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Michael - 2005-11-23 10:07:34
Seems like the people at that website only want to simplify the spelling rather than actually change the alphabet itself, though, which obviously wouldn't be a bad idea (and I say that from the vantage of an extremely good speller). Theodore Roosevelt badly wanted to do the same thing but it's one of his rare hobbyhorses that he couldn't actually materialize. I've visited one place where they actually did change the alphabet along with the name of the country's major city (Constantinople) and I've often wondered what that must have been like for the populace to assimilate at the time. Imagine if America suddenly converted its alphabet to Arab script and changed the name of New York City to Mohammedan or something. That's what Attaturk actually did for his country (in reverse) when he decided to westernize it. And he was shockingly successful.
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amatt - 2005-11-23 10:33:27
Saw Chris Whitley a few years back in Philadelphia. Very entertaining. Little known fact, he also did work with Jessie Lee Montague from Jake.
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amatt - 2005-11-23 11:47:03
The 'ugliest dog' is forever immortalized on the Ratdog cd Evening Moods.
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Sue - 2005-11-23 13:41:43
I was a big fan of Chris Whitley's first album, but I was so put off by the second one that I never listened to anything else he ever did. "Big Sky Country" and "Living With the Law" are brilliant, though. Is it just me, or is it a bit ironic that the photo on his web site depicts him holding a cigarette, and he died of lung cancer...?
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2fs - 2005-11-24 00:05:21
Spelling reform is a hobby horse of mine...or rather, not doing it is. I will try to keep it brief and relatively unranty. Anyway: first, you would utterly lose the distinction between homophones. Second: you would utterly lose the etymological history embedded in words' spellings. Third: you would have to choose whose pronunciation becomes the "correct" (to be rendered phonetically) one, thereby instantly marginalizing all other speakers of English and their regional and/or dialectical pronunciations. Finally: spelling, I've come to believe, is something rather more like the ability to hear musical intervals: sure, training can help, but if you don't have it, you never will. It's a question of pattern recognition - and I don't think phonetics would actually help much...particularly for those folks whose pronunciations are not whatever the hypothetical standard might be. Bad, bad, bad idea. Thank you. Warden? Could you untie these straps now?
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Paula - 2005-11-24 10:15:08
It's a question of pattern recognition
Bingo. I've always been a really good speller, and it doesn't feel particularly like a skill, more like being right-handed or brown-eyed.
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Michael - 2005-11-27 15:03:48
Yeah, "Anheuser" notwithstanding, I've always been an excellent speller and I think that has more to do with subconsciously picturing typescript than anything else. It's oddly important to me for no apparent rational reason beyond aesthetics, idiotically enough, how someone spells his or her name, for example. I remember going out with a woman I thought was named "Anne" years ago and being quite disappointed to eventually learn that she was actually named "Ann." I underwent an infinitesimal paradigm shift about her as a result (hey, I admitted it was idiotic). Of course you're absolutely right about the history of a word's pronunciation being embedded in its spelling (every letter in "knight" used to be pronounced back in the days of the Round Table). And trying to figure out the "correct" pronunciation of words in order to spell them accordingly is a Pandora's Box that had never occurred to me to even consider. While I'm posting (and just in case someone besides me is demented enough to have backtracked back this far), I finally saw "Walk the Line" the other day and am delighted to report that it was indeed Schlitz that they were pounding back after all, which is very realistic for the period, as I noted earlier. In fact, I think I remember seeing something in an early interview with the director that they wanted to use Schlitz and approached the company about a product placement deal, although I may be dreaming that. The most striking thing about the movie itself was how entertaining it is: nobody anywhere had quite prepared me for that. I thought Phoenix nailed the character (what was up with the extremely prominent addition to Cash's physiognimy, though?---I never noticed that on Phoenix before and wasn't particularly aware of Cash having one, although I guess maybe he must have; I suppose Dermot Mulroney might have been the next choice if Phoenix had been unavailable). I wouldn't be me if I didn't recommend catching some film of Cash and June Carter at the Museum of TV & Radio: she was quite the personality-driven entertainer in her own right and the museum has two hugely entertaining duets of "Jackson" filmed several years apart that I think anybody intrigued by the film should have a look at. I think Reese Witherspoon made a hell of a June and has a similarly longish face, which helped with the illusion. Of course I've never seen any of her kiddie movies ("Legally Blonde," etc.) but I was impressed by her performances as Aniston's kid sister on the TV series "Friends;" she seems to bring a very intense and enjoyable energy to everything she does, and "Walk the Line" was anything but an exception. I think the director made a wise if excruciatingly difficult choice by not overlaying any of Cash's actual singing onto Phoenix's renditions. Once the audience heard that voice, the mental picture of the real Cash would have inevitably elbowed its way into their minds and it would've undercut Phoenix's effect rather than enhanced it. The director was wise to leave the actual recording of Cash and Carter for the closing credits. Oliver Stone, faced with the same quandary for "The Doors," made the opposite choice and I think it was also correct for that film, since without Morrison's stunning voice, you miss half the band's impact. The actress in "Walk the Line" playing Maybelle Carter looked exactly like the real Maybelle except that she seemed eighty pounds heavier. Imagine being played in a movie by someone who looks precisely like you except eighty pounds heavier. Maybe Maybelle's lucky that she didn't live to see it.
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Michael - 2005-11-28 14:08:08
I had to look up "homophones," by the way, which I'd apparently forgotten so long ago that it amounted to a new one on me. Now that I know what they are (I was almost afraid to look), I agree that the loss of them would be another serious problem with any attempt to simplify the spelling. (Hey, I think I'll just stay back here by myself on this page for the next few months while everyone else moves on ahead. That would be a new approach to blog-responding, I suppose.)
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Paula - 2005-11-28 14:21:15
You could be like a squatter, just take up residency here, keep posting about your thoughts until the police come.
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Michael - 2005-11-28 15:29:04
Glad to see that you'd be keeping track of me, though; I figured I was aimlessly typing into infinity, with no one ever seeing this page again under any circumstances.
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Paula - 2005-11-28 15:31:28
Bloggers and blog-readers are an OCD-ish lot. Plus, I get a little e-mail notification anytime someone leaves a comment. Half of the time it's "Texas Hold'Em" spam.
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Michael - 2005-11-29 10:38:00
In that case, since you get email notifications, maybe I'll look at the release date of "Must Love Dogs" and go back to respond to your speculation about what sort of movie they might have made instead with that intriguing title (I saw that post when I went back through months of them over a couple of evenings a while back--talk about OCD!). My version of "Must Love Dogs" would entail (so to speak) Diane Lane and a comely female collie, thus deftly incorporating lesbianism and bestiality into the same exciting family-friendly evening at the cinema. Since script doctors make up to ten thousand dollars an hour, don't let the studios know about my scintillating creativity, however, since I think having that much money could threaten to hobble my drive and interfere with similar future achievements.
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