Is Simplified Spelling Worth Reform?

digitalhermit writes "I guess many folks are of very little brain, and big words bother them... There's a push for simpler spelling. Instead of 'weigh' it would be 'way.' 'Dictionary' would be 'dikshunery' and so forth. Dunno if it's a joke, but it seems in earnest. Mark Twain must be spinning around somewhere." Twain is often credited with the satirical call for spelling reform called "A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling," though according to Wikipedia, Twain was "actually a supporter of reform," and the piece may have been written by M.J. Shields. Benjamin Franklin was another champion of spelling reform, and even came up with a phonetic alphabet to implement such reform.

Comments

This is exactly what America needs.

[XorNand]

This is exactly what America needs: something that allows the populace to think even less in their everyday lives. The aversion to expending a little extra effort seems to be a uniquely American thing. We invent all of these machines to save us from having to perform manual labor. Then we all get fat and develop health problems from lack of physical activity. So now we pack it into gyms where we run in place, climb fake staircases, and lift heavy pieces of iron up and down for no useful purpose. Mindboggling. Taking mental shortcuts will be just as beneficial.

Re:Never going to happen

[bunions]

yeah. You'll never see people abbreviating things like 'you' and 'your' to 'u' and 'ur' or spelling 'through' or 'night' to 'thru' and 'nite'.

Sadly, I've seen 5th grade papers where the kid spelled through 'thru' and the teacher didn't let out a peep. :(

Simple solution

[Anonymous Coward]

A simple solution involves solving these spelling problems around the world. It's a simple, six letter word.

It's called SCHOOL.

English

[Distinguished Hero]

Due to the way that written was English developed, it is one of the few Indo-European languages to not be written in a phonetic manner (if you only know English, you may not completely comprehend what this means). That being said, now that English is an international language, and a huge portion of the world's population is already familiar with the way it is written, fragmenting and reforming it at this point is an asinine idea. Furthermore, there exist languages which are even less phonetic than English (e.g. Mandarin ("Chinese"), the Kanji portion of Japanese) and those people manage to do fine.

P.S. Implementing this idea would also mean that people would soon lose the ability to read the vast body of works already written in English; a huge translation effort would have to be undertaken, and a lot of works would still remain untranslated. Such a loss is not acceptable (unless you have Orwellian intentions in mind).

difference:

[conJunk]

You're right, it won't/shouldn't happen, but it's not like metric:

Our spelling of words inherits from their roots. English is the kind of language the hunts down other languages and corners them dark alleys to nick their vocabularies, and that history is in the spelling. If a words is unfamilliar, its spelling is a clue to its meaning. "Simplified Spelling" robs us of an ability to learn new words easily.

TFA says that these weirdos claim that illiteracy rates would drop if spelling were simplified. Not likely. The reson folks are illiterate is that we refuse to fund our schools sufficiently, or pay teachers enough to hire qualified ones. Not to mention that (and I wish I had a cite for this handy) the fact that junk food is cheaper than fresh food with plenty of veg means that kids in the poorer parts of America tend to have diets that reduce their ability to concentrate and learn. The problem isn't the language, it's social.

Metric on the other hand was regected out of misguided nationalism, and because people tend to refuse to acknowledge a good thing when they see it.

This is founded on a common misconception...

[gilroy]

... That the written language "should" reflect the spoken language. We make the unconscious (but unsupportable) connection that "written English" and "spoken English" are the same language, but they're not. They just happen to have easy mappings -- not as easy as these folks want, apparently, but nonetheless, not too difficult.

For example, when you speak, what do you do to separate words form one another? The surprising answer is, nothing. Take a tape of ordinary conversation. Run it through an oscilloscope. Look for the breaks. You won't find them. We "blur" words together in sentences. (I suspect this is why anyone speaking a different tongue always sounds like he/she is speaking very quickly... your brain hasn't learned to put the "spaces" back in by context.)

And that's for words. It's worse for letters. In an oscillograph of the word "bat", you won't see discrete units for "b", "a", and "t". It's just one sound. Heck, the "letters" we pronounce depend on what comes before or after.

The people behind this movement also act as if pronunciation is fixed, while of course, it is not. Some of the "nonsense" words they offer up as looking the same but not rhyming did rhyme, once. Then the spoken language evolved and, since the written language is considerably less plastic (an advantage, I would maintain), the oddness is frozen in.

Finally, when we adopt spelling that "looks like" the pronunciation... whose pronunciation will it look like? Bostoners and New Yorkers and Atlanteans pronounce many words in different ways. Who gets to be the official "correct" one?

Moving in favor of spoken English won't help literacy. I suspect, albeit without proof, that such a move would hurt it.

Re:This is founded on a common misconception...

[someone300]

Totally agree. Words when written to be read whereas when pronounced are to be heard. These two functions are not identical. Reading words works by analysing the curves and spacing of the marks on the paper or screen. Having things that are pronounced the same written different ways will increase the amount of individual patterns that our brain can quickly recognise and can speed up reading greatly once the language has been learned properly.
Since stuff written phonetically is more likely to have patterns repeated between words since there are few unique sounds in the English language, it could mean that average reading ability would become worse, despite the initial learning being quicker.

Our brain tries to look for shortcuts. How often has it happened that you read something like "Well" as "We'll" when it's in a valid context. This perhaps indicates that our brain is only skim reading and using the context and the overall look of the word to derive it's meaning. Just as not many people have trouble udnersatnding wehn wrods are wrirten lkie tihs, provided they don't overthink. If there are more words that look similar because they have similar sounds, it could result in more mistakes. Our brain probably isn't going to listen to every other syllable when someone is speaking but we might read only every other letter.

Any anyway, if we're going to go the simplified spelling route.. why not just teach the phonetic alphabet to everyone?

It CAN'T happen

[Reality Master 101]

I gave this a lot of thought one time. Everybody wants this and thinks it's a good idea, but there's a fundamental reason that it's simply impossible to reform spelling into a logical phonetic system:

People pronounce words differently.

Think about it... would it be to-may-to or to-mah-to? And that's just for starters. Factor in regional dialects and different vowal pronounciations. It simply can't happen.

Re:Aggressive refactoring ..

[gilroy]

But IMHO you also ought to ensure words are unique

Wasn't eliminating words the modus operandi of Newspeak? :)

At Least Use the International Phonetic Alphabet

[Fritzerei]

This is totally absurd. Simplifying English spelling would eradicate the link between words and etymologies, causing words to become mere signifiers of sounds. Words possess heaps of cultural significance that implicate literature, poetry, performing arts, and even visual arts. And practically speaking, what are we to do w/homonyms?

The simplification of Chinese characters represents a similar reformation, but at least traces of etymology remain in tact. A more accurate analogy to this proposal would be if the Chinese were to exclusively use Pinyin instead of Chinese characters -- simplified or traditional. Ask any Chinese-speaking individual what she'd think of the idea, and she'd say it's malarky.

If Americans really wanted to do this -- simplify spelling to eliminate inconsistencies between words and sound -- it would be a slightly better idea to make everyone use the IPA at least.

Re:Never going to happen

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

but then you have cases like: Weigh, way, and whey. If we compressed that to simply 'way', which way would you way the way?

In the context. Japanese has the same issue and that's how they deal with it. Besides, it would vastly increase the odds of constructing puns.

Please let it be fruitless jocularity.

[Were-Rabbit]

So ... rather than try to get people to think about the words they want to use and rather than educate them on the proper spelling of words, we're going to dumb down the language because people don't want to learn how to spell difficult or similar-sounding words correctly.

Uh huh.

This movement appears to be indicative of the propensity of lackadaisical or indeed preposterous individuals to repudiate the necessities of encouraging a proper enlightenment of the intricacies of linguistic comunication. Unquestionably, this preposterous recommendation can only be indicative of a desire to bring forth an ideology resulting in the reduction of the instruction of responsibilty upon one's self. One must ponder the disappearance of intellectual progress when considering why our many progenitors incurred no difficulty in the attainments of the identical language. Yet for reasons unknown the current populous has in some way been deemed too intellectually challenged to educate themselves of the same vocabulary. This indicates a very bankrupt, mental capacity with respect to the educational capacities of my fellow homo sapiens and should not be looked upon favorably.

Year Zero

[vain gloria]

I like the idea...simply because it would rid of us snobbery that people with higher education have over the uneducated as spelling would not have to be an exquisite skill anymore. Why should we have one more barrier between the rich/poor or educated/uneducated?

You don't think it likely that the rich might get to learn both methods and the poor find themselves distanced, if not severed, from the majority of previously published English text then?

Uh, this is stupid.

[jd]

Why stupid? Because:

• Pronounciation drifts over time. This means that when you read a text, you must not read it as you pronounce things NOW, but how the writer pronounced things THEN, even assuming the same regional accent.
  
• Pronounciation drifts over geography. Different areas have different accents. Some areas use sounds that simply don't exist - in any form - in other locations. So you must not read things as you pronounce them HERE, but how the writer pronounces them THERE, even assuming the same timeframe.
  
• Words evolve over space and time, some falling into disuse, others changing in form or meaning. "Simplified" spelling does nothing to help in understanding what was written.
  
• Simplified phonetic writing was used by the Norse - first as "Older Futhark" (30 characters) which was later simplified further to "Younger Futhark" (16 characters, plus 4 more they added on later when they discovered they couldn't write anything useful). In the end, it didn't make things any easier. It's easier to write, sure, but it's actually much harder to read.
  
• It's impossible to validate, as the namespace would be vastly more oversaturated than it already is. If anything, we need a far MORE formalized spelling to reduce the number of collisions.
  

"Simplified" spelling is a grave error, because the constant shifting of language rapidly overwhelms any benefits that might be had. The inconsistancies in a formal spelling system accumulate O(1), but the changes required in a phonetic system will accumulate O(n). Periodic re-alignments may be useful, but loosening the spelling system would be a disaster.

Re:Never going to happen

[Goblez]

Yup, and it only takes 4 times as long to read and looks like crap!! How about we teach people how to actually write and spell to begin with?

I done speak that proper english! N ain't nothin' wrong wit my speelin'!

Re:Never going to happen

[Metzli]

Pronunciation differences would have a huge impact on this change in spelling. Should you spell car as "cah" like a Northeasterner? Should door be spelled "doeor" like a Southerner says it? Since there isn't a truly standard pronunciation used by everyone, how can there be pronunciation-based spelling without causing major communcation problems?

Re:Never going to happen

[lawpoop]

I had a conversation with a native Chinese speaker and a native Slovenian speaker. Both agreed that English was *incredibly* easy to learn, mostly because it has comparatively rules. The Slovenian speaker had learned German, Slovakian, and Italian. I'm not sure what other languages the Chinese speaker learned.

We don't have noun genders like other European languages, and we don't have too many verb conjugations. It's also easy to transform words into other parts of speech, e.g. verbing nouns, or making verbs nounish or noun-y, so it's pretty easy to re-use words you already know.

So just learn a few rules, learn the vocab, and the few exceptions, and you're set.

Re:Never going to happen

[arivanov]

Well... There are examples to that.

Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, a few others.

They have all undergone a reform around the turn of the last century which simplified spelling and grammar. As a result Russian grammar can be expressed in under 8 pages and the language has in total around 40 exemptions to these rules. Everything else is built out through some fairly simple grammar rules. Bulgarian and Serbian are quite similar to Russian to this extent, though their language reform did not go that far.

The results are quite interesting though most people prefer to "oversee" them, because expressing them is considered to be very politically incorrect.

First of all as a result of the reform, most English speaking humanity students find Russian staggeringly hard. Engineering students (the few that are interested in languages) cruise through it with ease. I am speaking from the experience of trying to teach students at an American University Russian and it was not fun. The humanity majors could not gear their brain into "rule operating mode" and that was it. Some of them knew 3-4 languages by that time, but Russian was beyond them.

Second, Russians and attention to detail do not mix. I am half Russian and I have lived there for 10+ years so I am speaking this out of experience. Their brain functions from the perspective that things are built according to rules and most of them are not good at memorising exemptions and minute details. At the same time they will swipe the ground with you on math, ability to draw general conclusions and cold cynical logic. Sometimes you think that their entire bloody nation got a Turette syndrome.

Third, they even learn to read in a completely different manner. They learn to assemble things in blocks to get a meaning. That is simply impossible with English. An average toddler will outright get lost trying to get through all the intricacies of bought vs buy and caught vs catch and so on, so they learn to recognise words a whole, not to try to assemble them. This once again changes the way people think.

So on so forth. And by the way we can continue along these lines looking at Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and especially Chinese. Each of these shapes the brain in a specific pattern and some thoughts which are OK for them will be immensely foreign to an English speaker. And vice versa of course.

Overall, "the language shapes the thought". There are some very good observations by David Brin in the Uplift series to that regard that a language by design may prohibit certain type of thinking. So someone with a different language may come to a thought which will never otherwise occur.

A language reform will change the way English think. It is not just a problem of word meaning and context. It will fundamentally change education, culture, way of thinking, etc.

You are right, I do not believe it will happen.

Re:Never going to happen

[CohibaVancouver]

Just remember that next time you try to learn Chinese. Because yes, English is more difficult.

For whom? I would argue that a French-only speaker/reader would have a much easier time learning English than an Arabic-only speaker/reader. Ditto an English user vs. a Japanese user learning Chinese. My wife spent a couple of years in Japan ten years ago. She can still read the odd Chinese sign around town, whereas I have no idea.

Recent experience shows it's possible

[Palal]

1. French have done it. See this. Microsoft was one of the driving factors.
2. Russians did it in 1917 by dropping the "hard sign" in most places and getting rid of the letter "yat'" as well as changing the spelling of some words, which made everything more readable.

Hauever, if Inglish woz tu bi chen'gd intu a fonetic len'gwich, it wood soon bikam eether simil'ar tu Dzhermun or Dutch in spelin'g were it origineited.

I speak/write/type Russian, Ukrainian and English. The hardest part about learning English was the vocabulary and getting the patterns of spelling (through, though, etc.). Once that and the grammar rules were down, it wasn't hard from that point forward. Moving to the US at a young age also helped.

I think simple changes such as through=>thru, though=>tho, borough=>boro should be widely adapted as they're easy to implement and people already use them widely.

If big changes were made to a language, we'd experience a couple of problems:
1. Current speakers won't be able to read the new spelling (we read words, not syllables, remember?)
2. Kids in school now will have trouble learning the language their teachers don't know. Then, some teachers will force students to learn the new spelling, while others will prefer the old spelling, and given the fact that we don't have a standardized educational system we won't have a single standard for a couple of generations(why does everything have to be individualized??? France and Russia got right, why can't we adopt their system?!?!?!).
3. Gradual implementation will have to take place. You teach kids spelling from day one in first grade and you go through with it until they graduate from school. You teach the new spellign every in subsequent year, but you don't touch the kids that have already learned spelling and let them re-learn it later, or not learn it at all.
4. For 50 years we need to be willing to accept both types of spelling.

People will have trouble typing using the new spelling. I constantly have trouble typing transliterated words in Russian, using an English keyboard because I know how to type using a real Russian layout and constantly want to switch - think of Dvorak vs. Qwerty - you'd need to change the layout to make typing easier. Even if you don't change it, it will still be harder to type.

As for the metric system - it's much easier. Everything has to be industry-driven. First places that need to change are city planning departments and construction firms. If things change from feet to meters (or metres, if you prefer) everyone will follow. Again, this will have to be done gradually and to an extent it is already done in some industries. Personally, I have a big problem with feet. I can't picture how long 2000 ft is but I can picture 600 m... but that's a matter of preference. I can see it happening the other way around too. Don't get me started on conversions. In the end, it's hard to do reforms and what you need is an event for the reforms to happen suddenly (like a revolution) or a gradual implementation over a number of years (something we in the US don't seem to be able to do since we like instant gratification so much and we don't like to use our brainz).

In eni kejs, itz never too erli to start so wi better start nau wi litl ings.

Re:Expand the alphabet - don't just change spellin

[Fortran IV]

"Though coughing and hiccoughing, he fought through the tough boughs." In ten words, seven distinct ways to pronounce ough.

That said, the problem with phonetic spelling is that not everybody uses the same phonemes. How do you pronounce route? Roof? Centimeter? Status? Aunt? Praline? Species? Tomato? Amen? Do you make Irish stoo or styoo? Should chamois be spelled differently when it refers to the leather instead of the animal?

And it's not just the sounds. To me, protein is a three-syllable word, because I learned it in the late 60's, but to most people today it's two syllables. Listen to people talk around here: squirrel is a one-syllable word; chocolate, every, and syllable have two syllables; athlete has three. How do you say them?

Shall southern and midwestern children continue to find spelling difficult because the spellings are based on California or New England pronunciations? (Daddy, why does my spellin book keep puttin a "g" on the end of words? Why isn't there an "r" in warsh or horspital?) Shall the British find American English even more incomprehensible because nothing is spelled the way they say it?