Is spelling reform directly beneficial 4the autism community

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Alright I remaking a thread, because I guess I didn't make explicitly clear that I was asking a question of it's benefits.


So do you think English spelling reform would benefit aspies, espeically though with dyslexia, and other communication difficulties.

Here's a video that breaks down the complication of it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V7SmSlJCYo

Alright I'm restarting a thread because I think some people got the wrong Idea.

I'm not suggesting that simple spelling errors are the direct problem facing many aspies.

I am suggesting that if this was less of an issue there'd be more time in education, for teaching social skills, teaching basic grammar, and other problem areas that many peoples on the autism spectrum have in education.

From my personal opinion: In my language there was a great writing and spelling reform around 2000, and it simply sucked. So there were some weird things, that were afterwards less complicated. In exchange you had to learn thousend things, you already knew and that were absolutely logic, new. I hate it and partly I still refuse to use it, when it comes to completely unlogic idiotic stuff. (As example the word: Photograph. So its origin is old greek and makes sense a photo-graph is a somethings that paints down light. A picturedrawer. So this is a sense that makes absolutely sense. While Fotograf is refering to a count (=Graf) of Fotos (means nothing.))

So in the end 10% got better and 90% got worse. Complete senseless.

Sorry, but I had to correct your spelling and grammatical errors. As for my opinion, I do not think it is right to make everyone change from the spellings that they were taught and that have actual origins just to accommodate some people who cannot spell correctly. Not to mention, it will just make us look really stupid. Spelling "head" as "hed" because not everyone can remember there is an "a" after the "e" is just silly.

I've never heard of this.

As I've said before, Spell checker is my friend.

I'm curious to know which language, as I can't think of any language that is comparable to englishes strange spelling.

As far as the old school origin reasoning, I think it's total bunk.

The biggest chore for english speakers while learning other languages is being able to simply distinguish vowel sounds.

Well nobody would be forced directly.

With modern day computers a simple script can switch spelling systems in a second. And unlike our conventional spelling would take only a few hours to learn.

And it goes far beyond simple being unable to spell.

It's about saving time, increasing productivity, and cutting down on repetitive strain.

Not to mention that the people most effected are children and foreigners who are actually learning the language.

Again why would you add an extra thousand hours to virtually every human on the globe arbitrary.

This becomes a much larger issue when you consider the needs of aspie children.

There is so much our children should be learning, that can have dramatic effects on the overall outcome of their development.

Simple pyschology should be taught to children as soon as their young enough to read.

I would hate that. Misspelled words already throw me off-balance psychologically. I can't imagine having to relearn everything and being surrounded by what look like misspellings even more than I already am.

As mentioned we had that stuff, and it is not as easy as you think. You cant rewrite millions of old books in some hours. So our reform was meant as reform, but instead to change something in the end it only added something. So I am reading a newspaper or something on the internet and see the words with the new spelling. On the other side I simply read a book that was written before the reform, and get to see the old spelling again. So our old spelling did not vanish as was the plan, its still complete there, you only have now alternative spelling, that are also allowed, and that only makes you weird. Because before you only needed to know one correct spelling. Now you need at least two you need to remember. And when you write an Email or letter, its onyl doing things complicated, because then you sit there, want to use a word, then you remember both spellings, but dont remember anymore which was the old and which was the new one, and at least you want to wirte your letters according to the old OR the new spelling, so you dont want to mix it, because then your message really looks like crap. Also many magazines and newspaper that have as a majority old people as buyer and reader, refused to change to the new spellings because of their customers.

So the reform brought us instead of a new spelling, that made it easier for everone, instead a second additional spelling that only makes it harder for everyone. To answer your question: I am from Austria and the spelling reform was for Austria, Germany and parts of Switzerland.

Lol german spelling reform doesn't even compare to english, I think your truly not getting how misspelled english is. The comparison doesn't exist no offense.

I know enough german to understand that trust me on that.

The thing is since they'd reflect how their actually pronounced most people would be able to learn it in a weekend. At this point english spelling is closer to pictographs than actual phonetics.

a e i o u denote more than 20 different vowel sounds. I donno if you look into it a little you'll understand.

All I can tell you is most english words are misspelled as is.

We all learned as a child sounding it out doesn't work.

We somehow forget this as adults and think silly children, however it will have a major effect on the teaching time spent on young kids.

I know many people with poor spelling and language skills. They are all NT.

Spelling reform of English has been brought up many times over the years. Here is a wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_la ... ing_reform\

One of the criticisms against phonetic spelling based on pronounciation is that English words are pronounced in a variety of ways based on regional accents. Sometimes fiction writers will attempt to convey the accent of their characters by writing the accent phonetically. This is very difficult for me to read and I am sure I am not the only one. My difficulty with it is a variant of Nonperson's criticism of this idea. Trying to sound out words that are phonetic to somebody else's accent is difficult and slows down the reading. It scans as misspelling and takes more time to read, not less. There is also the matter of whose accent would be chosen to encode phonetically. From the wiki....



At the end, some spelling reformers believe that spelling could be made inclusive of regional dialects by using multiple spellings. Yes, that would be more inclusive. It would also be difficult to read. Many fiction writers do just exactly that and it is difficult to read.



Yes, and this makes it easier to read. Actually sounding out words is a slow and cumbersome way to read. Once people become adept at reading, at some point during their childhoods, they stop sounding out words (except when encountering new ones such as a new proper noun) and switch seamlessly to the much faster sight reading. Being forced to revert to sounding out words phonetically because of a writer's spelling makes the reading process slower and almost mentally painful .(Nonperson is not the only one who finds this difficult). Luckily most people have only a smattering of spelling errors so little phonetic reading is needed. Sometimes young people will misspell words on purpose as a form of written slang. This can be burdonsome to read but luckily many of these intentional misspellings get codified so that they can be sight read.




Here's an accidental example of the difficulty. Intentionally misspelling "don't know" as slang has been codified as "dunno". But you didn't use that codified slang misspelling that would be fast to sight read because so many people use it. Instead I had to sight read the word and realize you meant "don't know" (or "dunno"). This only cost me a second but it was only one word (or two words, really). That is nothing in a whole paragraph and I probably have some of my own in my own writing that somebody will pick out (thanks in advance). But it would be unbearable if the whole post was written that way.



It doesn't work. Very true. Attempting to sound out words in English is the bane of children and everybody who is not a native English speaker. But this is a temporary problem in that sight reading takes over pretty soon into the learning process. Once sight reading takes over, laborious decoding can stop and seamless reading starts.



We forget it because sounding out words is such a terrible way to read. It's necessary at first to understand the symbols (and this is a difficult time for many children because of the atypical spellings) but they get past it. There have been educators who attempted to remedy this problem with phoentic spellings. The phoentic system they used was called ITA for Initial Teaching Alphabet. A wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet

It was earnestly tried but it failed.


Basically it failed because English isn't written phonetically so the children had to learn to read twice, with a period of unlearning the ITA in between. I realize that this is the problem you are trying to solve.


Spelling reform to a more phonetic way can happen but it has to happen very, very slowly. One spelling can't simply replace another wholesale because English doesn't belong to just one country. There are slight differences such as "color" versus "colour" but the slightness of those differences shows why you must do this very, very slowly. Any attempt to do it all at once creates a Tower of Babel problem with people not able to read each others' documents. English has changed spellings over the years, but these spelling changes happened at a slow pace, one word at a time.

Oh, so your reform will be completely else. So you will make all old books vanish, to prevent having two spellings at the same time, to prevent your kids getting weird because of being forced to learn two different spellings at the same time, so they can read books that was made before the reform as well?

I know that your reform will affect much more words, then our german reform. But according to my math lessons: Few words changed leading to great chaos. Many words changed, leading to much, much more chaos. My best wishes for getting two written languages.

" I donno if you look into it a little you'll understand. "

"Lol german spelling reform doesn't even compare to english, I think your truly not getting how misspelled english is. The comparison doesn't exist no offense. "

Stoek, you do realize that everyone here is reading and writing in English in this thread, right? This is not a language with which we are unfamiliar.