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We constantly seek to give the essential gift of literacy to everybody. It is time we turned our attention to the task that is set for everybody, whether verbally able or not. All other major languages except English have improved their writing systems in the past hundred years. We spend millions of dollars and still the problems of illiteracy and near illiteracy remain with us. There is a storm calling for educational reform.
I would like to set out one major problem, and suggest a solution. It and others can be tested in pilot schemes. Science is all about questioning assumptions, testing theories, and analyzing facts.
The English language has a glorious tradition of defying any efforts of supreme authority and that still continues. Vocabulary increases by leaps and bounds. Grammar simplifies. Dialects proliferate People speak how they like. Dictionaries constantly record the new words.
However, spelling is a different matter.
Spelling is the tool to write the language. It is part of communications technology. And here we are in a bind. It has been slowly trying to keep up to date with the language. Dictionaries are authorities in that anything printed must conform to what they say. They say they follow the spelling that people use in the printed word. But anything printed must pass Microsoft Spellcheck. Unless Spellchecker pass it, it is not printed. Dictionaries go by what is printed. They describe, but inevitably prescribe.
Online and in private correspondence people spell fairly freely. Like North Koreans who nurture their own opinions privately.
Psychologists now document the costs of our spelling in the relative slowness of children to become literate, compared with children in countries with consistent spelling. The people most handicapped by spelling in learning literacy are identified – dyslexics, the learning-disabled, immigrants, and the disadvantaged. Spelling Bees show the difficulties of spelling. Only some entrants manage to remember it all. Most people cannot spell, and rely on Spellcheckers.
We boggle at the difficulty of bringing in any change – yet in every other field, including the rest of communication technology, scientists bring in unimaginable changes.
Most people including teachers know little about writing systems and repeated old assumptions. Some of our worst spelling is past attempts to solve problems, which add to the chaos, e.g. in spelling long vowels, with dozens of alternatives. Spelling reformers invent purely phonetic solutions which mean problems for dialects. An Englishman tries to popularise Freespelling on the web. Spell how you like, and eventually it will all settle down. Perhaps!
Yet the unnecessary difficulties in English spelling keep a large proportion of the population illiterate or semiliterate. They have enough problems anyway. (Do you want more statistics). The position of English as the world’s lingua franca is threatened.
Yet it is posibl to cut out the unnecessary dificulties in English spelling and keep the general appearance of print, changing about 6% of letters in text and omitting about 8%. This is by abandoning the old British-American idea of spelling reform, which is radical phonetic change, and going the way of most other modern languages of the world, which take out their unnecessary difficulties. This could be done with English.
1. About half the words in everyday text ar made up of 100 words, so keep the spelling of the 35 most common irregular words: all almost always among come some could should would four half know of off one only once other full/ful pull push put their they two as was what want who why, and international word endings -ion/-tion/-sion/zion. That is not too much to lern, The spelling of the other 65 most common words is sensibl.
2. Cut out the surplus letters in words, that do not represent meaning or pronunciation and often mislead, as in guardian and sieve. This cuts the unnecessary difficulties in spelling by half. They account for half the problems of the ‘demon spellings,’ and until spellcheckers petrified change in print, were gradually being cut out – e.g. horror and economic for horrour and oeconomick.
3. Modify the BBC Text Pronunciation Guide, which is familiar and can be modified to include American speech, to be a Dictionary Pronunciation Gide and the first lerning for beginners. Spelling is seen as a convention to represent fonemes and morfemes rather than as a fotograf of sounds.
4. The rules of spelling can fit on one page. The 147 spelling patterns that ar quite unnecessary afect relativly few wurds. Keep personal and place names, and dificult forin wurds like ‘bourgeois’ in italics. Reserch shows very few homofones need spelling diferentiation to avoid confusion – to/too/two for exampl. English is alredy full of homonims.
5. Copy the recent exampl of the Académie Française, and allow mor vairiant spellings within the rules in dictionaries for 7 vowels and 4 consonants. Democratic choice can decide the future.
6. An International Commission on English Spelling can monitor and collate reserch, and authorize improvements, on the lines of spelling commissions of other nations.
Most arguments and assumptions AGAINST improving spelling can be used to improve it.– that whatever helps lerners must help readers as well, that reading is visual as well as auditory, that families of wurds must be recognisabl, cultural value must be maintaind, the ‘Chomsky’ line of underlying fonology, and even etimology.
The cost is minimal compared with the costs of no updating. Nothing at present in print will need reprinting.
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/spelling.htm
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/writsys.htm
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/literacy.htm
http://www.ozreadandspell.com.au
