English orthography is not “close to optimal”

Human Language Technologies: The 2015 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the ACL, pages 537–545, Denver, Colorado, May 31 – June 5, 2015. c⃝2015 Association for Computational Linguistics English orthography is not “close to optimal” Garrett Nicolai and Grzegorz Kondrak Department of Computing Science University of Alberta {nicolai,gkondrak}@ualberta.ca Abstract In spite of the apparent irregularity of the English spelling system, Chomsky and Halle (1968) characterize it as “near optimal”. We investigate this assertion using computational techniques and resources. We design an al- gorithm to generate word spellings that max- imize both phonemic transparency and mor- phological consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that the constructed system is much closer to optimality than the traditional English orthography. 1 Introduction English spelling is notorious for its irregularity. Kominek and Black (2006) estimate that it is about 3 times more complex than German, and 40 times more complex than Spanish. This is confirmed by lower accuracy of letter-to-phoneme systems on En- glish (Bisani and Ney, 2008). A survey of English spelling (Carney, 1994) devotes 120 pages to de- scribe phoneme-to-letter correspondences, and lists 226 letter-to-phoneme rules, almost all of which ad- mit exceptions. Numerous proposals have been put forward for spelling reforms over the years, rang- ing from small changes affecting a limited set of words to complete overhauls based on novel writing scripts (Venezky, 1970). In spite of the perceived irregularity of English spellings, Chomsky and Halle (1968) assert that they remarkably well reflect abstract underlying forms, from which the surface pronunciations are generated with “rules of great generality and wide applicabil- ity”. They postulate two principles of an optimal orthographic system: (1) it should have “one repre- sentation for each lexical entry” (consistency); and, (2) “phonetic variation is not indicated where it is predictable by a general rule” (predictability). They conclude that “conventional orthography is [...] a near optimal system for the lexical representation of English words” (page 49), which we refer to as the optimality claim. Chomsky and Halle’s account of English orthog- raphy is not without its detractors. Steinberg (1973) argues against the idea that speakers store abstract underlying forms of separate morphemes and apply sequences of phonological rules during composi- tion. Sampson (1985) cites the work of Yule (1978) in asserting that many common English word-forms provide counter-evidence to their vowel alternation observations. Derwing (1992) maintains that the ob- servations only hold for five vowel alternations that can be predicted with simple spelling rules. Ac- cording to Nunn (2006), the idea that spelling repre- sents an abstract phonological level has been aban- doned by most linguists. Sproat (2000) notes that few scholars of writing systems would agree with Chomsky and Halle, concluding that the evidence for a consistent morphological representation in En- glish orthography is equivocal. It is not our goal to formulate yet another pro- posal for reforming English orthography, nor even to argue that there is a need for such a reform. Furthermore, we refrain from taking into account other potential advantages of the traditional orthog- …

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