Spelling standards on ATS need improvement

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. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's
government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and
has accepted a five year phase in plan that would be known as "EuroEnglish".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will
make the sivil servants jump for joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour
of the "k". This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have 1 less
letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the
troublesome "ph" will be replaced with the "f". This will make words like
"fotograf" 20% shorter.

In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be
expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always
ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of
the silent "e"s in the language is disgraseful, and they should go away.

By the 4th year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th"
with "z" and "w" with "v".

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. After zis fifz year, ve vil hav a realy sensibl
riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it
ezi to understand each ozer

ZE DREAM VIL FINALI KUM TRU!

I know this is old, but it still tickles me.

I'm an English teacher. Yes spelling is important, but it's not the bee all and end all of life.

If you know that you're carp at spelling, type up in word or text edit and copy and paste... It takes 10 seconds more and if you post a lot and correct a lot your spelling will improve.

Grammar - That's another kettle of fish, and a lot down to personal style a lot of the time.

Peace!

MonKey

reply to post by Hellmutt

Hellmutt;

Your point about dyslexia is well taken. But my gut tells me that it is not what is causing the perception by some (many?) of the woeful state of English usage around here. Though my gut could be wrong.

As for having "variety" in language usage, I've no problem with that. Writing in slang or writing phonetically does have its use, that use normally being for humorous or rhetorical ends. At the same time, I feel that one must be able to effectively use the standard rules before one can make effective use of breaking those rules. And when reading a post you can almost always spot the difference. As an analogy, I don't thing that Picasso would've been able to do what he did were he not already an accomplished draftsman.

Thanks.

Originally posted by ChiKeyMonKey

ZE DREAM VIL FINALI KUM TRU!

I know this is old, but it still tickles me.

mnky

Thanks for the chuckle, mnky.

I think all English teachers and spelling fanatics should adopt my system of having two misspellings per post. This will satisfy the 'dyslexic Eskimo' contingent and promote 'toxic egalitarianism'.

I see you did just that in your post (besides the 76 intentional errors in the joke). Kudos. Gracias.

However, the errors must be -very- subtle, and ideally will pass scrutiny of 99% of the posters that read your missive.

In stage two, we are considering posting entirely in 'Altavista Bable' mode, by alternating paragraphs in Spanglish, Fractured French, Oaxacan, Esperanto and Pig Latin. After all, there are more posters to assuage than just the Eskimo.



(there are two misspellings in this post)

reply to post by Badge01

At any rate thanks for trying. Oh, and you slightly misspelled derrière.

I was wondering if I should've inserted that danged accent. Now I know.

Thanks.

P.S. This might also set-off some folks, but I think everyone should have to take a semester of Latin. It is extremely helpful in understanding English grammar.

I love when people find this undeniable truth in their research, of which they're really, really excited about because nobody knows about it yet, and they spell the headline wrong. or make numerous errors along the way. They've one upped the entire United States government and did it with a 5th grade spelling level! Give me a break and read a book.

da skye iz bloo.

is dat lez true, cuz i miss pelt it?

Originally posted by RiotComing
Admittedly, I am a real stickler for spelling, I often make typos due to my cheap keyboard and go back constantly to proof-read and edit them!

I thought I was the only one who did that... ; )
(And English is not even my second language!)

BTW, you forgot one of the most appalling recent (?) additions to the, ehm, "New Grammar": should/could/would of said...

And hopefully it can be carried out without too much confuse the language. Where I'm from, english is horrible. Learning from a book, is no good. ATS is a good place to learn english... ...and Arnold Swarzenegger

English is a living language deal with it.

Stop crying over semantics.

Originally posted by billybob
da skye iz bloo.

is dat lez true, cuz i miss pelt it?

No. Spelling and grammar do not somehow sympathetically alter the the physical world.

It would however cause the reader to question the intelligence, rationality, veracity, and perhaps sobriety, of the poster and thereby call into question the value of the content.

But then maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy before my time.

Originally posted by blahdiblah
English is a living language deal with it.

Stop crying over semantics.

We're not crying, this is a joyous celebration of the riotous confusion of a polyglot assembly of tongues. A symphony macabre to some, and a gala fandango to others.

And with that I will waltz along with amusement at watching both sides.

Originally posted by Noscitare

Originally posted by billybob
da skye iz bloo.

is dat lez true, cuz i miss pelt it?

No. Spelling and grammar do not somehow sympathetically alter the the physical world.

It would however cause the reader to question the intelligence, rationality, veracity, and perhaps sobriety, of the poster and thereby call into question the value of the content.

But then maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy before my time.

well, i personally hate miss pelting words and poor grammarising, although i'm obviously not a capitalist.
however, i don't want to censor other less edumacated types from typing their two cents, just because they are either still learning the language, or have reached their summit of learnimicating.

reply to post by RiotComing


I don't mean to be too straightforward on this, but to have a standard for something presupposes that it's the same everywhere, correct? If that's so, then we need to stop this habit of separating US English spellings from "Real English" spellings, as if there was a difference. Last time I checked, it was the SAME LANGUAGE!!

To be completely fair though, I always double, and sometimes triple check my posts before making them, looking for those tell-tale red lines under my words. God, I sure do love Firefox for it's spell-check feature!! [Spell-check fired a warning at me, so I had to put a hyphen in there.] Oh, and one last thing; I'm American as well. Some of us pay VERY close attention to how we're portrayed, both on the web as well as in real life.

Just sayin'...

TheBorg

reply to post by Hellmutt


Shame on you for misspelling Arnie's name. But that's OK, 156,000 people spelled it with a 't' on google. (incidently, it doesn't mean 'black plowman). I'll let it pass that you've insulted Germans and the Governator with that little dig.

To be serious for a second, I'd be happier if people would -at least- not misspell a thread title.

You have to admit, that really makes ATS look st00pid.

And...we're not talking about an occasional typo, we're talking about blatent disregard for the English language and not (sic)'loosing' entire words (mainly contractions).

I think we've already lost the 'your=you're' battle. Even people with pretty good points totals and very good posts just don't seem to know what 'you're' means anymore.

However are you speaking as a Mod or as a poster, here? Because I think it's just wrong for a Mod to promote ignorance (of spelling). Give us a system of positive reinforcement for correct spelling, dagnabit!


patefacio toxica egalitarianism there are two misspellings in this post

reply to post by billybob

however, i don't want to censor other less edumacated types from typing their two cents, just because they are either still learning the language, or have reached their summit of learnimicating.

I agree, billybob. I don't think that anyone here would advocate banning or otherwise censoring the orthographically impaired.

For all that I know this thread was started by some English majors (former or current) ranting an venting about something that hits home.

reply to post by billybob


Dude!

I would challenge you to post every post from now on in this pidgen English.

C'mon, can you do it?

Plus, the sky is not blue. It's clear. Or gray.

(ROF,L).

(Plus you get a slide-bye since you have over 35,000 ATS points and a cool avatar.)



patefacio toxica egalitarianism there are two misspellings in this post

reply to post by blahdiblah


Lade-da, shows how much you know (taunting with humor).

Semantics has -nothing- to do with spelling. It's the study of linguistics and the meaning of a language. (neener, neener).

Besides posting a rant like that in a 'spelling' thread, is like taunting Christians in a thread devoted to rational discussion of Atheisem.

If you're going to taunt at least look up the complex terms you're going to use. It's just not funny, it boarders on pathetic, don't you think?


patefacio toxica egalitarianism there are two misspellings in this post

reply to post by NGC2736


Well -I- think that symphony macabre should be in italecs!

In additon, I think that was the second funniest post I've read today. (wipes tear from eye).




patefacio toxica egalitarianism there are two misspellings in this post

Do you suppose their could be a spell-checker built-in to ATS, maybe one that wouldn't auto change anything but would suggest changes privately that people might need to make? I think everyone would win if we had one.

[edit on 30-11-2007 by Jim_Kraken]

Originally posted by Badge01
reply to post by billybob

 

Dude!

I would challenge you to post every post from now on in this pidgen English.

That would be funny.

Are you folks aware of a book titled Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban? The entire book is written in a sort of pidgen English. And I can pretty assuredly state that he wouldn't have been able to pull it off were he not already a master of "standard written English".