Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Feynman, Richard (April 1963), This Unscientific Age, From the Danz Lectures, Retrieved on -0001-11-30
Folksonomies: phonetics Memes
30 NOV -0001
Spelling is the Problem
Now let me get to a lower level still in this question. And that is, all the time you hear the
question, "why can't Johnny read?" And the answer is, because of the spelling. The
Phoenicians, 2000, more, 3000, 4000 years ago, somewhere around there, were able to
figure out from their language a scheme of describing the sounds with symbols. It was
very simple. Each sound had a corresponding symbol, and each symbol, a corresponding
sound. So that when you could see what the symbols' sounds w...Folksonomies: phoenetics
Folksonomies: phoenetics
1 
Putting letters together into words is one of the most basic skills required for literacy. If this basic skill is so hard for so many people to grasp, then, Feynman argues, there is a problem with the way words are spelled.
01 JAN 2010
How do We Fix Spelling?
...it can be argued, perhaps, if they wish, that it's a question of style and beauty in the language, and that to make new words and new parts of speech might destroy that. But they cannot argue that respelling the words would have anything to do with the style. There's no form of art form or literary form, with the sole exception of crossword puzzles, in which the spelling makes a bit of difference to the style. And even crossword puzzles can be made with a different spelling. And if it's no...Folksonomies: phonetics
Folksonomies: phonetics
If we can write words with letters from the English alphabet to phonetically reproduce words in other languages, like Mandarin or ARabic, then why can we not rearrange the letters in our own words to phonetically match the way they sound when we speak them?
