced two different ways in British English (RP), depending on the particular word. For example, consider the pair <chair> and <cherry>. The latter is pronounced /tSEri/ in both kinds of English, while <chair> in pronounced /tSEr/ in American English, or /tSe@/ in British English. DRE adjusts to this easily, because, with a few exceptions, you can determine the British pronunciation from the spelling (either traditional or as modified by DRE). If the sound is spelled with er or err, the British pronunciation will be /Er/ - as in <cherry>, <very>, <sterile> and <inherit>. Otherwise, in words like <care>, <fair>, <their>, <wear> and <scary>, the /e@(r)/ pronunciation will be used.
The American sound /Ir/ can similarly be pronounced either /Ir/ or /I@(r)/ in British English. For example, <mirror> is pronounced /mIr@(r)/ in both varieties of English, while <nearer> is instead pronounced /nI@r@/ in Britain. Again, the correct pronunciation is almost always easy to determine. If the sound is written ir, irr or yr, the British pronunciation will be /Ir/ - as in <miracle>, <mirror> and <pyramid>. Otherwise, in words like <beer>, <fear>, <here>, <pier> and <series>, the /I@(r)/ pronunciation will be used.
The American sound /Ur/ almost always becomes /U@(r)/ in British English. There are a few exceptions, such as <courier> and <guru>.
The combination /Vr/ occurs in British English, but not American English. It appears in words like <hurry> and <nourish>, which are pronounced with /3`/ in American English. Most words spelled with urr are pronounced this way in British English, except those derived from other words, such as <blurry> and <furry>.
As can be seen, these distinctions are quite regular, and
all that is required of DRE is to deal with the occasional exception.
"ere" is used in TS for /e@(r)/ in two extremely
common words: <there> and <where>. DRE respells them
as thâre and whâre. A few words of
foreign origin are also exceptional. DRE respells these words
with "eir": eirzàtz,
skeirtzó, sombreiro (ersatz, scherzo, sombrero).
Similarly, "ir" is used for /I@(r)/ in a few foreign words. DRE respells them with "ier": liera, nádier, niervàna (lira, nadir, nirvana).
The sequence ûr is used for /Vr/ when it retains this pronunciation in British English, as in coûrìer and gûrù.
The DRE spelling urr is used whenever the British
pronunciation /Vr/ is intended. Thus, <courage> and
<nourish> are respelled as curraj
and nurrish. The
appropriate British spelling for <blurry> and <furry> is
not clear to me - I suppose that blûrry
and fûrry is about the
best that can be done.
One other interesting development in this area should be
mentioned. According to the Longman pronunciation dictionary, for
a few very common words ending in -ary or -arily, the American
pronunciation of /Eri/ or /Er@li/ is becoming common in British
speech. Examples are the words <necessary> and
<voluntarily>. Ironically, this pronunciation would make
the current DRE spelling inappropriate - DRE would have to use necesèry and voluntèrily to indicate the
pronunciation accurately. For the moment, I'm leaving the
traditional use of a rather than e intact in these words. If
anyone cares about DRE in ten years, this will bear re-examination if
this development proves to be the start of a growing trend.
Certain words containing a short a sound in American
English require respelling due to silent letters or other defects, but
cannot use an obvious respelling representing a homonym. "cache",
"damn", "halve", "lamb" and "morale" are examples of such words.
A previous version of DRE used the digraph ae in such cases: caesh, daem, haev, laem and morael. The problem with
this is that many of these words are pronounced in British English with
the broad a sound, for which this spelling is inappropriate.
While the combination àe would work in the abstract, it is a
combination which a person familiar with the traditional orthography
would find quite surprising for this pronunciation.
When I became aware of the conflict with British English,
after much consideration I changed the ae digraph to aa, allowing me
the use of aà for the British form, which in turn permits the
relationship between haaf and
haàf to be as clear as
that between bath and bàth. It is indeed
unfortunate that aa in traditional spelling is practically never
pronounced as short a, but at least, for an American, the intended
pronunciation of caash, haaf and moraal is pretty clear. I
chose to use aà rather than àa for the broad form by
analogy with oo and oò - one should imagine the diacritic
applying to the digraph as a whole.
I have chosen to respell more words than strictly
necessary with aa, in order to increase the familiarity of the
notation. Words like caaf,
jiraaf, laaf, laam, plaad and
saamon could have had other spellings, but using aa in this way
increases its visibility, so that the reader becomes more used to
seeing it. For British readers, there are only two very common
words (daam and laam) that have the unmarked
spelling, but I hope the relationship of these spellings to haàf and laàf will still be apparent.
I have considered a number of possible improvements to
DRE. I have not adopted any of them, and probably will not, but
it could be argued that they would be beneficial. The first two
sets of changes discussed below would make DRE spelling slightly more
logical and precise, but I'm not convinced this is particularly
important. The third set attempts to rationalize several
inconsistent English spelling patterns, which would be of significant
value if successful. In all these cases, one unfortunate effect
of
the proposed changes would be to cause DRE to deviate further from the
current appearance of English, thereby reducing its familiarity and
acceptability to the average reader. Finally, the last change
alters stripped DRE to solve an unpleasant problem inherited from TS,
at the cost
of making it diverge from the other forms of DRE.
As discussed above,
DRE is not a phonemic writing system. In terms of the consonants,
there are three primary ambiguities:
The th digraph represents both the voiceless /T/ and voiced /D/ th sounds. While usually only one of the two sounds is possible for a given spelling, there are a few words where the meaning must be considered in determining the pronunciation. The pair either/ether is the classic example. DRE could easily be modified to distinguish these sounds, probably using the classic dh digraph to respresent the voiced sound, as in dhis, widhin, ôdher and soódhe. Many of the most common English words contain the /D/ sound, so this change has a radical impact on the overall appearance of DRE. A change with slightly less impact is to keep th for the voiced sound, and use tx for the voiceless sound, as in txick, txrill, atxléte and sympatxy. I like this because it helps preserve the similarity of related words like batx/báthe, bretx/breathe and clòtx/clóthe. Despite this advantage, most readers of English would no doubt find this convention difficult to get used to.
The letter x is used both for /ks/ and /gz/. This flaw is straightforward to fix, using a double x for the /gz/ sound. This combination does not occur in standard written English (or at least did not before the Exxon company came to be), but it is easy to read and not unnatural looking: exxist, auxxilyary. The main reason not to make this change is that it appears to be completely unnecessary.
The ng digraph is used for three different sounds: /N/ (hung), /Ng/ (hungry) and /ng/ (ungrateful). While the distinction between /Ng/ and /ng/ is mostly academic, and varies widely between speakers, there is no doubt that the /N/ and /Ng/ sounds are of a rather different character, and that spelling finger and singer so similarly is not ideal. I've considered a number of modifications to DRE to repair this fault, but most of them are too outlandish-looking to consider for long. I consider the best solution to be spelling the soft ng sound with a tilde (ñg), as in tañg, siñger, readiñg, leñgth and shañghaí. (In reduced DRE, the diacritic would be omitted at the end of a word, since the hard ng never occurs in final position.)
As for the vowels, there is one ambiguity in DRE that
dwarfs all others: the inability to represent in spelling the
difference between a short vowel and a schwa. The words chapel and lapel use the same letters with
different interpretations, as do pozitiv
and pozition. Any
change
to this would entail a huge change in the appearance of the language,
and seems out of the question. If one was absolutely determined
to do such a thing, I would recommend a diacritic under the vowel to indicate a
schwa, as in pozịtiv and pọzitiọn. This is unobtrusive
enough to avoid interefering with normal reading speed, or giving a
false impression of stress. Of course, these
characters are rarely found on non-Vietnamese keyboards, and are
difficult to generate with any but the most Unicode-aware
software. Thus, even if one was inclined to think that making
this distinction improves the orthography (which I do not), practical
considerations intervene.
Several of the conventions of current English spelling
preserved by DRE are particularly illogical. Proponents of
logical spelling might prefer that these regular but illogical features
be remedied. I myself consider the benefits of these changes to
be very small.
The word endings -le and -re are particularly illogical - the e is itself not pronounced, but adds a vowel sound before (or a syllabic character to) the preceding consonant. It's almost as if the spelling system were itself dyslexic, as reversing the order of the two letters generally results in an acceptable spelling (except when the letter c is involved, as in <particle> or <acre>). The best correction for this, one to bring joy to the hearts of those who think that reformed spelling's task is mostly that of shrinkage, is to just leave the e off: pàrticl, búgl, ácr. One might be tempted to go further, and omit the final vowel from words like <camel> and <thunder>, but this is entirely contrary to the DRE philosophy of not respelling words whose spellings are already acceptable.
The past tense ending often adds a gratuitous silent e, as in moaned, wished and looked. Sometimes, this is accompanied by a doubling of the final consonant, simply to avoid ambiguity, as in pinned or stripped. The plural ending does not work like this; we write looks and pins, not lookes and pinnes. Logically speaking, the extra e and the doubling should go. (Unfortunately, the doubling is still needed before -ing, in order to distinguish pinning and pining, though this could be fixed by writing pineing.) It would be possible to go even further with this by, as is often recommended, spelling the past tense with a t where it is so pronounced: wisht, laaft. This is not a change I could ever consent to, as I consider the value of using the same letter for all regular past tenses to be far greater than the value of accurately representing the variance in the way this inflection is pronounced. I note that many proponents of wisht do not also suggest the equally accurate spellings wishez or ribz.
Traditional spelling frequently adds an -e before the s of the plural of a word ending in a vowel, as in chilies and heroes. For words ending in -o, of which there are very many, this is particularly aggravating, as it is usually difficult to predict whether an e is required or even accepted. DRE could easily mandate that no e is to be added. For -i words, the required diacritic on the long vowel prevents ambiguity when the e is omitted. For o, life is more complicated, as the diacritic would be omitted from an ending o in reduced DRE, but even so, the rules of DRE prohibit the formation of words which end in an unmarked -os. Dropping the e's from these plurals is probably a change which ought to be made, but I have resisted it out of a general desire to avoid modifying the spellings of grammatical features of the English language.
Another feature of the English plural which is rather illogical is the replacement of ending -y with -ie- in the plural. Many reformed spelling systems repair this, so that you would have variëtys and remedys, but this is uncalled for in DRE. The mutation of -y to -ie- is completely regular and predictable, and the ie digraph has the correct pronunciation in DRE, so retaining the y in the plural serves only to make the orthographies diverge without offering a significant benefit. Similarly, using spellings like béutyful, happynêss and fúryôus to preserve the y of the root word seems misguided, however logical.
The use of i as a modifier letter in the endings
-cious,
-tion, etc. is quite illogical - there is no remnant of any
vowel-like qualities to the i here. DRE has already introduces
the digraphs sj, tj and zj in certain words: presjur, questjon, úzjùal.
Why not make the j convention universal, so we would also write eficjent, impresjon, conscjôus,
indignátjon, vizjon? The only difficulty here is
the fact that DRE defines tj to be pronounced as /tS/, not /S/, but the
rule could be modified to require this pronunciation only before u or
after s, t and (optionally) n, and to respell the exceptional word ríetjôus as ríettjôus.
An even more radical proposal would be to eliminate the redundancy of
cj, sj and tj altogether, and just use sj for /S/ in all cases, and tj
only for /tS/: efisjent,
lusjôus, indignásjon, pàrsjal. Because
of the large number of common words using these endings, either form of
this
change would have a great impact on the overall appearance of
DRE. A less drastic proposal that might be worth doing is to
correct those words where the spelling of a suffixed form is
gratuitously different from the root, e.g., inflùencial, abolision,
transmition, benefitial.
As discussed above, a
serious spelling difficulty that DRE does not address is the
irregularity of certain suffixes, especially -able/ible (and the
related -ability/ibility), -ance/ence (as well as the related
-ancy/ency and -ant/ent) and -er/or. A phonemic spelling system
solves these problems easily by establishing a common spelling for each
(e.g.,
-ibl, -ens, -ur) and sticking to it. For a system like DRE, whose
goal is to change as little as possible, solutions are not so easy to
come by. There are a number of approaches one can take, and they
all have their drawbacks.
One can do as the phonemic systems do, and just declare a single spelling. This introduces several problems. There is the problem of the c; if you retain the TS rules for c, you can't spell significance and magnificence with the same ending. There is the problem of deciding the applicability of the rules; if you respell visitor, actor and accelerator with an e, do you also respell janitor, doctor, and motor? Another problem is the occasional occurrence of two words derived from the same root, as with <forceable> and <forcible>, or <resister> and <resistor>. And finally, there is the problem that spellings like profitible and evidance don't look like reformed spellings to the literate reader: they look like errors.
In his MORE spelling system, Pete Boardman offers an
intriguing idea: use e as a "magic e" in these endings, which is to
say, use -ence and -er to indicate a preceding long vowel, and
otherwise use -ance and -or. Thus, one would respell
<creator> and <competence> as créáter and competance. One could
generalize this rule by using -eble in place of -able/ible if the
previous vowel was long. Even overlooking the problem of the c,
there are undesirable side-effects to this rule too. For
instance, if one respells <confident> as confidant due to the short i, then
<confidant> must also be respelled to something like confidahnt or confidont, neither of which
appeals. (In British English, the extremely ugly spelling confidaant would be
required.) Additionally, this rule offers no guidance as to the
appropriate spelling for words like <reliance>,
<expedience> and <congruent>.
Yet another possibility is to use one spelling for words consisting of an English root word plus the suffix (that is, words like mixer, breakable and repentance) and another for similar words with a more complex etymology (words like donor, visible and affluence). This is a harder rule to apply: there are difficult words like <equator> and <excellence>. And we still haven't gotten around the problem of the c.
I have been pondering these issues for quite some time,
and have reached no definite conclusions. If, at the present
time, I were to try to enhance DRE to better handle these suffixes, I
would try the following (and possibly try something different tomorrow):
The ending -able would be used when the remainder of the word is itself an English word, and -ible would be used otherwise. -eble would be used rather than -able after a soft c. Any words ending in -üble (such as solüble and valüble) would continue to do so. Thus: breykable, díjestable, audible, flammible, repláceble, redúceble.
The case of -ance/ant/ence/ent is the most
difficult. First, I would restrict the applicability of the
rules which follow to words where both the -nt form and one of the -nce
or -ncy forms exist. This would leave out words like science and
clearance. Words where a soft c or ci/ti precedes the suffix
would retain the current spelling: magnificent, indécency,
pátient, proficient. All other such words would be
respelled with a u vowel: elegunce,
differunce, relíunt, prominunt. This last avoids
the effect of seeming to be simply a misspelling, at the cost of having
to
respell twice as many words. It also forces the respelling of
some extremely familiar words, such as absunt and distunt. One may question
whether this rule is really an improvement; we now have three endings
instead of two, and it is still not obvious in some cases which is
correct.
The ending -er would be used in all cases where the remainder of the word is itself an English word: viziter, acter, counseler, dictáter, burgler. In cases like resister/resistor, the word with the more literal meaning would be given the -er ending. Words like coroner, ancestor and sponsor, where the suffix is less literal, would not be respelled.
Stripped DRE is DRE with all the diacritics removed.
It is similar to Wijk's Regularized English in somewhat improving
English spelling without using diacritics. It works because, even
without diacritics, the changes in DRE from TS were designed to
indicate, or at least not mislead about, correct
pronunciation. In one situation, DRE "fixes" TS simply by adding
a
diacritic, but without the diacritic, the current spelling remains
misleading. This is the situation with words like <epitome>
and
<cafe>, where a final e is not only not "magic", it is not silent
either. Because DRE goes to a lot of trouble to remove misleading
silent e's (as in the spellings fòrtjunat
and jenúin), it seems
wrong to fail to correct e's which look silent, but are not. The
problem with making such changes is that it causes stripped DRE and the
other forms of DRE, which can use diacritics to make this distinction,
to diverge.
There are several approaches to fixing this in stripped DRE, differing
mainly in the details:
My personal preference for a correction here is to replace a final long e with an -i (epitomi) and a final e or ee pronounced as long a with ey (cafey). Though -ay would show the pronunciation better than -ey does, it fails to work in words in which the e is preceded by c, like <divorcee> and <fiancee>. An ending -y could be used in place of -i, and produces more familiar looking words, but this also creates potential confusion in spellings like catastrophy and finaly.
Another possibility is simply to continue to use the DRE diacritics on e at the end of a word: epitomé, cafè. The biggest issue here is that TS already uses a diacritic in some words of the sort, such as <resumé>, but it is the wrong diacritic for DRE.
A hybird solution could use the -i solution for words like <epitome>, and use é in words like café and divorcée. I regard changing the direction of the accent as a greater divergence from the other modes of DRE than simply replacing the final e with ey.
I have not established any of the changes above because, at this time, I regard stripped DRE as being of relatively little interest, and consider reduced DRE to be the most promising form. If, somehow, there were to be a massive groundswell of enthusiasm for stripped DRE, I suspect I would change the definition as indicated, using the first listed approach to the problem of the unsilent final e. Until that day, it seems best to keep the definition of stripped DRE simple, even at the cost of considerable imperfection.
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