I’m not sure there’s really such a thing as incremental improvement here.
That is: if you publish a book whose “only” divergence from currently-standard English orthography is that it makes (say) the change you propose here, then you are publishing a Book With Weird Spellings, and the gap between a book in ordinary English and a book in English-with-weird-spellings is much bigger than the gap between any two specific sets of weird spellings.
No publisher is ever going to say “these changes are so modest that they won’t seem like a big deal to readers and reviewers so f—it, let’s give it a try”.
(Maaaaaybe a much smaller change could be incremental enough, though I’m having trouble thinking of plausible examples that aren’t close to “this single word should be spelt differently”, which I think one could get away with. But if you want to get from current standard English orthography to something much simpler or cleaner by a series of changes that small, I think it’ll take you several hundred years. Which is to say, I think not coincidentally, you’re looking at a rate of change comparable to the rate of organic change in the language’s spelling and vocabulary.)
“ph” seems like a good start, seeing as it’s pretty much always an “f”.
Dwarfs → Dwarves is an example of a word sort of being changed in order to be more consistent. Though in this case Tolkien had to continuously make sure that editors didn’t “fix” it. And to be honest it sort of introduced an extra spelling, rather than fixing the current one…
For most normal printed books the effort would be prohibitive. On the other hand, ebooks don’t have similar problems. It’s easy to both publish the ebook in old spelling and in the new spelling. The same goes for websites where you can automatically parse between the spellings.
When it comes to actual physical books it would be possible to print a special edition of the book in the new spelling with a limited print run and sell it for more money as a collector’s item.
Yup, true, you could pretty easily do ebook editions in pairs. But my prediction for that is that the only people who would buy the new-cpelling edition are the ones who are already on board with cpeling riform, and you can’t change a language just by selling reformed-spelling books to people who already think spelling should be reformed: you need to change the minds of the people as a whole.
Maaaybe you could bring them in by spreading the idea that New Spelling Is High Status, but to me that feels unlikely to work. I think that if you want to do that you need some body like the Académie Française officially pushing the new spelling, and even then it’s going to be difficult: I think everyone in France ignores the AF when it says unpopular things like “don’t use le weekend”. It’s just really difficult to change a language from the top down.
Cormac McCarthy successfully published a fiction book with no capitalization (and some reduction in other punctuation), The Road, to critical acclaim. Of course, it didn’t lead to a groundswell of novels without capitalization.
I haven’t read The Road, but: isn’t this a case like (e.g.) Riddley Walker or A Clockwork Orange where the language is deliberately nonstandard, and meant to be perceived as nonstandard, as a sign that we’re looking at a world radically changed from the present one?
Yes, it is intended to be nonstandard, and underscores the misery of the world, as if to say they things have gotten so hopeless they can’t even muster up the energy to add quotation marks.
Then (to make explicit something I left implicit before) I don’t think it says anything about what success a publisher would have trying to use currently-nonstandard orthography just because they think it’s better.
(Note that even if some nonstandard orthography would be better if everyone used it, it may still be much worse for most readers now because it’s not what they’re used to, and readers will likely not be happy to have their reading made more difficult because a publisher is on a crusade to improve the English language. And, accordingly, publishers won’t do that because they like selling books.)
But The Road is the only one of his that I’ve read, partly because of that, so to say more I’d need to do more research than a quick look at Wikipedia.
A single-word change that you can observe in the wild is through → thru. It appears that way on road signs and I’ve started to see it creep into informal and even semi-formal writing, e.g. internal-only business email. Unfortunately, the related change throughout → thruout just looks bizarre, though I guess the original is kinda a bizarre word too.
I’m not sure there’s really such a thing as incremental improvement here.
That is: if you publish a book whose “only” divergence from currently-standard English orthography is that it makes (say) the change you propose here, then you are publishing a Book With Weird Spellings, and the gap between a book in ordinary English and a book in English-with-weird-spellings is much bigger than the gap between any two specific sets of weird spellings.
No publisher is ever going to say “these changes are so modest that they won’t seem like a big deal to readers and reviewers so f—it, let’s give it a try”.
(Maaaaaybe a much smaller change could be incremental enough, though I’m having trouble thinking of plausible examples that aren’t close to “this single word should be spelt differently”, which I think one could get away with. But if you want to get from current standard English orthography to something much simpler or cleaner by a series of changes that small, I think it’ll take you several hundred years. Which is to say, I think not coincidentally, you’re looking at a rate of change comparable to the rate of organic change in the language’s spelling and vocabulary.)
“ph” seems like a good start, seeing as it’s pretty much always an “f”.
Dwarfs → Dwarves is an example of a word sort of being changed in order to be more consistent. Though in this case Tolkien had to continuously make sure that editors didn’t “fix” it. And to be honest it sort of introduced an extra spelling, rather than fixing the current one…
For most normal printed books the effort would be prohibitive. On the other hand, ebooks don’t have similar problems. It’s easy to both publish the ebook in old spelling and in the new spelling. The same goes for websites where you can automatically parse between the spellings.
When it comes to actual physical books it would be possible to print a special edition of the book in the new spelling with a limited print run and sell it for more money as a collector’s item.
Yup, true, you could pretty easily do ebook editions in pairs. But my prediction for that is that the only people who would buy the new-cpelling edition are the ones who are already on board with cpeling riform, and you can’t change a language just by selling reformed-spelling books to people who already think spelling should be reformed: you need to change the minds of the people as a whole.
Maaaybe you could bring them in by spreading the idea that New Spelling Is High Status, but to me that feels unlikely to work. I think that if you want to do that you need some body like the Académie Française officially pushing the new spelling, and even then it’s going to be difficult: I think everyone in France ignores the AF when it says unpopular things like “don’t use le weekend”. It’s just really difficult to change a language from the top down.
Cormac McCarthy successfully published a fiction book with no capitalization (and some reduction in other punctuation), The Road, to critical acclaim. Of course, it didn’t lead to a groundswell of novels without capitalization.
I haven’t read The Road, but: isn’t this a case like (e.g.) Riddley Walker or A Clockwork Orange where the language is deliberately nonstandard, and meant to be perceived as nonstandard, as a sign that we’re looking at a world radically changed from the present one?
Yes, it is intended to be nonstandard, and underscores the misery of the world, as if to say they things have gotten so hopeless they can’t even muster up the energy to add quotation marks.
Then (to make explicit something I left implicit before) I don’t think it says anything about what success a publisher would have trying to use currently-nonstandard orthography just because they think it’s better.
(Note that even if some nonstandard orthography would be better if everyone used it, it may still be much worse for most readers now because it’s not what they’re used to, and readers will likely not be happy to have their reading made more difficult because a publisher is on a crusade to improve the English language. And, accordingly, publishers won’t do that because they like selling books.)
My understanding is that parent commenter is wrong, and The Road was like that just because Cormac McCarthy generally writes novels like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormac_McCarthy
But The Road is the only one of his that I’ve read, partly because of that, so to say more I’d need to do more research than a quick look at Wikipedia.
A single-word change that you can observe in the wild is through → thru. It appears that way on road signs and I’ve started to see it creep into informal and even semi-formal writing, e.g. internal-only business email. Unfortunately, the related change throughout → thruout just looks bizarre, though I guess the original is kinda a bizarre word too.