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

nothing?

[IAmTheDave]

Nuthing fore u tu see here. Pleez mov alon.

Re:Never going to happen

[IAmTheDave]

You no what? It aint never gonna happen.

Agreed, especially considering it was originally proposed in 1789 by our most famous dictionary's namesake, so if he can't get it going, well then, I ask you, who really can?

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.

Re:Simple solution

[iminplaya]

It's called SCHOOL.

In the US, we say "escuela".

Re:Simple solution

[Reziac]

Exactly. Parents no longer sit down and read to their preschool-age kids. My mom DID... and I could read at a 4th grade level by the time I was 5 years old -- AND I already had a sufficient grok of phonics (by intuition, not training) that I could work out ANY word, even one I'd never seen before. (The only ones that gave me trouble were irregulars like "Bartholomew" -- where the accents don't fall on the standard syllables.)

Between that, and when spelling/phonics began being taught (in my era, that was in the 2nd grade), it was very easy for me and for most students. Kids who couldn't read, and who couldn't puzzle out new words, were very rare.

But now? Spelling isn't taught until the 4th grade or even later. Phonics often isn't taught at all, another legacy of the "whole word recognition" debacle (if you watch severe dyslexics, you'll see that WWR is how they read -- so the object of WWR was apparently to make everyone read at the level of the lowest common denominator!) I remember when the first WWR experiments came along -- my 5th grade class was one of 'em, and even at that age we KNEW we were being shortchanged compared to the other kids.

As to "odd" spellings like weigh vs way, they DO convey meaning. Frex, a "weigh station" is not the same thing as a "way station".

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:Never going to happen

[Trifthen]

Part of the problem is context. In English, since there are so many words which are homonyms, information is actually transmitted by the spelling of the word. It's bad enough one word can have dozens of meanings, 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 which manner would you determine the effect of gravity upon watery milk byproducts?) See the problem?

Simplified spelling destroys context and meaning in English. We would basically have to rewrite the language from scratch to avoid problems like the one outlined above. In not so simple terms: that will never happen.

Re:no, British English makes sense

[$lashdot]

"Centre" is not an example of the prefix + stem + suffix model. It is a reminder that England was for a time ruled by the French.

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.

Re:Never going to happen

[js3]

brilliant idea. Lets take a fairly easy to grasp language and turn in into japanese for people who can't spell.

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

[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

[Waffle Iron]

Well, we could always overload words the way a C programmer would:

way -> way
weigh -> way1
whey -> way2

Although introducing namespaces would be more clear to the reader:

way -> Directions::way
weigh -> Measurements::way
whey -> Foodstuffs::way

But since we're talking about text documents in general, maybe we should base a new simplified spelling scheme on XML:

way -> <spelling:overloaded_word category="directions"> way </spelling:overloaded_word>
weigh -> <spelling:overloaded_word category="measurements"> way </spelling:overloaded_word>
whey -> <spelling:overloaded_word category="foodstuffs"> way </spelling:overloaded_word>

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:Most other countries did it two centuries ago

[Inda]

The only person who has the right to change English is The Queen. The Queen's English belongs to the Queen and we should all be thankful that she lets us use it.

God bless The Queen and the British Empire!

Because it makes sense now is not a reason

[caffiend666]

Just because it makes sense now is not a reason. Things are made unintelligable with time. People attempt to draw distinctions between things and change them subtley. Time compounds the issue. A significant advantage must be shown before doing this. Even simple reality makes things change. China is reforming the written language out of necessity, because becoming literate in classic Chinese takes almost a decade. Latin is easier... Shaving a year or two off of this schedule means more time for real learning. Words are pronounced differently a year from now, in different places, even by people who attend different schools. I wouldn't want people with 'Harvard' accents dictating spelling, I live in Texas. I'm sure people at Harvard would equally hate the idea of someone from Texas like Bush dictating the dictionary.

For example, months in many languages are counted. First Month instead of January, second month instead of February, and so on. This used to be the case in English. But, the start of the year was changed to reflect the solar calendar instead of a lunar calendar, and the months no longer made sense. What was the seventh month of the year, was now the 9th month of the year and so on. The names September, October, November, and December each mean seventh month, eigth month, ninth month, and tenth month respectively. Even though they are in fact the 9th - 12th months.

Adding 'engineered' changes only add to the confusion long term. Not only do people have to deal with tense and style changes, but forcing more changes on top of it only makes problems worse. Words gain meaning with time. This will happen whether we try to temporarily fix it or not.

This is no better than the political correctness debates. A word which may be proper and make sense one year quickly gains meaning in both positive and negative connotations until many are unwilling to use a word. The end result of not accepting this additional meaning is that old written language quickly becomes unintelligible. Forcing change makes the issue worse. The Chinese had riots when they briefly tried switching to the latin alphabet in the 50s.

A big part of the reason the Chinese stopped switching to a phonetic alphabet is it would in many ways destroy their national identity. Mandarin is spoken very differently from Cantonese. But, they largely can understand each others writing. If they had switched to a completely phonetic system, there would be very little tying that nation together. Written Chinese is more like spoken Mandarin from a few hundred years ago. Not even regular Mandarin speakers would be able to read a phonetic version of what was spoken a few years ago.

English is an evolved language. Because of this, it is easy to start but hard to master. It will continue to evolve.