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Atypical pneumonia

Atypical pneumonia, also known as walking pneumonia, is any type of pneumonia not caused by one of the pathogens most commonly associated with the disease. Its clinical presentation contrasts to that of "typical" pneumonia. A variety of microorganisms can cause it. When it develops independently from another disease, it is called primary atypical pneumonia (PAP).

The term was introduced in the 1930s and was contrasted with the bacterial pneumonia caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae, at that time the best known and most commonly occurring form of pneumonia. The distinction was historically considered important, as it differentiated those more likely to present with "typical" respiratory symptoms and lobar pneumonia from those more likely to present with "atypical" generalized symptoms (such as fever, headache, sweating and myalgia) and bronchopneumonia.

Signs and symptoms
Usually the atypical causes also involve atypical symptoms:
 * No response to common antibiotics such as sulfonamide and beta-lactams like penicillin.
 * No signs and symptoms of lobar consolidation, meaning that the infection is restricted to small areas, rather than involving a whole lobe. As the disease progresses, however, the look can tend to lobar pneumonia.
 * Absence of leukocytosis.
 * Extrapulmonary symptoms, related to the causing organism.
 * Moderate amount of sputum, or no sputum at all (i.e. non-productive).
 * Lack of alveolar exudate.
 * Despite general symptoms and problems with the upper respiratory tract (such as high fever, headache, a dry irritating cough followed later by a productive cough with radiographs showing consolidation), there are in general few physical signs. The patient looks better than the symptoms suggest.
 * Silent hypoxia may occur and not be noticed, but will be picked up by pulse oximetry.

Cause
The most common causative organisms are (often intracellular living) bacteria:

 * Chlamydia pneumoniae: Mild form of pneumonia with relatively mild symptoms.
 * Chlamydia psittaci: Causes psittacosis.
 * Coxiella burnetii: Causes Q fever.
 * Francisella tularensis: Causes tularemia.
 * Legionella pneumophila: Causes a severe form of pneumonia with a relatively high mortality rate, known as legionellosis or Legionnaires' disease.
 * Mycoplasma pneumoniae: Usually occurs in younger age groups and may be associated with neurological and systemic (e.g. rashes) symptoms. See Mycoplasma pneumonia.

Atypical pneumonia can also have a fungal, protozoan or viral cause. In the past, most organisms were difficult to culture. However, newer techniques aid in the definitive identification of the pathogen, which may lead to more individualized treatment plans.

Viral
Known viral causes of atypical pneumonia include respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), influenza A and B, parainfluenza, adenovirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), and measles.

Diagnosis
Chest radiographs (X-ray photographs) often show a pulmonary infection before physical signs of atypical pneumonia are observable at all. This is occult pneumonia. In general, occult pneumonia is rather often present in patients with pneumonia and can also be caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae, as the decrease of occult pneumonia after vaccination of children with a pneumococcal vaccine suggests.

Infiltration commonly begins in the perihilar region (where the bronchus begins) and spreads in a wedge- or fan-shaped fashion toward the periphery of the lung field. The process most often involves the lower lobe but may affect any lobe or combination of lobes.

Epidemiology
Mycoplasma is found more often in younger than in older people. Older people are more often infected by Legionella.

Terminology
"Primary atypical pneumonia" is called primary because it develops independently of other diseases.

It is commonly known as "walking pneumonia" because its symptoms are often mild enough that one can still be up and about.

"Atypical pneumonia" is atypical in that it is caused by atypical organisms (other than Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae, and Moraxella catarrhalis). These atypical organisms include special bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protozoa. In addition, this form of pneumonia is atypical in presentation with only moderate amounts of sputum, no consolidation, only small increases in white cell counts, and no alveolar exudate.

At the time that atypical pneumonia was first described, organisms like Mycoplasma, Chlamydophila, and Legionella were not yet recognized as bacteria and instead considered viruses. Hence "atypical pneumonia" was also called "non-bacterial".

In literature the term atypical pneumonia is current, sometimes contrasted with viral pneumonia (see below) and sometimes, though incorrectly, with bacterial pneumonia. Many of the organisms causative of atypical pneumonia are unusual types of bacteria (Mycoplasma is a type of bacteria without a cell wall and Chlamydias are intracellular bacteria). As the conditions caused by the various agents have different courses and respond to different treatments, the identification of the specific causative pathogen is important.

title: Atypical pneumonia


text:
Talk:Spelling reform

Critisism - Criticism - of Spelling Reform
This article talks about "habits and lack" of governments. Somehow, these two do not belong together for the Netherlands, where the 1955 Spelling Reform was only made because: - in 1947 it was announced that another reform would come. - it had become a habit to change the spelling.

By the way, further scientific research has proven that: - People learn the word-pictures, even with alphabetical. This has some serious consequences:
 * 1) Spelling reform is annoying for anybody who wants to read or write.
 * 2) The quickest recognition can take place if a morpheme always stays the same.
 * 3) Phonological spellings do not speed up any learning process.
 * 4) A phonological spelling for English would harm the language abilities of children.

It has thus been proven, that the English spelling isn't too bad. It is very stable, as practically all documents follow the standard spelling, and differences between the US and the UK are very small. It also follows the morphological principle quite good (day-daily is one of the exceptions).

So the only case where spelling reform would be useful, is when morphological structures are not clear, or when the correspondance between speech and writing have become too large. But also this last thing does not apply to English spelling, as 85% of all spellings is completely regular! There is no case where "cat" would be spelled as "dog".

y wunder how that „studdy“ with 85% reguler spellings was made, but y'm quite shoor tha studdy maker wanted ta proove by all means that inglish spelling is reguler. y wunce made a „skeam“ that followed all patterns and sub-patterns y cood find, and as ew can sea, fewer than 85% ave tha spellings ar reguler (till this point 34 reguler spellings and 23 not reguler, wich means 59% reguler werds). ok, this is running text and not a werd list. but even in werd lists the proportion ave reguler spellings never reach 85%. amung the 100 most frequent werds, 58% ar reguler. if y take tha middle ave a list with tha 10000 most frequent werds, y cum ta 61% reguler werds. and werce: menny werds mite be considered ta have a reguler spelling, like 'have' (the E must be considered reguler becaus V requires a following vowal). but this „reguler“ spelling is just reguler for tha speller, not for tha reader, who will read it with a long vowal, riming it with gave, pave, shave, etc. the same aplies for a werd like 'lost': thare is no uther way ew cood spell it, so we wood have ta consider it reguler. still the most likely way ta pronounce it wood be with long O, riming it with most, post, etc, acording ta tha sub-pattern that OST is pronounced with long O). thats quite uneek in tha werld, y gess: if ew followed all the patterns and sub-patterns (hundreds av them) ew'd get hundreds or maybe even thousends ave misspronunciations. consistent/inconsistent ar ajectives like 'tall' or 'fat': to say that a person is tall or fat makes wun presume that the person is taller or fatter than at least haf tha population. so ta be considered consistent a language shood be mor consistent than the majority ave tha languages, and i cant sea how that cood be tha cace, at least not amung languages that use tha romen alfabet. english mite be mor consistent than tha keltic languages, but thats all (if thats tha cace). even french is altogether mor consistent: it mite be as hard for tha speller as inglish, but it is much mor easier for the reader. y gess ew can pronounce mor than 95% ave tha french werds tha rite way, if ew sea them ritten. wich will never be tha cace with inglish. this text was ritten in an inglish spelling that follows inglish patterns and sub-patterns.

 * People recognize the general shape of words, not the exact "word-picture". Therefore, spelling reforms that do not radically change the shape of the words do not have a high transition cost. Cut spelling is an example of such a spelling reform. AdamRetchless 22:31, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)
 * Someone who makes the assertion that scientific 'research has proven' that 'the English spelling isn't too bad,' and who, against a considerable body of evidence, goes on to insist 'Phonological spellings do not speed up any learning process' belongs firmly on a talk page, if anywhere, and not in the article proper.--86.31.105.33 (talk) 01:02, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

 * According to most numbers I've read, something like half of the most common English words contain spelling exceptions. I don't know where this person got the 85% statistic, but the only way I can possibly see that as being true is if a couple hundred spelling rules were used (there are about 90 basic ones, for ~40 sounds). If phonological spellings don't affect the learning process, why do countries like Spain and Italy have lower rates of dyslexia and such? And if a phonological spelling would harm the language abilities of children, you'd better notify the Spanish, Italians, Finnish and any linguist creating an orthography for a language that doesn't have one yet - because they're all very phonemic, and presumably that means that Spaniards ought to be deficient, when the opposite is actually true. As for reading by word shapes - the only difference is that you'd learn different "word shapes" - but they'd be easier to learn. -Anonymous

 * Dyslexia is not really linked to the ability to spell properly, but to the inability to perceive and recognise letters & words, as if one cannot find focus, or the marks on the page refuse to be still. A wrong diagnosis of  dyslexia, here, attracts all manner of extra funding & help which is unavailable to a pupil who is simply discouraged, or too lazy or thick to learn. That could have a lot to do with our higher rates of "dyslexia".  It is also true that in other countries, formal teaching starts at a later age than here, waiting for children to reach a stage of intellectual development at which they can better cope. Our early, often premature start simply develops anxiety and a failure backlash, compounded by a prevalent style of teaching where correctness is regarded as unimportant.Memethuzla (talk)

 * Half or 85% or what? Well, it depends where your cutoff is. Inconsistent spellings are concentrated in the very common words (probably because perpetual repetition allows us to retain them despite their irregularity) and the very rare words (because this range tends to include non-naturalized foreign borrowings, proper names, and such). So if your list of common words is the top 20, the unusually spelled vowels in 'be', 'to', 'of', 'the', etc., are going to send your rate of exceptions through the roof. If it's the top 200, less so. Top 2000, not a problem. So you can pick your quotable rate of inconsistency by choosing your frequency cutoff carefully. (Compare inconsistent stress placement in Spanish verbs; very common words are likely to have stress in places not consistent with the stress style of the rest of the language (Eddington 2004, Lingua 114:856).) In original research I have shown that common words are measurably less consistent in the spelling of their vowels. Overall, in eight thousand monosyllables, 81% could be correctly predicted from spelling by comparing them with other known items, but words in the first quartile were only 79.3% predictable; second quartile, 83.2%; third quartile, 84.0%; fourth quartile, 82.7%.

 * It also depends on how you measure consistency. Kessler and Treiman (2001, Journal of memory and language 44:597) hand-analyzed a list of 3117 items and found that their vowel spellings were explainable in 92% of cases, but I ran my computer model over a comparable list of the 3173 most frequent monosyllables, which could be predicted by analogy only 80.6% of the time (with, again, all eight thousand words available for reference; if they were compared only to one another the rate of prediction dropped to 71.7%). So consistency as measured by a particular hand scoring method and as measured by automated statistical prediction are two different beasts as well. I'm not convinced such statistics, stripped of context as sound bites, add anything to our understanding of spelling reform.

 * eritain 08:47, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

With a degree of erudition, one might come to appreciate the English language as a mélange of bits & pieces from many different times, places, cultures; each spelling carrying with it a whole history, a world of subtlety & nuance. Phonetic or simplistic re-casting is like a bad cover-version of a favourite song.Memethuzla (talk) 05:28, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
 * 'A little learning is a dangerous thing.' The small amount of erudition to which you refer is reminiscent of a enthusiastic holidaymaker returning from an initial visit to France, determined to recapture the experience by constantly adopting some French habit or mannerism.--86.31.105.33 (talk) 23:49, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

It's probably worth pointing out a difficulty for spelling reform based on pronounciation. The pronounciation of words varies significantly between regions (in English, at any rate), and historical distinctions which have been lost in some dialects persist in others. Thus, a system which might be more "logical" for one group of speakers could be less logical for others.

-- Paul
 * True, but it's probably worth replying that the surmountability of this problem is evinced by the fact that, at some point, traditional spelling made such choices, resulting in an orthography which, incidently, more accurately reflects regional or colonial speech than the Queen's English.--86.31.105.33 (talk) 01:09, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

Several words are described as "anachronisms". This label was incorrectly applied to "thru" and "nite". Both of these spellings are common in informal writing, and "thru" is often seen in "thruway" because it fits on the road signs. I don't know what the author was getting at by labeling them as anachronisms, but perhaps there is another word that describes them better. Obscure? AdamRetchless 22:31, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Those sections are perhaps inevitably pretty subjective. It currently states that "cigaret" never caught on but that "agast" did (a bit), which I find to be pretty much backward. It could also use the addition of some more of Noah Webster's successful whims - for instance the dropped silent e in judgement/acknowledgement/abridgement/lodgement. Unfortunately I don't know where to put these chronologically - they were certainly in place by the 1913 edition (which rather coyly notes that the full spellings are "sometimes" used "in England" ;). Theatre/theater is also missing - they're now in about equal use, though the popularity of the revised spelling seems to be waning (a section on the sociological forces that popularise or revile reformed spellings might be interesting in itself). - toh 20:43, 2004 Dec 15 (UTC)

There is an error - I believe, in classifying American English spellings under dominant spelling; I think it better to place them under "variant spellings" while making clear that they are the dominant spelling for American English, instead of insisting on something that is not true for the vast majority of the English-literate world. User:anonymous
 * I'm not rejecting your main point, but I looked up some facts, and Americans represent 1/2-2/3 of native English speakers and maybe one third of the persons who use it on a day to day basis...so I don't think anything can represent a "vast majority" of english speakers without including Americans. AdamRetchless 15:28, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

 * Yes, I made a glaring mistake on that... sorry. But I'd like to add that "native" is becoming more of a mystery to define; for instance, some books argue that Singaporeans (educated in an exclusively English medium, and the mother tongue has been mostly reduced to a foreign language; I am sixteen and going through its paces!) are native speakers, while others insist that only Caucasians fit the bill; and some books have "first-class native" and "second-class native" denominations, which seems to be a kind of modern day racism all on its own. User:anonymous

I've noticed that "tyre" -> "tire" is not on the list. It's interesting because the "tyre" spelling is never seen in Canada and "tire" (for the rubber wheel) is never seen in Australia. Also "program" is the only spelling for computer program whereas "programme" coexists with "program" for older uses in Australia.

 * My recollection of Canadian spelling is that, officially, they follow British usage when the differences cover an entire class of words. For example, Canadians follow the British in the colour class, the theatre class, and (sometimes) in the -ise class, although the American -ize is used in Canada also.  Unique words that are written differently in Britain, such as gaol, tyre, kerb and so forth, are spelled in Canada as they are in the United States.  Smerdis of Tlön 15:53, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

The distinction between programme (never a computer program), and program shows how nonphonetic spelling differences can be used to increase clarity. And the attmept by most spelling reformers to spell "come" as "cum" is an obvious example as to why these reforms will never, ever, get the backing of mainstream America. User:Anonymous

 * As a Canadian, I struggle between the American and British spellings. When I write official military correspondance, I use the British spellings.  When e-mailing my peers, I use American spelling, as it is closer to the way we pronounce the words.  We very frequently consult the Oxford Canadian Dictionary to find the correct spelling.  It often lists both British and American variants as equal in preference. When I read the British printing of the Harry Potter novels, some of the spelling looks shocking to me:  "plough", when we Canadians use "plow" exclusively.  (Brian Merz)

 * That's pretty true for spelling in Singapore - generally British usage, American terms - best demonstrated as the Singapore English page notes, "sports pages" feature "soccer news". "Tyre" is very interesting too - I believe it's the dominant spelling in Singapore, but it's also true that Singaporeans aren't famous for keeping to their language conventions. Also, perhaps the use of the word "program" for computers is really by poor International English localisation on the part of Microsoft et al... the Mac OS (International English localisation was *removed* quite some time back) avoids this by reverting to the slightly less-familiar "application". User:Anonymous

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Wile it's tru that vowels change considerably from region to region, consonants are pretty consistent and a minor reform would be great.Cameron Nedland 21:33, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Adam, several years ago I ran across that '85% regular' stat. Couldn't find any sources or data. Looked as if the writer (forgot who) pulled it out of his ass. All you need to do to show that it's total balderdash is compare the spelling of a few dozen words and see how many different letters are used to represent each sound and how many sounds are represented by each letter.[[User:JO 753| JO 753]

Deceptive Nature of Functional Literacy Comparisons
Functional literacy is usually defined as an ability to read at the 9th grade level or so, with sophisticated materials such as medicine instructions, tax forms and the like which someone might encounter in day to day life. It primarily a vocabulary standard rather than a gauge of whether or not you can read at all. It is a standard based on an ability to function in an industrialized literate society, not the baseline literacy that comes into play at the stage of education when children are learning to simply spell at all.

Most people who are functionally illiterate can still read street signs, the headlines in a typical daily newspaper, and so on. In short, most can spell, albeit, often not terribly well. Ohwilleke 19:13, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

French Orthography
As of this year, it would seem the reform might finally see the light. Publications, while not yet in the mainstream, now exist, including a lexicon of the modifications ("le millepatte sur un nénufar", showcasing two of the components of the reform, being a simplification of the rules for composite nouns and the rectification of some words which had what was considered as an anomalous orthography. Associations in the rest of the Francophony have been formed during the period after the adoption of this rectification, and are trying to spread it usage. From the little I know on the field, it is at the very least presented to teachers in colleges and universities in Quebec (and that I'm suggested to take a little time to introduce to students during my peer-to-peer tutor work), and I seem to have heard that teachers in Switzerland are considering its adoption. I'll check for copyright issues however before, but from what I heard the Academy is relatively prompt to answer, so it could be done in one or two weeks. David

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Public domain and distribution
Texts distributed freely on the web are not necessarily considered public domain, am I wrong? David

 * Just because something's distributed freely online doesn't make it public domain, no. (You can download Linux from a whole lot of places, and of course Wikipedia articles are freely available all over the place, but certainly neither is public domain.) There may well be copyright in the work, and if it's not stated in the document you should contact the authors and ask for details. Marnanel 18:35, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)

 * In the US, copyright adheres to any work created by an author after 1977 even if no mention of copyright is made in the work. (For prior years, there are different rules.)
 * US law has a provision for "fair use", which can be explained (outside of court) as use that will be of no harm to the rights of the copyrightholder. (For example, copying a Mickey Mouse video for home use in order that the original will not be destroyed by one's VCR fits as fair use; copying an extra for one's friend is not, because it reduces the market for the specific video (even slightly); capturing an image from the video to make a birthday card is definitely not fair use, even though the particular image might never be used by the copyright holder to produce a birthday card. Copyright intrinsically bestows rights and duties of non-production as well as of production.) Fair use includes scholarly usage under certain circumstances.
 * When copyright has not expressly been refused by the author, such works are under copyright in the US for seventy years after the author dies. Other countries have different rules... it's really quite a hodge-podge -- especially when you add in the effects of corporations like Disney who have successfully pressured governments to lengthen the copyright protection periods so that their creations like Mickey Mouse are still protected. dwc 20060126

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Spelling reform poll
Removed and inserted into the Manual of style as suggested below by Cadr.

 * This is the English Wikipedia, and that implies standard English authography (British, American, etc. varients all acceptable). I see no reason to adopt any other spelling method, and it would have to be discussed elsewhere (i.e. in the wikipedia style guide, and that sort of thing). Cadr 17:58, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I think it's all about things like beauty and efficiency. If a poll here was moved to the Manual of Style I can't find it. Etaonsh 21:57, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Peeve
Is there a neutral way to say that reformers can be very nitpicky, while ignoring larger issues of language planning? Something like anathematizing sexist language while ignoring grave cases of sexism? I assumed (perhaps wrongly?) that he meant that spelling reformers bang on endlessly about the nitty-gritty of spelling reform proposals without exploring the more key issue of why the world seems to be irrevocably biased against them/us(?). Etaonsh 21:05, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
 * You're going to need to explain that remark... bitch. --Tysto 01:18, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Thank you for that comment, Tysto. It just made my made my day. Howevery, I think that the problem is that "language planning" is a confusing term. Doyel 16:03, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I feel it needs no further explanation, even tho I'm one myself. Etaonsh 21:54, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
 * To answer seriously, I'm not sure how the issue of ignoring language planning relates to spelling reform, since spelling reform is only a constituent part of language planning. Are you suggesting that they should change from being just spelling reformers to full-scale language reformers? --Tysto 20:24, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Is there a neutral way to say that reformers may be on the wrong track? The acceptance of correct spelling as somehow being more important than what is written has always appeared to me to be nit-picking and elitist although often cited in UK Media as a reflection of declining standards of education. Spelling is a skill like any other and like any other skill, some people have a knack for it and other's don't - Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald are often cited as poor spellers.Mighty Antar 11:24, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

 * Nit-picking and élitist? What is it about people here, the inverted snobbery, that we don't want to have an élite? The French are only too happy to high-fliers around. The word "correct" says it all. Memethuzla (talk) 04:32, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

I dont think you have to worry about saying it neutrally; its a plain fact. Most reformers get into the whole linguistics / IPA mindset and forget that there are billions of people of widely varying backgrounds, intelligence and educational levels who need to write every day. The majority of these potential customers of the reform proposal dont have a clue or give a hoot about 'upper velar fricatives', 'bilabial plosive' and other such academic blather. Tell the average person that J is really D+G or i is really a+e and all you will get is a blank stare.JO753 11:12, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Other languages' spelling reforms
Here are some rough thoughts of what is missing in this article in the non-English field.

 * Changes of script:
 * Many languages, especially recently of the former Soviet Union have changed from Cyrillic to Latin; many of those changed from Arabic to Cyrillic at the onset of the soviet period.
 * Malay was written in Arabic script but changed to the Latin script. The former is still in use in Brunei.
 * Turkish was written in Arabic script until the reforms by Ataturk when a Latin script was adopted. See also Ottoman Turkish.

 * Changes of spelling:
 * China introduced its standardized simplified characters in the 20th century, they were not adopted in every Chinese-speaking country.
 * Danish had one or more reforms in the late 1940s or 1950s. Changes included replacing "aa" with "å" and ending the practice of capitalizing all nouns as German still does.
 * Dutch The Nederlandse Taalunie or Dutch Language Union was responsible for the modification of the Dutch orthography in 1995. The Dutch orthography article also mentions reforms in 1946 (Belgium), 1947 (Netherlands), and 1996 (Belgium and Netherlands).
 * German has undergone several reforms before the current one.
 * Icelandic eradicated the letter "z" in 1973 except in personal and family names. See Talk:Icelandic language (User:Biekko)
 * Irish underwent a spelling reform sometime in the past couple of centuries.
 * Japanese standardized the uses for hiragana and katakana, okurigana; also a few hundred (at most) kanji characters were slightly simplified after WWII. Some kana characters went out of use, when?
 * Korean has more or less eliminated hanja (Chinese characters) - was there an official reform for this in either country? Also several hangul letters have become obsolete - when was this?
 * Spanish used the cedilla (ç) for the sound of the affricate [ts] until an orthographic reform in the 18th century. (From Cedilla)
 * Swedish changed its alphabetical order, making å, ä, and ö separate letters coming after z.
 * Yiddish had differing orthographies in Russia and in other communities. A recent effort by YIVO has come up with an apparently popular standard.

Doubtless there is more - this is just off the top of my head as it's a field I've been interested in for some time but not in a very organised way. — Hippietrail 17:57, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Even as an American, I had no idea that "catalogue" and "cancelled" were supposed to be spelled "catalog" and "canceled".Personally, I think that the English language is fine as it is; to change it would be to tarnish the sterling silver of linguistics out of which it is made. Many of the reforms made my Melville Dewey are totally absurd. If he spelled "lodge" as "loj" would he spell "lodged" as "lojd"? That's my take on things. --Amrun en' Sinta

 * Of interest, too, is the post-revolutionary Russian language reform of 1918, which extended to a considerable "simplification" of the grammar, and almost certainly with the intent, as well as effect, of making the literature of earlier times unavailable to the masses.

 * Also the Turkish spelling reform (a Romanisation, complete with intriguing rules of assonance), of Ataturk in 1923, again at a time of great political reform & the establishment of a newly secular state.
 * Then there is Mongolian, where the rather beautiful vertical   [[Image:Monggol kele.svg|frameless|30px]]     has been almost entirely displaced by crude Cyrillic script.
 * Memethuzla (talk) 03:34, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Leading spelling reform proposals?
The "list of leading spelling reform proposals" is a misleading title. This is certainly not a list of the most popular or well-known proposals, so the extent to which these are the "leading proposals" is arguable. For example, I have seen no material about Nuspelynh except for the Nuspelynh website itself, and even that is extremely unlikely to succeed relative to other proposals for two reasons: firstly, it makes no attempt to represent sounds not found in Western American English (e.g. the vowels in the words cot, caught, and calm are spelt identically), and secondly it uses letters like "c", "q" and "x" and vowels, which I think most English speakers would find unacceptable. I don't think at this point we can set out a list of criteria that makes a proposal inherently more likely to succeed, since it will take a long time to even make people aware of spelling reform and willing to go through with it, and their attitudes about "acceptable" and "unacceptable" proposals could easily change in that time. For example, what if North American speakers become more receptive to the idea of using diacritics as Spanish becomes increasingly spoken in the US? By the way, why exactly does the list say that North Americans in particular do not favor diacritics? I haven't met any British, Australian or Indian speakers who advocate diacritics any more than Americans do. Certainly there is a place here for a discussion of how radical a scheme can get before it's too unrealistic, but it's a bit premature to be singling out specific schemes and setting up boundaries between what will and will not be accepted by the general public. — Ливай | ☺ 02:14, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * It does seem that Brits are more receptive to ligatures, at the very least. But nowadays they mostly write them as two letters, e.g. "foetus". -Anonymous

Theodore Roosevelt's spelling reform
This article makes no mention of President Theodore Roosevelt's efforts to reform spelling in the U.S at the beginning of the 20th century. Other Internet sites that I have visited do mention it, but suggest it had no long lasting effect. However when I was working for NASA as a summer intern in 1966, there were two lists of words in the U.S. Government Printing Office Style Manual that mandated certain spellings. One was the familiar list of U.S.--British differences (e.g. color vs. colour). The second was a list of reformed spellings that were only mandated for U.S. Government documents. I was told the lists dated back to the Teddy Roosevelt administration. One word I remember in particular was "align", which came up all the time in my work on guidance systems. In the U.S. Government, the word was required to be spelled aline (also alinement). Our section secretary had to retype (pre-word processor) a long technical memorandum I had authored to change those spellings. --agr 17:36, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

re: The sub-heading List of leading spelling reform proposals... Is unclear wrt to which historical initiatives, versus current politicking (err.. politicing) among the COGNIZATI. No historical 'feel' is given to us readers for current versus past efforts, nor is there a distinction clearly made as to which are US proposals, or those of other English speaking countries. Which fact augments the very point made just above, WHERE IS TR's Letter to the Public Printer of the United States, and mention of the Simplified Spelling Board (Columbia Univ... and for all I know, Mark Twain), or the SSB's newsmaking 'Circular number 6'. Pultzer prize winning British historian Edmund Morris spends several pages (paperback, pp460-461, in Theodore Rex) discussing the impact of Teddy's guidance which targeted 300 words, and kept the press 'buzz' but implies that there was a rare partial failure here by a man who was 'winning everything' at the time. Some historical discussion of where he prevailed, and where he and the SSB did not is surely in order! Fabartus 16:26, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

American variant spellings
It should probably be noted that, at least for the "analog" and "catalog", these words are the dominant forms in American English in some cases.

In my experience, with some crossover in both directions; non-US usage favors "analogue" in all cases.
 * analog is commonly used as an adjective (an analog computer), while
 * analogue is commonly used as a noun (the toe is an analogue to the finger)

Also in my experience, This might have something to do with the awkwardness of trying to produce the -ing form of "catalog". In any case, there is again some overlap between these uses, and the whole thing seems to be in flux. Non-US usage still favors "catalogue."
 * catalog is commonly used as a noun (The latest Sears catalog), while
 * catalogue is commonly found as a verb (I've got to catalogue all of these files).

Furry-ferry merger
Here's what L. Craig Schoonmaker http://www.geocities.com/sswordday/ has to say about the ferry-furry distinction:

+ +
 * Quote-THIS is the famous "distinction without a difference", except that there are about 4 times as many -erry's as -urry's. And please note that Dictionary gives woor.ee, foor.ee, and hoor.ee (that's the sound that the U with a 'hat' (circumflex accent) shows: short-OO), which I have not heard so regard as bizarre. Either they heard wrong or they're on drugs.
 * Dictionary, oddly, is sometimes just plain wrong. For instance, "water" is not shown there as ever being pronounced "wut.er", but I listened very carefully to reports of water-main breaks on TV stations in the New York Tristate Metropolitan Area (the broadcasting capital of North America), and wut.er is plainly the pronunciation educated people in this area give that word. The SSWD project, of course, cannot offer "water" precisely because it has more than one common pronunciation.
 * If you put together the -erry's and the -ery's pronounced the same, you get a MASS of words with ER as the crucial spelling, but if you try to use -ury rather than -urry, you get a completely different sound. So I think we'll go with -erry. But I appreciate your views. Cheers.

+ + + +
 * Quote-''UR, ER, OR, and AR may be pronounced with tiny differences by SOME speakers in SOME dialects as to SOME words. I went to your URL for the Cambridge dictionary, which offers TWO bizarre transliterations (which may or may not be rendered in standard IPA but is opaque to me -- IPA transliterations tend to proceed from the positions of vocal apparatus of the linguists who speak them in preparing to write them; SSWD is concerned about what people HEAR, and if they hear no difference between, for instance, vaann and venn for French "vin", it doesn't matter to them whether the person saying it forms the word one way, because the listener hears it the same no matter which way a speaker might articulate it). Most to the point, the Cambridge dictionary shows TWO pronunciations, British dialect and American standard.
 * I then went to the Merriam-Webster URLs for the other words and clicked on the speaker icon to listen to the pronunciations rendered, in American English, and found no distinction worth making. All those words would rhyme PERFECTLY as most people regard things. Of course, we could avoid the problem altogether by saying that there are two different pronunciations for "worry", so the word can't be changed!
 * For most ordinary, for whom the SSWD project is intended, not for linguistics specialists, there is between a great many word pairs or groups, no difference worth 'worrying' about. There are a lot of overeducated people who have bugaboos about tiny matters of no consequence, and will argue them endlessly, to everyone else's tedium. I'm not about to argue the linguistic equivalent of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, a subject that may have fascinated some medieval theologians but nobody else.
 * The SSWD project is about NEEDED change, and preferably changes that people can readily apply to things they HEAR. One transliteration for a small range of actual sounds is convenient, and all spelling is convention. Few speakers of standard English distinguish in sound between "ferry" and "furry". Having a distinction in spelling for these two HOMONYMS is useful. As to which spelling you favor for a reform of "worry", I have noted that you favor "wurry".
 * The problem may be only that a following-R tends to alter the quality of the vowel before it, for some speakers more than others. I have not yet offered this word (which you plainly render "wurd" and I render "werd") and might select "wurry", on the basis that some people might see it as parallel to "merry", which they pronounce like "Mary". Or I may not offer it at all, since, as some people regard things, it has two pronunciations so cannot be changed if a change would antagonize some significant body of speakers. I am asking for more comments. Cheers.

+ + + +
 * Quote- ''YES, I noted that in checking "merge", some dictionaries use the U with a hat as the vowel. But in any case, that is the ER sound, as shown plainly by the sample words in Dictionary.com's own pronunciation key: "urge, term, firm, word, heard".
 * As for "ont", I suggested that because "ant" is a homophone we can eliminate from a language filled to overflowing with homophones, and seems to those of us who say "ont" -- meaning a large proportion of the best-educated people in the U.S. and almost everybody in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, etc. -- that calling a person by a homophone for an insect is arguably disrespectful. I have no power to impose anything, and the SSWD site is designed mainly to make people think. As for "tord", too-waurd is a spelling pronunciation, and as with ev-er-y and other spelling pronunciations (which my Random House Unabridged labels so people know better than to use them), spelling reformers can properly advise people that tho they think they are being careful to be correct, they are actually being wrong.
 * The distinction between "ferry" and "furry" is, I repeat, not "worth making. All those words would rhyme PERFECTLY as most people regard things." People who try to draw needless distinctions and force people to try to supply only one of essentially interchangeable spellings do spelling reform a disservice. This is not the distinction between "merry" rhyming with "berry" and "merry" rhyming with "Mary". It is TRIVIA that ordinary people do not waste time on and cannot justify wasting educational time and money on. If you see a poem in which one line ends with "ferry" and the next appropriate line ends in "furry" or "worry" or "cherry" or "very", will you be startled by an appalling lack of rhyme? If so, you are one in perhaps 15,000 people.
 * Native speakers of English cannot and do not make the short-E as in "bed" and follow it with R in the same syllable and come out with anything like what most people say for "very", "berry", etc. Following-R changes the quality of many vowels in its same syllable.
 * Make all the silly and PRETENTIOUS distinctions you want. Ordinary people concerned with communication rather than language as an arcane study to itself will not trouble to heed you.'' 64.12.116.67 04:22, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

German spelling "reform" of 1901?
To my limited knowledge German simply didn't have any codified and unified orthography before 1901; each school used its own (though similar) rules.

While I am at it, I'd like to comment the quite short-sighted opinion against a spelling reform for English. Please read this.

Er... yes, English has the least logical orthography of all languages that use an alphabet, it's even worse than Mongolian written in the Mongolian alphabet and Tibetan, and that by any criterion -- phonetics, etymology, morphology, whatever.

David Marjanović        david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at         00:34 CET-summertime        2005/8/7

Through v. thru
I changed "thru" to "through." Someone changed it back to "thru." And then someone else changed it back to "through." I see "thru" on signs at fast-food restaurants, but I've yet to see it in prose except in students' poorly written papers and here. Perhaps my experience is deviant from that of the majority, but I guess it should be put to a discussion. "Through" is standard, and even on a spelling reform page it seems appropriate. Savantpol 17:39, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

 * "through" is normal, and "thru" is deviant, but "thru" does get a mention (with no value-judgement) in my Macquarie Dictionary, and I've seen it in various more informal writings (such as you might find on the talk pages here), even when the writer is taking the effort to spell properly for other words. "Drive-thru" is an excption; that construction appears even in formalities up to and perhaps exceeding (broadsheet) newspaper prose. —Felix the Cassowary ( ɑe hɪː jɐ ) 00:02, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

 * The use of thru is actually quite common on Wikipedia and this is only not apparent because some people have campaigns to "correct" it. It is most common in tables where space is at a premium.Dejvid 09:32, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Hiccup
I don't agree with the listing of the word hiccup in this article as a 20th-century reformed spelling of hiccough. Hiccup is in fact, the older form—the spelling -ough arised owing to a popular etymology linking it to cough. The O.E.D. says that hiccough "ought to be abandoned as a mere error" and hiccup appears in quotations as far back as 1580. I'm going to remove it from the list.
 * Several of the worst spellings are due to a 16th cent fad for etymology. Repairing the damage and going back to more fonemic spellings is still a reform.Dejvid 22:42, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
 * I agree with you, but that logic seems questionable in this case. The O.E.D. gives quotations for "hiccup" from 1580, 1581, 1621, 1635, 1671, 1727, and 1893. "Hiccup" only appears in quotations from 1626, 1744, 1794, and 1876. For me, this seems to show that the two forms coexisted. Nevertheless, I'm willing to leave it there. I will just modify it to make it a little clearer. Lesgles 20:29, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

Disputed: Brazilian reaction to spelling reform
In the section on spelling reforms for the Portuguese language, someone wrote the paragraph:

"All this is moot in Brazil, where apart from some enthusiasts the reform is being thoroughly ignored, as most people do not see any problem with the current orthography and many linguists argue it would enforce uniformity where Brazilian usage is actually more regular or reflects local pronunciation."

Is this assessment based on some kind of opinion polls, or does who wrote it believe he can speak on behalf of the 180 million Brazilian citizens? I think such broad sweeping generalizations should either be backed up by statistical data, or not written down at all.

I have attempted to clarify this issue with the user who wrote the paragraph, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Leandrod#Portuguese_spelling_reform. He replied to me once, then stopped, so I am going to openly challenge his paragraph. Everything in it is either personal opinion, unproven, or unclear.

"All this is moot in Brazil, where apart from some enthusiasts the reform is being thoroughly ignored, as most people do not see any problem with the current orthography and many linguists argue it would enforce uniformity where Brazilian usage is actually more regular or reflects local pronunciation."

The spelling reform was stalled for over ten years due to legal impediments: it needed to be ratified by all signatary countries, which had not happened. Then, in the summer of 2004, a change was made to the text, allowing the agreement to go into effect in the countries that had already ratified it. One of these was Brazil. Although a year has passed, not much has been done yet to implement the proposed changes to spelling--in Brazil or elsewhere.

The phrase "All this is moot in Brazil" seems to suggest that Brazil's situation with regard to the spelling reform is special, which is not the case.

"most people [in Brazil] do not see any problem with the current orthography" This seems like unsubstantiated opinion. Furthermore, it is irrelevant. Whether or not most people see a problem with the current orthography tells us nothing about whether or not they will adopt the new orthography when the time comes to do so.

"many linguists argue it would enforce uniformity where Brazilian usage is actually more regular or reflects local pronunciation" This sentence is difficult to understand. Who are these "linguists", and how do we know they're "many"? What does "enforce uniformity" mean, and why do those linguists see it as a drawback of the agreement? What is a "more regular" spelling? How does the current orthography "reflect local pronunciation" in a way that the new orthography does not?

Dec. 4 2005.

 * I removed his adiction, it is obviously a personal feeling. Brazil is in fact the biggest supporter of this reform, and the country that will most gain from it (internationally, obviously).

 * There are obviously no linguistic problems with the reform as he stated, it is his imagination at the work. Only some accent marks that are not that useful will be removed, i dont see any linguistic problem with English speakers (they dont use accent marks). Next time, simply remove it. --Pedro 20:43, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

-- As a brazilian, i'll try to give my opinion on this. First, a rational spelling seems a good thing, and portuguese spelling is relatively good. However, our spelling has been reformed too often. The last one was in the 70's, so there are many people who learned the old spelling (the one that used the circumflex (^) more often) and they still confuse some words. Fortunately, the even-older-spelling (the one with y, ph, etc.) is dead, i could not find much information about it. So, imagine if they change things again! That would be a lot of confusion, wasted money and the spelling would still have its known quirks (c or ss? g or j? x or ch?). I would also like to point out that (1) the proposed reform isn't widely known here (i can only find small notes about it once in a few years) and (2) some points are dabatable, at least in my humble opinion (Do we really need to change the rules for hyphens to something else that is equally complex? Do we really need to get rid of the trema (¨)? etc. etc.). If they really want to reform our spelling, they should wait at least 70 years and then come up with something that's really easier for us, and not cosmetic changes that go nowhere. --143.54.13.75 18:10, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

 * Just to add my two cents, the new rules for hyphenization proposed in the 1990 reform are far simpler than the ones we use today ! I sincerely hope they are adopted. Having said that, I must say that, as a Brazilian, I personally feel uncomfortable having to write "ideia", "voo", "apoio", "joia" or "frequente" instead of "idéia", "vôo", "apóio", "jóia" and "freqüente" (readers who are familiar with Brazilian Portuguese phonology will understand what I mean !).  Nevertheless, I am prepared to accept those aforementioned changes as a minor price to pay in exchange for the much more significant dropping of the mute consonants in European Portuguese spelling (e.g baptismo, óptimo, direccção, acto, etc...)

 * Spelling reforms usually face considerable opposition when they are first introduced and are normally slow to be implemented. That is true not only for Portuguese, but also for other major languages as well, see e.g. the discussion on this page on the negative reaction to the 1990 French spelling reform or the 1996 German spelling reform. Most of the reaction tends to come from publishers, newspaper editors and writers who have been using the older spelling for a long time and are predictably reluctant to accept changes. For the ordinary person on the street, spelling reforms may be even more painful as one needs sometimes to literally "unlearn" how to write certain words. Older people in particular sometimes never adjust to spelling changes and keep using the old orthography until they die. Nevertheless, as time passes and the new spelling is introduced in schools and is increasingly used in printed books and newspapers, the normal trend is for reaction to the reform to die out as a new generation of language users is brought up with the new spelling rules. That happened before following all major spelling reforms that were introduced in Brazil (e.g. in the 1940s and 1970s) and will certainly happen again following the implementation of the 1990 orthographic agreement which, incidentally, affects only a relatively small number of Brazilian Portuguese words (no more than 0.5 % according to estimates I've seen on the Internet). The impact on European Portuguese spelling is on the other hand more significant due to the dropping of the mute consonants, but, again, resistance will fade as younger people in Portugal begin to be schooled in the new orthography. At this point, I would say the implementation of the reform is inevitable and will be a reality in the coming years or decades. As a new media, the Wikipedia should yield to that inevitability and adopt the 1990 orthography immediately in all new Portuguese-language articles. At least, that is my POV. Mbruno 01:58, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

 * I think Wikipedia should be prudent, and wait until the reform has actually begun to be implemented in practice. FilipeS 13:38, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

I took off portuguese from the languages with a reasonable spelling. I dont know who had that idea. Of course it is more regular than english or french, but most european languages have a more consistent spelling. We can mesure consistency by assigning one letter to one sound (basing it on the statistical count) and then say that evrything that deviates from that is an inconsistency, a negativ point for the language. Then the pronunciation (in european as well as in brazilian portuguese) is quite far from the spelling, and english is lite yeers away... but then another way of counting is considring all the patterns and sub-patterns, in this case portuguese doesnt hav such an irregular spelling (for instance knowing that final O is an (almost silent, sometimes compleetly silent) /u/, all the words with final O become regular. And heer english becomes a lot mor reggular too, altho stil very irregular wen comparing with other languages. Heer we can make the count as if teeching a non-nativ speeker who doenst know the language or as if teeching somebody who knows the language (at leest the spoken form): if yu teech english to a nativ speeker, yu can tell him that content words with 2 sounds beginning with a vowel hav thare consonant dubbled, so that the word has at leest 3 letters. A nativ speeker will know that /aed/ is a verb, thus a content word, and so the D has to be dubbled: ADD. A non-nativ speeker wont know wat /aed/ meens, so he cant know that it is a content word and cant spel it rite. The same aplies for a word like /flVSt/, wich for the nativ speeker can be only the past tense of 'flush', so it is certainly 'flushed', wile a non-nativ can only spel 'flusht'.

Ennyway portuguese is in the middle feeld, together with german and perhaps danish. But it is much less consistent than the other romanic languages exept french, less consistent than dutch or the other scandinavian languages and less consistent than slavic, baltic or finno-ugric languages. In brazilian portuguese, A has 4 pronunciations (má = /ma/, banana /ba'nâna/, faz /fais/, nao /nuN/ (the 3 first ones obey patterns, the forth one dusnt), B is silent in 'também' (no pattern), /s/ can be speld with S, C, Ç, SS, X, Z, (thare ar rarely patterns for it - it is the area with the moast mistakes), DE/DI ar /dZ(i)/, E can be /E/, /e/ or /i/ (final E is a pattern, in uther cases u just dont no), G needs U to be pronounced as /g/ befor E or I (pattern), on the uther hand the U in 'linguiça' is pronounced (no pattern), H is silent (the pattern is that it is silent, but the riter who heers a werd with H wont spel it becaus he didnt heer it), the sound /Z/ can be speld with G or J (no pattern), L wich is not folloed bi a vowel is a semivowel /u/ (mal, nacional = /mau/, /nasjonau/), final M is /N/, thus 'bom' is pronounced like english 'gong' (with B, of corse), final O (and sumtimes meedial O - final O is a pattern, meedial O is not) is /u/, R has 2 sounds, actualy 3 (beginning R and rr is /h/ ('real' = /he'au/), intervocalic is tongue /r/, and offen it is silent), S can be /s/ or /z/ but that has its patterns, TE/TI is /tS(i)/ (with pattern), X has 4 sounds /S, ks, s, z/ (sumtimes with a pattern, sumtimes not). Ennyway, such a languaj cant be considderd as havving a consistent spelling.

I'v herd sum brazilians complaning about the reform, on the uther hand menny peeple wernt uzing the diferential axents ennyway (especialy the ü in werds like 'freqüente, lingüiça'). Zé do Rock, june 2012.

German orthography
Deutsch (German) is cited as a language "which use[s] an anachronistic or overly complicated spelling [system]". First of all, the use of 'anachronistic' does not work here. Perhaps 'archaic', 'obsolete' (which I still don't like, as they are still usable), or perhaps even 'vestigial'. Secondly, and perhaps, most importantly, it's not true! German spelling is incredibly regular and phonetic, perhaps not quite as Italian or Spanish, but it's certainly a fair sight more regular than French or English (although that's not saying too much). I beg for examples to show me otherwise. I'm fluent in German, and I cannot think of an example that isn't an obvious French or English loanword (e.g.-"Genre", "jogging"). 64.122.95.110 20:40, 15 February 2006 (UTC) ColinKennedy 20:40, 15 February 2006 (UTC) (sorry, I got logged out)
 * I'm far from an expert on the topic (maybe Angr could comment here?), but afaik, no dialect of German distinguishes the various realizations of /ä/ from those of /e/. I wouldn't call this "anachronistic", I would call it "etymological retention" or something more along those lines. Anachronistic is like when modern English was being developed, some (fairly influential) folks went back and readded "silent letters" (some of the occurrences of the digraph "gh" come to mind) on an etymological basis, to the spelling.  Even more anachronistic was the standardization of Føroyskt.  Some official limba română spellings are anachronistic as well, including the name Romania.  On the other hand, it could be that German is listed as using "overly complicated" spellings.  /i/ is spelled "ie" (archaic diphthong), complex (and for outsiders, apparently arbitrary, especially since Duden's rules aren't followed in all of Germanspeakerdom) rules about when old sz is to be written "ß" vs "ss".  No apparent rationale for the existence of both ü and y as separate letters.  Failure to distinguish between adjacent [glottal-stop distinguished] vowels and diphthongs, e.g., "ee" can be either /e:/ or /eʔe/.  /ʃ/ is spelled "sch".  /ʧ/ is "tsch".  /ʤ/ is "dsch".  /ˈʧɛ·çɪʃ/ is "tschechisch". "g" is sometimes /g/ and sometimes /ç/.  "ch" is sometimes /ç/ (/ʃ/ in some dialects) and sometimes /χ/ or even /x/.  "r" is /ʀ/ or /ɐ/ (some places /ʁ/).  Easy enough once you know the rules, but not quite as simple to an outsider.  ;-)  Tom e rtalk  00:42, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

 * If you will, some spellings might be called anachronistic in the sense that non-etymological spellings were introduced. There are, for instance, dialects that distinguish ä and e also in short vowels, but the distinction is different from the one in the written standard. For instance, the primary umlaut of /a/ was /e/, not /ä/, so in Middle High German the plural of stadt 'city' was stedt(e), but in the modern standard language, ä is used in all instances that correspond to a, no matter what their etymological development. Then, ie is being used in words that never had the diphthong ie, vor instance wieder 'again', Friede 'peace'; ss as well, for instance Wasser 'water'; and then, there are anti-etymological distinction of originally single words into two words, for instance dass vs. das 'that', wider vs. wieder 'again'. 84.73.159.74 07:12, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

"catalogue became catalog" Eh?
Since when, exactly, has catalogue been spelled as "catalog" in American English? I'm an American, from Ohio, and I can only ever remember it being spelled "catalogue." I'm 23, by the way, so it is not due to my old-timey nature or anything. ChildeRolandofGilead 15:08, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Try a google search and you'll find lots. Indeed try google itself Google catalogs.  There really isn't such a hard border between British and American spelling.  Hence it is not unusual for Americans to use a "British" spelling and British "American".Dejvid 18:31, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, how many "Ohioans" have contributed information online—AND in standard American English spelling? Would they maybe use "catalog" when in a rush? Who knows if that's how they spell it in their spare time. Y'know, people often use different vernaculars when in different situations. Talking (aloud, that is), is an exception: if I had to spell every word I spoke, in my mind and whilst speaking, I'd just as soon keep my mouth shut!… Anyway, I often use the spelling "thru" when working thru(/through/thrû) a computer, as well as many other ergonomic conventionalisms. So, the way people spell on the Internet doesn't necessarily reflect the way people spell on paper or typewriter or even word processor. The Web has definitely changed alot of things; spelling habits being one of them. Space is often a general issue for most non-aristocratic computer users. Although, one wonders, in terms of kilobytes, how much larger an e-text copy of the Bible in British English would be in comparison to that of American English version… Hunoz?
 * As for myself, I have developed a personal mishmash spelling of English words, wherein one will find the spellings "colour" and "favour" side by side with "program" and "catalog". It may seem bizarre to others, but that's the least of my worries. I just use spellings that are comfortable for me. After all, most people nowadays seem to prefer to communicate via e-mail over smail (i.e., "slow mail" or "snail mail"). Personally, I am content with the spelling of Modern English. I'm a lexicographer of sorts (and among other things) and I'm familiar with the histories of many English words and know that many of the "spelling vagaries" actually hearken back to an earlier pronunciation—indeed, if Shakespeare were alive today (and also not situated inside a coffin), we would marvel at the way he pronounced English. As a Germanic language, English is a bit mysterious, if you will, so, naturally, its spelling-speaking correspondence will seem inconsistent from the viewpoint of, say, an Italian speller-speaker. Needless to say, a reform of the spelling of English, proposed by some little whippersnapper seems to me a bit imprudent. Besides, after several centuries, current English spelling has naturally evolved thus, therefore let us see how it will further evolve…—Strabismus 21:26, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Removed Arabic
I don't see how Hebrew is classified in one category when Arabic is classified in another. I have no idea how favorable Hebrew spelling is, but it is very similar to Arabic spelling so they are either both good or bad. Removed reference to Arabic.

 * To put it simply, they both suck but are probably better than English.Cameron Nedland 21:38, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Removed Hebrew
"consistent (and preferably phonetical) spelling systems -- like Finnish, Russian, Italian, Spanish or Hebrew". Hebrew spelling for Ivrith is a traditional spelling, which is far from being consistent or even phonetical. I removed it. Metron 12:10, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Reference from Computer
The August 2006 issue of Computer references this article. I know there's some template to put on the talk page for it but I haven't a clue what it is or where I saw it. Cburnett 18:37, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Pinyin
Make sure to mention the pinyin battle on Taiwan. jidanni.org/lang/pinyin --Jidanni 2006-12-12

 * Pinyin is a transliteration system, not really the spelling of the language. Likewise, you cannot say the change from Wade-Giles to pinyin is a spelling reform. Strictly speaking, Chinese is not spelled with alphabets, hence the closest you can get is writing reform, not spelling reform.  I would said the spelling reform in other languages is analogous to the Traditional verses Simplified Chinese writing reform.  Kowloonese 02:20, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

 * Oops, I just added a section on pinyin to the article, and foolishly didn't come look here until afterwards. I will leave it up to someone else checking this page to decide if it should be deleted or removed or anything...  --Politizer (talk) 03:26, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

German
"languages which use anachronistic or overly complicated spellings -- like German, French or English."

I'm not sure that German should be used as an example of this. German uses consistent spelling and is entirely phonemic. At least this is my experience. Morrad 20:12, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Hungarian spelling reform
I find it a little strange that there is no mention even in passing of the Hungarian linguistic (and spelling, which is relevant) reform which occurred at the end of the nineteenth century. 140.142.175.94 05:25, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Irregular English spelling: 'God-given'?
'Because the Bible was the first English book to be read by large numbers of people, its spelling errors had a large effect on English spelling. People regarded them as God-given and copied them.[citation needed].' No citation is in fact needed, because the reasoning is quite valid in itself; altho perhaps it could be better phrased, e.g., for the latter sentence: '...For most readers, this would inevitably have endowed them with a seemingly God-given validity.' Having said that, perhaps a citation is, in fact, required, i.e., giving specific examples of said 'spelling errors'(?).

A citation is definitely required. While 'God-given' spelling errors sounds vaguely plausible, this is not an argument that I’ve come across anywhere else and in fact, falls down pretty quickly when you consider the significant number of bibles identified as faulty (see Bible errata) because of various spelling mistakes within them. I think this whole paragraph should be removed ref WP:NOR Mighty Antar 10:45, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Actually, you can find this in at least 1 place I know of. Its in The Story of English by McCrumb, and he was refering to some earlier work.JO 753 16:30, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Does it cite what the earlier work was? Given the English Bible only had about 8000 different words, it shouldn't be hard to cite any consistant errors said to have been established by this practice. Mighty Antar 18:06, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Irreflections?
"The aim of spelling reform is to make spelling easier for learners and users by removing its difficulties. It attempts to remove irreflections between what is written and spoken"

What in the world is an irreflection? And since this word does not exist, how are we simplifying spelling by adding words that no one else in the English speaking world knows? Pray, tell.Homely (talk) 15:58, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

 * Hugely amusing, or rather sad. It achieves exactly the opposite. My understanding is that victims of the ITA found, when they entered the real world, that they were rendered functionally illiterate, and continued through life at huge disadvantage. (I admit,  [citation needed]).
 * I recall meeting a pair of young teachers, trained in the ITA approach in Northern Ireland, doing their teaching experience in the North-East, Geordie-land.
 * "Does that approach work?", I asked; "No, it's completely impossible, with the difference in dialect, we haven't a clue what the kids are writing". Yep, it's anecdotal, it's a faithful account, and indeed [citation needed]. And it is a dire warning, too.  Memethuzla (talk) 04:23, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Dubious political and cultural motivations for Spelling Reform
I think not enough attention is paid here to the circumstances in which language reform generally takes place. Isn't it interesting, historically, that many of those who have pushed for reforms tend to be political radicals also? There might well be a hidden agenda as well as an impatient desire for change and simplicity.

It is certainly true that it does not require a political push for a language to evolve, it will do so on its own (though whether that is an advance or dysgenesis is moot).

Leaders of major political revolutions (or invasions), particularly the more oppressive regimes, waste no time in "simplifying" the spelling, grammar, vocabulary of the lingua franca, ostensibly to make it more available to the poor ......, but certainly to impose a Newspeak of their own, to insinuate the new culture into every cranny of their subjects' new existence. A mere side-effect of all this generous help is that, very shortly, most old literature and guidance in the old ways becomes almost completely inaccessible to the new generations, & a cultural paradigm can be completely shifted in double quick time. For that reason alone, those of us who value our liberty should be very suspicious of educational (quiet) or political (noisy) initiatives radically to change our mode of basic communication.

Think about that the next time you are offered something "for free"; a subtle semiotic variant of "in return for you freedom".

Memethuzla (talk) 06:20, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
 * The above is nothing more nor less than a biased statement of political preference. And when so many contributors present the constipation of conservatism as some attractive, apolitical norm, it is hardly surprising that overdue change, if and when it does finally come, comes in unpleasant, explosive bursts.--86.31.105.33 (talk) 22:46, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

'Simplified spelling' should not redirect here!
'Simplified spelling' should not redirect here, but it does, at the time of writing. To those in the know, the two concepts are far from interchangeable. Simplified spelling has been implemented repeatedly, not only in the writings of private hobbyists and historical genii, but in the secret communications of companies, as well as learning simplification programs such as the I.T.A. and Sayspel. The current redirection arrangement also seems to mitigate against both Simplified Spelling and Spelling Reform. For one thing, it results in simplified spelling schemes not being properly documented, despite their limited historical successes and implementations. Additionally, I raised the subject of 'spelling reform' with another ordinary working class gent, recently (a caretaker at Charlton House, in fact) and noted that he responded with much greater enthusiasm to the concept of 'simplified spelling,' which, despite involving a longer word, sounds less hifalutin. Arguably, the confusion between simplified spelling and spelling reform is among the historical reasons for the failure of the latter. The failure to appreciate, treasure, and use simplified spelling, once devised, itself mitigates against its acceptance, but an instant, assumed equation of examples of simplified spelling with spelling reform, or an attempt thereat, sets it up for something it is unlikely, in any given instance, to achieve. Many simplified spelling schemes are devised, in many written languages, but the number of historical instances of spelling reform is minute in comparison - this becomes clear early on in the study of the subject. Some schemes may be 'born to fail,' in that respect, in the sense that there was never any intention for them to replace traditional spelling - I.T.A. is an example of this. Many are doomed, in this sense, simply owing to the obvious difficulty of instituting changes which will meet with the approval of large (and sometimes, even, comparatively small) language communities. Said confusion therefore leads to expectations unlikely to be met, and a failure, at the time, to appreciate the beauty and worth of any individual simplified spelling scheme for what it is - an experiment in design.--86.31.105.33 (talk) 06:59, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Moldovan
I've removed from the article the part where it seemed to state that switching Moldovan spelling from Cyrillic to Latin was accompanied by a phonemization of the orthography. The same part also was saying that Moldovan is a variety of Romanian. Both statements are false. I didn't bother labeling the passage as lacking sources, since I know for a fact that there aren't any.

Moldovan is in fact Romanian. The language was given a different name (and a different script) in Moldova for political reasons and no other. There is no linguist stating they are different languages, or dialects, or anything of the sort. It's one language.

Its Cyrillic orthography was in fact about just as phonemic as the Latin orthography that was used before and after. There is an almost 1 to 1 correspondence between the two scripts (somewhat like the two spellings of Serbian), with only a few exceptions that are regular and depend on the actual pronunciation. As such, the transition in 1989 from Cyrillic to Latin in Moldova was not, and cannot be, justified as a means to render the spelling more phonemic, but to reunite the orthography of the language. — Adi  Japan  07:52, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Definition of spelling reform
There's a dialogue on the talk page of English-language spelling reform about the definition of spelling reform (here). Your input is appreciated. Throughme (talk) 20:59, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Spelling reform


text:
La Fenice

Teatro La Fenice (, "The Phoenix") is a historic opera house in Venice, Italy. It is one of "the most famous and renowned landmarks in the history of Italian theatre" and in the history of opera as a whole. Especially in the 19th century, La Fenice became the site of many famous operatic premieres at which the works of several of the four major bel canto era composers—Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi—were performed.

Its name reflects its role in permitting an opera company to "rise from the ashes" despite losing the use of three theatres to fire, the first in 1774 after the city's leading house was destroyed and rebuilt but not opened until 1792; the second fire came in 1836, but rebuilding was completed within a year. The third fire was the result of arson, and destroyed the house in 1996 leaving only the exterior walls; it was rebuilt and re-opened in November 2004. In order to celebrate this event, the tradition of the Venice New Year's Concert started.

History
Seven old theaters were active in Venice at the end of the eighteenth century, two for the production of plays and the others for music. The grandest of these was the Teatro San Benedetto, which stood on the site currently occupied by the Rossini cinema. Built by the Grimani family in 1755, it was subsequently assigned to the Nobile Società di Palchettisti (Noble Association of Box-holders). However, following a judicial ruling in 1787, this association was expelled and forced to give up the opera house to the noble Venier family, the owners of the land on which it was built. The association immediately proposed building a larger and more sumptuous opera house than the one it had lost, which would become the symbol of their changing fortunes and their capacity for ′rebirth′. It was therefore to be called La Fenice, like the mythical, immortal bird able to rise out of its own ashes, to symbolise the association's splendid rebirth after its misfortunes.

The piece of land between Contrada Santa Maria Zobenigo and Contrada Sant'Angelo was bought for the purpose in 1790 and the private houses on it were demolished. A competition was then announced for the design of the opera house, and the committee of experts selected the work of the architect Giannantonio Selva from the 29 plans submitted. Work began in 1791 and was completed just 18 months later, in April 1792. La Fenice immediately made its mark as one of the leading opera houses, noted in Italy and Europe both for the high artistic quality of its work and the splendour of its building. But, almost as if the name were the bearer of bad omens, on the night of 13 December 1836 the opera house was devastated by a first fire caused by a recently installed Austrian heater. The newspapers said it took three days and three nights to put out the fire and that various hotspots were still smouldering among the debris 18 days later. The flames entirely destroyed the house, and only the foyer and the Sale Apollinee were saved. The association decided to proceed with its immediate reconstruction. It appointed the architect Giambattista Meduna and his engineer brother Tommaso to carry out the work, while Tranquillo Orsi was responsible for the decorations. The work began in February 1837 and performances were temporarily staged in the Teatro Apollo (previously the San Luca, now Goldoni).

Everything was completed in record time. By the evening of 26 December of the same year, the new opera house, reborn in the new artistic style of the age, was opened to the public. The speed of the work, however, led to urgent restoration works to the framework being required as early as 1854 and, again under the direction of Giambattista Meduna, the house was redecorated in a style that remained unchanged until 1996. On 23 July 1935 the box-holder owners ceded their share in the opera house to the Comune di Venezia, so it went from private to public ownership, and in 1937-8 part of building was subject to further major restorations and alterations by engineer Eugenio Miozzi. On the night of 29 January 1996, during a period of closure for restoration works, a second fire – as the Myth said – this time arson, completely destroyed the house and most of the Sale Apollinee. Once again La Fenice rose again, faithfully reconstructed to a plan by the architect Aldo Rossi, and was reopened on 14 December 2003.

First theatre
In 1774, the Teatro San Benedetto, which had been Venice's leading opera house for more than forty years, burned to the ground. By 1789, with interest from a number of wealthy opera lovers who wanted a spectacular new house, "a carefully defined competition" was organised to find a suitable architect. It was won by Gianantonio Selva who proposed a neoclassical style building with 170 identical boxes in tiers in a traditional horseshoe shaped auditorium, which had been the favoured style since it was introduced as early as 1642 in Venice. The house would face on one side a campo, or small plaza, and on the other a canal, with an entrance which gave direct access backstage and into the theatre.

However, the process was not without controversy especially in regard to the aesthetics of the building. Some thirty responses were received and, as Romanelli accounts, Selva's was designated as the design to be constructed, the actual award for best design went to his chief rival, Pietro Bianchi. However, Selva's design and finished opera house appears to have been of high quality and the one best suited to the limitations of the physical space it was obliged to inhabit.

Construction began in June 1790, and by May 1792 the theatre was completed. It was named "La Fenice", in reference to the company's survival, first of the fire, then of the loss of its former quarters. La Fenice was inaugurated on 16 May 1792, with an opera by Giovanni Paisiello entitled I giuochi d'Agrigento set to a libretto by Alessandro Pepoli.

But no sooner had the opera house been rebuilt than a legal dispute broke out between the company managing it and the owners, the Venier family. The issue was decided in favor of the Veniers.

At the beginning of the 19th century, La Fenice acquired a European reputation. Rossini mounted two major productions there: Tancredi in 1813 and Semiramide in 1823. Two of Bellini's operas were given their premieres there: I Capuleti e i Montecchi in March 1830 and Beatrice di Tenda in March 1833. Donizetti, fresh from his triumphs at La Scala in Milan and at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, returned to Venice in 1836 with his Belisario, after an absence of seventeen years.

Second theatre

In December 1836, disaster struck again when the theatre was destroyed by fire. However, it was quickly rebuilt with a design provided by the architect-engineer team of the brothers Tommaso and Giovanni Battista Meduna. The interior displays a late-Empire luxury of gilt decorations, plushy extravagance and stucco. La Fenice once again rose from its ashes to open its doors on the evening of 26 December 1837.

Giuseppe Verdi's association with La Fenice began in 1844, with the premiere performance of Ernani during the carnival season. Over the next 13 years, the premieres of Attila, Rigoletto, La traviata, and Simon Boccanegra took place there.

During the First World War, La Fenice was closed, but it reopened to become the scene of much activity, attracting many of the world's greatest singers and conductors. In 1930, the Venice Biennale initiated the First International Festival of Contemporary Music, which brought such composers as Stravinsky and Britten, and more recently Berio, Nono, and Bussotti, to write for La Fenice.

On 29 January 1996, La Fenice was completely destroyed by fire. Only its acoustics were preserved, since Lamberto Tronchin, an Italian acoustician, had measured the acoustics two months earlier.

Arson was immediately suspected. In March 2001, a court in Venice found two electricians, Enrico Carella and his cousin Massimiliano Marchetti, guilty of setting the fire. They appeared to have set the building ablaze because their company was facing heavy fines over delays in repair work in which they were engaged. Carella, the company's owner, disappeared after a final appeal was turned down. He had been sentenced to seven years in prison. Marchetti surrendered and served a six-year sentence. Ultimately, Carella was arrested in February 2007 at the Mexico-Belize border, was extradited to Italy, and was released on day parole after serving 16 months.

Present theatre
After various delays, reconstruction began in earnest in 2001. In 650 days, a team of 200 plasterers, artists, woodworkers, and other craftsmen succeeded in recreating the ambiance of the old theatre, at a cost of some €90 million. As Gillian Price notes, "This time round, thanks to an enlightened project by late Italian architect Aldo Rossi and the motto 'how it was, where it was', it has been fitted out with extra rehearsal areas and state-of-the-art stage equipment, while the seating capacity has been increased from 840 to 1000."

La Fenice was rebuilt in 19th-century style on the basis of a design by architect Aldo Rossi who, in order to obtain details of its design, used still photographs from the opening scenes of Luchino Visconti's film Senso (1954), which had been filmed in the house. La Fenice reopened on 14 December 2003 with an inaugural concert of Beethoven, Wagner, and Stravinsky. The first staged opera was a production of La traviata, in November 2004.

Critical response to the rebuilt La Fenice was mixed. The music critic of the paper Il Tempo, Enrico Cavalotti, was satisfied. He found the colours a bit bright but the sound good and compact. However, for his colleague Dino Villatico of the La Repubblica, the acoustics of the new hall lacked resonance, and the colours were painfully bright. He found it "kitsch, a fake imitation of the past". He said that "the city should have had the nerve to build a completely new theater; Venice betrayed its innovative past by ignoring it".

Façade
Built in 1792 to a plan by the architect Giannantonio Selva, the façade of the building is the only element to have completely survived the two fires that almost entirely destroyed the opera house in 1836 and 1996. Unlike the other theaters in the city, whose entrances are in secluded places like alleys and small squares, La Fenice is the only historic Venetian theatre facing onto an open space, Campo San Fantin. It is also the only one to feature a colonnade in neo-classical style in its façade. This bears the theatre's insignia in the centre portraying the phoenix that rises from the flames, carved in 1837 to design by Giambattista Meduna. The façade features two statues in niches representing the muses of tragedy and dance: Melpomene and Terpsichore. Above them are the masks of Comedy and Tragedy, thought to be by Domenico Fadiga. The first sculptures that adorned the entrance to the opera house, in terracotta and carved in Baroque style, were attributed to either Giuseppe Bernardi or his nephew Giovanni Ferrari, both of whom taught Canova. They were replaced in 1875 as they were in an advanced state of decay and were in any case thought incompatible, if restored, with the classical style of the façade. The two new statues were made in Custoza stone by Augusto Benvenuti in a new style that better suited the building. All trace of the original sculptures was lost after the theatre management sold them to Benvenuti in 1876. Two commemorative stelae were placed in the entrance vestibule after the 1837 reconstruction. The one on the right, sculpted in that year by Antonio Giaccarelli to an original design by Giambattista Meduna, is attributed to the architect Giannantonio Selva. The one on the left, in honour of the playwright Carlo Goldoni, is by Luigi Zandomeneghi and was moved from the atrium where it had been dedicated on 26 December 1830. The new sign of the opera house, in gold and blue, again to a design By Meduna, was also placed above the entrance in 1837.

Foyer
Escaping entirely unharmed from the first fire that destroyed the original La Fenice Opera House on the night of December 1836, the entrance, by Selva, was enlarged in 1937 as part of the upgrading works directed by the engineer Eugenio Miozzi. On that same occasion some walls that divided the right side of the foyer into several spaces were demolished to make this side the mirror image, in shape and decoration, of the left. A commemorative plaque recording the box-holder owner's transfer of shares to the Comune di Venezia in 1935 was then placed in the right wing. It was precisely thanks to this work, which also included restoration, that the foyer and the Sale Apollinee on the upper floor managed to partly withstand the collapse of the floor and the wall against the stairs to the boxes following the fire of 29 January 1996. The opera house entrance is therefore the area in which the largest number of original elements of the building survive: part of the decoration and most of the columns, the floor and the access stairs to the boxes.

House
The fire of 1996 completely destroyed the five tiers of boxes, the stage and the ceiling, leaving only the perimeter walls on the original house.

Reconstruction was based on the architect Aldo Rossi's design, keeping to the motto "As it was, where it was," which had been applied to the rebuilding of St Mark's bell Campanile, exactly the same as the original and taking ten years, after it collapsed in 1902. The faithful reconstruction of the house was facilitated by the comprehensive treatise on the reconstruction that had been drawn up by the Meduna brothers after the work carried out following the first fire of 1836. Reconstruction of the decorations in the house, in a Rococo style, was based mainly on consultation of the considerable photographic archive on the opera house held in the theatre's historic archive. In order to speed up the work, two procedures were adopted.

Reconstruction of the masonry and wooden framing of the building was carried out in the opera house itself by hundreds of workers employed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, while the decorative components were constructed at the same time in various external workshops so that these would be ready for application once the structural work was complete. The same nineteenth-century materials were used: papier-mache, wood, and plaster for all ornamentation of the royal box and the entrance, the 22 Nereids that are part of the cornice of the so-called soffittone (ceiling), and the four putti in the royal box. The guiding principle was that of recreating the original house, particularly its specific technical solution based mainly on the use of wood, carefully chosen and treated to obtain the best acoustic response. The big soundbox of the wooden house was enclosed in a protective envelope of masonry and reinforced concrete floors.

The only decorative element built at least partly on site was the ceiling, which reproduces the original design, giving the optical illusion of a vaulted ceiling. It features paintings of several female figures, some of whom are carrying musical instruments, and young maidens representing the Graces, Music, Dance and Aurora. The chandelier is a reproduction of the English original in gilt bronze, commissioned by the Meduna brothers from craftsmen in Liverpool in 1854. The arms of the sconces in the boxes were also made following the model of a single surviving example.

The main theme of the house decorations, dating from 1854, is a reproduction of a forest with acanthus leaves depicted in the papier-mache decorations, subsequently enriched with 23-carat gold leaf worked using the quartz technique and polished with agate. The paintings outside the boxes have cherubs with musical instruments or in playful mood. The first tier also includes the profiles of classical poets, while the second features six allegories representing History, Poetry, Philosophy, Comedy, Tragedy, and Music.

On the third tier are putti holding tablets engraved with the titles and authors of 14 of the most important operas staged in the house.

A significant innovation in the appearance of the house was made by a radical change of color inside the individual boxes. The original shade of beige has now been replaced by a blue-green pastel color.

The current access to the stalls was designed by the engineer Miozzi in 1937 and decorated at the sides with two plaster caryatids. The house originally had two small entrances in the section now occupied by the first on the right of the current access, which until the second half of the 1930s was taken up by three boxes in the first tier.

The orchestra pit now has a moveable platform. When the pit is not required, the platform can be raised to the level of the stalls, allowing some rows of additional seats to be added to the front, increasing capacity by 104 to 1,126. The moveable platform, which consists of two elements, can also be completely or partially raised to the level of the stage in order to enlarge it.

The curtain was reproduced on the basis of an examination of historic documentation, in dark-green, deep nap, fire-resistant synthetic velvet decorated with 1,100 flowers in gilt leather.

The new stage is accompanied by a second lateral stage onto which the stage equipment now moves sideways for construction and handling of the scenery.

Royal box
The place of honor in the house has a tormented existence, relating not only to the history of the opera house but also to the political and historic events of the city of Venice.

The royal box was not part of Giannantonio Selva's original plan for La Fenice; at the time of its construction the house contained only boxes of the same size. Venice had lost its independence in May 1797 to the First French Empire, which then handed the city over to the Austro-Hungarian empire for eight years following the Treaty of Campoformio in 1797, and in 1805 Venice once again came under French rule. The first imperial loggia was built only provisionally in 1807 to accommodate the emperor, Napoleon, who was expected in the opera house on Tuesday 1 December 1807 for a performance of the cantata Il Giudizio di Giove by Lauro Corniani Algarotti. Its construction required the demolition of three central boxes in both the second and third tiers.

In 1808 the architect Giannantonio Selva built the definitive model with the assistance of Giuseppe Borsato on the decorations. This was destroyed by the fire that struck La Fenice in December 1836, and was rebuilt along with the rest of the house by the Meduna brothers in 1837, with the assistance of Giuseppe Borsato, who increased the splendor of the decorations. Following the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Venice once again found itself under Habsburg rule. At the end of March 1848, following insurrectionary uprising and the Republic of Venice's consequent declaration of independence from Austria, the loggia was taken down so that the original tiers of boxes could be reinstated in the so-called "Republican" house. The six boxes that had been in the center of the house until the beginning of the nineteenth century were therefore rebuilt. However, the Imperial Austrian Royal Government then returned, and on 22 August 1849 ordered reconstruction of the loggia in its original form. The decorations were entrusted once again to Giuseppe Borsato who, now over 70, remade them to a richer design than before. This was his last work; his box was presented in January 1850 in the presence of his widow Maria Bonadei Borsato. The imperial loggia finally became the royal box in 1866 with the Veneto entrance into the Kingdom of Italy.

The symbol of the Italian royal family can still be seen inside the box, reproduced on the side walls. There was a third Savoy shield on the crown of the external cornice, but this was removed after the republican victory in the referendum of 2 June 1946 and replaced with the lion of St Mark, the symbol of Venice. There are some ivory-painted wooden putti in the corners of the walls on four gilt, wooden candelabra. On the papier mache-decorated wooden ceiling there is a reproduction of the painting Apotheosis of the Sciences and the Arts, originally by the painter Leonardo Gavagnin. The royal box also offers its guests the use of a private room, which has its own private entrance.

Sale Apollinee
The Sale Apollinee, so named because dedicated to the Greek god Apollo, father of the Muses and patron of the Arts, including music, consists of five rooms whose current layout dates from 1937. These rooms are now used during the intervals by the audience occupying the first three tiers of boxes and the stalls. The five rooms of the Sale Apollinee were originally used even when there was no show in the opera house; its bar would be open during the day and there was a billiard table in one of the rooms.

On the top of the main door is a symbol of the sun, a tribute to the King of France Louis XIV. The Apollon room was thought of as a ballet room; ballet came to prominence in part because of Louis XIV's interest in it. He performed a series of dances in Ballet Royal de la Nuit, in the final piece as Apollo in a costume with a kilt of golden rays—and thus became known as the Sun King. La Fenice was built in tribute to the god Apollo.

Unlike the house, which was completely destroyed by the enormous fire of 1996, about a fifth of these rooms survived. The surviving fragments can be easily recognized, as the precise intention of the reconstruction work was that it highlight the difference between the historic sections and the recent additions. The original parts of the ceiling cornices and remaining ornamental stuccoes on the walls are darker in color, in testimony of the last fire. The same difference can be seen in the marble frames of some of the doors, repaired with new marble of a different color, and in the new flooring, which merges with the typical Venetian terrazzo that remained in the room dedicated to the famous singer Maria Malibran.

Thanks to these completions, the Sale Apollinee has been rebuilt on the basis of the originals, though a wider range of choice was conceded than in the house, shown by the new upholstery and furnishings in these rooms.

Sala Dante
The main bar is in the Sala Dante, named after the frescoes that once decorated its walls.

This room was inaugurated in 1865 on the occasion of the sixth centenary of the birth of Dante Alighieri. To celebrate the event, the painter Giacomo Casa created a large composition within the decorative ceiling frame, showing Italy in the act of crowning the great poet and six tempera fresco paintings on the walls, with the same number of scenes from the Divine Comedy. Two of these were then replaced in 1867 with others in tempera by Antonio Ermolao Paoletti.

In September 1976 the walls and ceiling of this room, renamed the Sala Guidi, were decorated with works by the Venetian painter Virgilio Guidi, which covered the scenes from Dante. The fire of 1996, however, destroyed these canvases, bringing back to light some fragments of the original decoration by Casa, which have now been completed with a sinopia to assist their reading.

Sala Grande
The Sala Grande or ballroom is he main room of the five Sale Apollinee, lit by the three windows in the middle of the entrance façade.

Used over the years for different purposes, the Sala Grande was an elegant venue for balls, chamber music concerts, conferences or book launches, and (before La Fenice was provided with special rooms for them) rehearsals. It was also used by the governing board in 1935. Almost completely destroyed on the night of 29 January 1996, the Sala Grande has been faithfully reconstructed to the original model.

The floor, which is above the foyer, collapsed after the fire and only the corners were saved. The current floor has been faithfully rebuilt to the original model and its characteristic floral patterns reproduced, requiring the use of various types of wood: maple, olive, and cherry. The color of the walls is also the same as the original. A gallery runs around the circumference of the upper part of the room, with access from the three doors on the top floor.

New rooms
"As it was, where it was", the motto for reconstruction of La Fenice, called for the opera house to be rebuilt as it was before the 1996 fire. This principle, however, was seen applying only to the rooms of particular historic and artistic importance. The opportunity was therefore taken to redesign the parts of the building that did not come into this category, resulting in the creation of three new rooms.

In fiction
Donna Leon's debut novel, Death at La Fenice (1992), the first in her Commissario (Detective) Guido Brunetti detective series, centers on a mystery surrounding the sensational death by cyanide poisoning of a famous orchestra conductor, in the midst of a production of La traviata at La Fenice. In several scenes the opera house is described in meticulous detail, as it was at the time of writing, previous to the third fire.

title: La Fenice