What are good linguistic arguments for keeping heterographic homophones?

Question

While having a discussion with a friend who oft malapropriates their/there/they're, and to/too/two, he maintains the position that he has a:

"disbelief that the current system is the best one"

He contends that all that is necessary is a single word, say, 'ther', that will accommodate all the uses and that since the context can be gained from a spoken conversation, that a "better system", in his view, would be a system with just the single option - essentially, collapse all homophones into single words with the same orthography, but with combined definitions.

I don't share this perspective; I find the written word to be a superior form of language than spoken, and detest the bastardization of linguistic rules by people who can't be bothered to proofread and follow grammatic and syntactical rules.

My sentiments aside; what specific reasons are there to persist variant spellings of homophones?

He's also made reference to the supposed 'inefficiency' of having to learn and use the variant homophones:

"I do not refuse to learn, I just will not go out of my way to re-type, or proof read something when I feel it reasonable that it will be understood. Also, I feel that its requirement is not necessary and the rules should be amended to simply and expedite conversation."

So - what are good linguistic reasons to retain the heterographic homophones?

Answer 1

The final sentence in your post, "...what are good linguistic reasons to retain the heterographic homophones?" reveals a fundamental misunderstanding on your part of what linguistics is.

1. Theoretical linguists, in their capacity as researchers, are never interested in prescribing any rules or maintaining or "retaining" anything. They are interested in making observations about how language works and how it changes over time.

2. Most linguists study spoken (or signed) languages; written records and orthography do come into play in linguistic research, but mainly as tools to gain insight into the historical development of languages.

In comments above you ask about a linguistics professor correcting spelling in written assignments. When I corrected my students' phonology assignments, I never cared if there were prescriptive grammar or spelling errors; I only wrote comments if there were errors having to do with the concepts being tested in the assignments. Think of a math teacher grading an assignment involving a geometric proof. Would that teacher take points off for an extraneous apostrophe in a sentence like "Because ABC is a right triangle, the square of it's hypotenuse is equal to the squares of the other sides"? Nope.

But actually, whether or not a linguistics professor corrects spelling errors in a written assignment is (as people have mentioned above) irrelevant. You bring up the scenario of an advisor correcting a thesis draft. In that case, the professor might comment on a misspelling, but not in her capacity as a linguistic researcher! Such a comment would merely be in the interest of "playing by the rules" of the academic establishment at large. When my choir director in college took us on concert tours, he dutifully saw to it that the underage members of the group (the majority of us) didn't drink after performances, as that is the law in the U.S. But his personal political belief was that people should be allowed to drink from the age of 18. It would be silly to extrapolate from my music director's behavior that there must be a "musical reason" for maintaining the legal drinking age of 21.

All that aside, I invite you to think about what you really mean when you lament the "bastardization of linguistic rules". The truth is, the way any individual uses language (written or spoken) can be seen as a "bastardization of linguistic rules" from the perspective of someone who lives in a different place or a different time. In my comment below your post I teased you about the dangling participle in your first sentence. Some people would consider that sentence construction to be a "bastardization" of English; as a linguist, I don't care one way or the other, especially since I had no trouble inferring your intended meaning. Even the spelling of bastardization that you use would be considered a bastardization of the written form of English by those in the UK who would spell it bastardisation (although their complaints would not be entirely founded from a historical standpoint--see this blurb on -ize and -ise)!

Answer 2

The only reasons I can come up with are these:

• to avoid or reduce semantic ambiguity
• to keep tract of the word's history

In Czech orthography, for instance, we keep both <y> and <i>, and both <ý> and <í>, although their pronunciations have merged to [ɪ], and [iː], respectively, in most varieties of the language. While it helps the reader to distinguish <bit> "beaten" from <byt> (both pronounced [bɪt]) "flat/apartment", and <bít> "to beat" from <být> (both pronounced [biːt]) "to be", it has a major impact on school children who have to memorize close sets of words preserving the <y>'s and <ý>'s.

Another example from Czech is the use of graphemes for voiced obstruents (such as [d], [ɡ], [b], [z]) in devoicing environments or their voiceless counterparts in voicing environments to maintain the underlying phonological information to some extent. This, unlike the <y/ý>/<i/í> distinction, can actually make things easier for learners, who usually retrieve the underlying information from the various inflected forms anyway, hence they know, for example, they have to write <plod> [plɔt] "a fruit", because the genitiv singular is pronounced [plɔdu], and they know they have to write <plot> "a fence", because the genitive singular is pronounced [plɔtu] etc.

So the answer is not simple at all and depends largely on your preferences as a reader or learner, as well as various properties of the language in question plus its orthographical system. Notice that one of the main obstacles Czech learners of English have to face is the high level of spelling unpredictability (spelling-to-pronunciation mapping and meaning-to-spelling choices) and I also remember reading an article mentioning the very same kind of problems pre-to-early-school native speakers of English have to face (which is why it seems to take them much longer to acquire basic reading and writing skills than it takes children trying to acquire a more predictable orthographical system, such as the Czech one). On the other hand, of course, learning the English spelling system trains learners' memory, which could be considered a pro rather than a con.

For what it's worth, being a non-native speaker (and forever a learner) of English, I would welcome a radical reform leading to a simplification and regularization of the English spelling system. :-)

Answer 3

If you go to the Middle English Dictionary, you will see what English looks like when words are spelled according to the way they sound.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=byte&byte=178070811&egdisplay=open&egs=178073841

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?size=First+100&type=headword&q1=suster&rgxp=constrained

Of course, words are spoken differently in different parts of a country and in different parts of the world, and pronunciation changes over time.

So, even if we could "decide" on a normalized spelling for each English word (New York accent wins? London? Los Angeles?) the spellings would eventually get out of sync with the sound, and for many speakers they would be out of sync from the get-go.

One also wants to preserve the ability to read what is already written. Do you want people 100 years from now not able to read what is written today? How easy do you find Middle English? or even Elizabethan English?