In DC, even the Spelling Bee draws protesters

[Towlie]

Source: Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The nation's capital always draws its share of protesters, picketing for causes ranging from health care reform to immigration policy.

But spelling bee protesters? They're out here, too.

Four peaceful protesters, some dressed in full-length black and yellow bee costumes, represented the American Literacy Council and the London-based Spelling Society and stood outside the Grand Hyatt on Thursday, where the Scripps National Spelling Bee is being held. Their message was short: Simplify the way we spell words.

According to literature distributed by the group, it makes more sense for "fruit" to be spelled as "froot," "slow" should be "slo," and "heifer" — a word spelled correctly during the first oral round of the bee Thursday by Texas competitor Ramesh Ghanta — should be "hefer."

Read more: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h1bmf2tG4WxyUwMd4tmmmxpVTW6gD9G40H601

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http://www.english-zone.com/index.php?page=1114&pid=81">Meihem in Ce Klasrum was published in 1946 as humor, but protesters today want it to become a reality. This is what the Internet is doing to us.

[yellerpup]

1. How ignorant.

:kick:

[WaaHoo]

12. yes

Perfect summation.

[MattBaggins]

27. How is this ignorant?

Having a desire to fix the one of stupidest spelling systems of any language in the world is far from stupid, except for the snobby elitists that think silent letters and asinine rules like I before E make them all stuffy and superior.

English spelling is a stupid twisted fuckfest.

[brendan120678]

29. Words a spelled distinctively for a reason...they have meaning.

If you change the spelling of words to make them all "fonetic," you loose the etymology and genealogy behind those words.

[MattBaggins]

33. You can clean up some the stupider rules without losing those.

Germans haven't lost anything for changing how they spell certain words and neither would we.

If your argument were true we should all go back to speaking Old English to preserve all that highfalutin etymology and genealogy.

[Odin2005]

34. That's what a dictionary is for.

Spanish is phonetic and they don't bemoan the lack of etymological spellings in their writing.
(Spanish iz fonetic and ðei doun't bimoun ðie lak ëv etimolojikl spelings in ðeir wraiting.)

Really the only problem with English when it comes to a phonetic orthography is vowel variation in the dialects (I merge the caught and cot vowels, for example), but that shouldn't be a problem with a broad enough transcription.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

2. I suport dis.

[kentauros]

3. Someone needs to get these people an etymological dictionary

so they can learn a little history of language. (http://www.etymonline.com)

By their rules, we should also be re-spelling our names, too...

[SkyDaddy7]

5. Sounds like Tea Baggery??

[kentauros]

6. Thats "T Bagrree"

:P

[pinboy3niner]

4. Gr8! Now they want to destroy the richness of our language.

Surprisingly, one of the protesters is an 81-year-old FORMER ELEMENTARY SCHOOL PRINCIPAL! :wtf:

Thanks for posting this--and for the laughs!

[monmouth]

7. Well darn, how do these people expect court stenographers to do

their job? Our strokes on the machiney thing are all phonetic like the way these idjits want it. Not fair I say....LOL..

[Odin2005]

25. A hideously un-phonetic orthography is "richness"?

Then I guess Spanish must be a very poor language. :eyes:

[MattBaggins]

28. Our moronic mishmash of "Rules (except for the million exceptions)"

is far from "richness". It's stupid and nothing more.

[boppers]

8. Spell according to regional pronunciation? That's not brilliant.

Why should slow be spelled slo, just because some folks drop the w when speaking the word? Should we have separate dictionaries for separate spoken dialects?

[kentauros]

10. "Should we have separate dictionaries for separate spoken dialects?"

Thar ya go

[Igel]

15. Huh?

Pretty much nobody prounces the 'w' at the end of 'slow'. We mostly have an off-glide, a sort of 'w', but it's not because there's a 'w' in the orthography. It's because we've broken our "long vowels" and diphthongized them.

*ow > o: > ow, in other words. Lots of words without *ow but with o: also had o: > ow. For example "sloe." (As for symbols: *ow means "original" or "old", > means "became", and the : indicates length.)

Of course, not all dialects had o: > ow. Some did other things with it, either having the o: become something else or having the resulting ow continue to change. The standard dialect, the one with the political and economic and social power behind it, has the diphthongized o. But there's no other reason for the standard to be the standard.

In other words, we simply spell, as it turns out, primarily according to one regional pronunciation, one that was prevalent centuries ago in another country. That's not a sound reason for keeping our orthography.

In fact, our spelling is sometimes stupid. "Debt", borrowed from French "dette" has a "b" because Latin "debit" has a "b". The "b" vanished from French centuries before the word got into English.

But there are good reasons not to have regional spellings. And that is because the dialects are still mutually comprehensible so we still have essentially one language, because the spellings are still, for the most part, reasonably phonemic and parsable and nearly equally useable for all the dialects, and because there's a wealth of material nobody's going to reprint and which should remain accessible.

[KamaAina]

9. I'll be eating ghoti for dinner tonight.

That's 'gh' as in 'rough', 'o' as in 'women', and 'ti' as in 'situation' -- 'fish"!

[mitchum]

11. Fuk yeh!

[Xenotime]

13. Spelling is just a supression attempt at the lower class.

[Rebubula]

31. LOLZ

Not sure if Serious...

If not - nice troll
If Serious - well...

Education should be the goal of all people.

[pinboy3niner]

32. Well, it "suppresses" the hell out of the teabaggers! LOL

:rofl:

[Mojeoux]

14. Yeah, we'll picket the Spelling Bee

Gud eyedea. Gude ida.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

16. In the 19th century, the Koreans finally adopted a phonetic alphabet.

They had been previously using the Chinese system, which consisted of thousands of characters. It was remarkably inefficient, and only scholars could spend the years necessary to learn to read and write it.

The phonetic alphabet took only a few days for an intelligent adult to learn to read and write. And it was much more efficient for the rapid communication of ideas, business transactions, etc.

In fact, the Korean phonetic alphabet had actually been invented hundreds of years earlier. There had been an academic debate at the time about whether or not to adopt the new alphabet, or stick with the old Chinese system. The old scholars had decided to stick with the old inefficient Chinese system. Why? They gave excuses like "well if it's good enough for the Chinese it's good enough for us." "I had to learn it when I was a kid, so gosh darn it so should everybody else." "If kids these days learn to read and write an easy way, they'll wind up being lazy and always looking for an easy way out."

My point? My point is that newer, better ways are often ignored because grumpy old dicks would rather do things the bad old fashioned way for the sake of complacency.

[Art_from_Ark]

17. Well, the Chinese kept their system,

(with character modifications in mainland written Chinese) but they seem to be doing pretty well these days. The Japanese still use thousands of Chinese characters as well, and it doesn't seem to have hurt their progress too much.

In fact, characters can often convey a complex meaning better than simple phonetic renderings. For example, I was reading a news article recently about a problem with 口蹄疫 in one of the rural areas of Japan. If only the phonetic spelling こうていえき had been used, I would have no idea what the problem was. But seeing that the first character is "mouth" and the second character" is "hoof" and the third character is "disease", it became obvious from the characters what the problem was.

[fishbulb703]

22. China and Japan use the english language (and alphabet) for international trade.

[Art_from_Ark]

35. But domestically, they use their own writing systems

The Japanese, for example, had the opportunity to switch to a Roman alphabet-based writing system (romaji), or simple hiragana/katakana, but they chose instead to keep their own system, including over 1800 "basic" Chinese characters, for domestic purposes. And yet, despite the complexity of their written language, Japan has one of the highest literacy rates in the world.

[Javaman]

18. You mean the tea ball licker baggers aren't out there protesting with their misspelled signs?

That would be just so sweetly ironic.

"speelin is usless".

[brendan120678]

19. What a stupid idea.

That's really all that I can say about that.

[LeftinOH]

20. Idiocracy: "language had devolved down to slang words and grunts" n/t

[johnaries]

21. No need to protest, texting and IM'ing will eventually take care of it.

no wat i men?

[Odin2005]

26. It should be "No wët ai mien", IMO.

:evilgrin:

[Codeine]

23. The stupid; it burns. nt

[Odin2005]

24. I can't believe how people in this thread think our fucked up orthography is so holy.

And accusing anyone who thinks English needs a spelling reform of being stupid teabaggers = FAIL

[alfredo]

30. No reform needed, just allow our language to evolve naturally.