Phoneticians as Reformers 02

Phoneticians of 19th century

Phonetics is the study of speech sounds and how they are produced, but phoneticians in the 19th century worked in a little different way from what they do today. In those days there were phoneticians who proposed or developed new system of writing to faithfully represent how the words were pronounced.

English spelling has many irregularities. A very famous example displaying the irregularity is the clever respelling of "fish" as "ghoti" ( 'gh' as in 'enough', 'o' as in 'women', and 'ti' as in 'nation').

Why so many irregularities? Here are some of many reasons.
-Words came into English from foreign languages retaining their original spelling but the pronunciation adapted to English.
-There was the Great Vowel Shift that changed the pronunciation of Middle English long vowels but the spelling staying as is.
-There were words which the spelling were reformed to reflect Greek or Latin etymology.

Phoneticians thought 26 letters in the alphabet were just not enough to phonetically describe the English words accurately -- too many irregularities, no standardized spelling or pronunciation. This issue was one of the motivations for Bernard Shaw to write "Pygmalion" (Phoneticians as Reformers 01).

Here are what phoneticians of the 19th century did to tackle the issue of the inconsistency of spelling and pronunciation:
-Regularizing: applying existing spelling rules more consistently. Some were proposed by an American English-language spelling reformer Noah Webster, and resulted in the difference in American and British spelling.
-Standardizing: Using the English alphabet and adding new diagraph (eg. <th> →/ð/, <ng>→/ŋ/), new spelling was proposed. This was proposed by Issac Pitman, who also invented shorthand system that is widely used in Britain.
-Renewing: replacing all alphabet with newly invented symbols. Bernard Shaw invented the Shavian alphabet. It had 48 letters all looking nothing like the Latin alphabet, and were "phonemic" as possible.

Against the effort of the reformers of the 19th century, English still retains its irregularities in spelling and inconsistency of spelling and pronunciation, and diverse Englishes flourish in different parts of the world.