English spelling reform
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| − | English was fortunate that its standard orthography was framed in the fifteenth and sixteenth century by the Tudor chancery, and fixed in semi-permanent form when William Caxton set up a printing press and began printing books in [[London]]. Spellings were free, though a consensus was shaping, and not fixed into a canonical form until the appearance of Samuel Johnson's ''Dictionary'' of 1755, but the general rules of the system were put in place at that time. | + | English was fortunate that its standard orthography was framed in the fifteenth and sixteenth century by the Tudor chancery, and fixed in semi-permanent form when William Caxton set up a printing press and began printing books in [[London]]. Spellings were free, though a consensus was shaping, and not fixed into a canonical form until the appearance of Samuel Johnson's ''Dictionary'' of 1755, but the general rules of the system were put in place at that time. During this time, English was enduring a sweeping sound shift involving its vowel sounds, a process known as the Great Vowel Shift. As a result, |
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| − | During this time, English was enduring a sweeping sound shift involving its vowel sounds. As a result, | + | |
*the values of vowel [[alphabet|letters]] in English do not resemble the sounds they represent in [[Latin]], Italian, or the other more phonemically spelled Romance languages; and | *the values of vowel [[alphabet|letters]] in English do not resemble the sounds they represent in [[Latin]], Italian, or the other more phonemically spelled Romance languages; and | ||
*English spelling embodies a late Middle English phonology, one in which most words would be pronounced with values much closer to their standard values elsewhere, but which no one would understand easily if spoken aloud today. | *English spelling embodies a late Middle English phonology, one in which most words would be pronounced with values much closer to their standard values elsewhere, but which no one would understand easily if spoken aloud today. | ||
| − | + | The vowel shift gave current English "long vowels" values that differ markedly from the "short vowels" that they relate to in writing. Since English has a literary tradition that goes back into the Middle English period, written English continues to use Middle English writing conventions to mark distinctions that had been reordered by the chain shift of the long vowels. | |
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===A system with multiple layers=== | ===A system with multiple layers=== | ||
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English spelling reform is a perennial favorite subject for the more harmless variety of cranks. Many proposals to change English spellings have been ventured from the sixteenth century to the present. Thankfully, none of them have made significant headway.
The only one with any traction is the very slight reform by Noah Webster. His reform added to the lovely chaos by introducing an artificial distinction between written British English and American English, while keeping most of the traditional irregularities in place.
Contents |
The chaos that is English spelling
English, like many other languages with a long literary tradition, has a "deep" spelling; it has fallen largely away from the ideal alphabetic principle in which there is a close correspondence between individual characters of the script and specific sounds in the language (a "shallow" orthography). English is written with a twenty-six letter version of the Latin alphabet [1] No diacritical marks are used in any words of the core vocabulary. But English has from twenty-four to twenty-six consonants[2], and, depending on dialect, anywhere from fourteen to twenty one separate vowel sounds, including diphthongs that English treats as simple vowels.[3] A twenty six letter alphabet does not begin to cover this.
English copes with its alphabetic inadequacy by a number of stratagems. English uses many digraphs such as sh, ch, ng, and th; two letter combinations that represent a single sound. But the most basic stratagem used in English spelling, as you learned on Sesame Street, is onset and rhyme.[4] In native words, the sounds of onsets can usually be deduced from the written form; English spelling only tolerates silent letters in syllable onsets for non-native words (rhythm, science). The complexities of English spelling are mostly in the rhymes and part-rhymes ("rimes"). Readers of English learn that the closing letters of sing and bring have one value, but that the same characters must be realized differently in singe and fringe. There are moreover often several variants that can be used to spell these rhymes; many, such as this example, make use of a silent 'E'; but alternatives exist for most silent-E spellings. The rhymes also serve to distinguish homophones and indicate word origins, factors have nothing to do with how the word is usually pronounced.
Perceived inadequacies in this system -- it's easy to compile examples (tongue, fondue) where the system seems obviously broken -- are generally the impetus behind proposals to reform English spelling.[5][6]
History of the current chaos
English was fortunate that its standard orthography was framed in the fifteenth and sixteenth century by the Tudor chancery, and fixed in semi-permanent form when William Caxton set up a printing press and began printing books in London. Spellings were free, though a consensus was shaping, and not fixed into a canonical form until the appearance of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of 1755, but the general rules of the system were put in place at that time. During this time, English was enduring a sweeping sound shift involving its vowel sounds, a process known as the Great Vowel Shift. As a result,
- the values of vowel letters in English do not resemble the sounds they represent in Latin, Italian, or the other more phonemically spelled Romance languages; and
- English spelling embodies a late Middle English phonology, one in which most words would be pronounced with values much closer to their standard values elsewhere, but which no one would understand easily if spoken aloud today.
The vowel shift gave current English "long vowels" values that differ markedly from the "short vowels" that they relate to in writing. Since English has a literary tradition that goes back into the Middle English period, written English continues to use Middle English writing conventions to mark distinctions that had been reordered by the chain shift of the long vowels.
A system with multiple layers
Contributing to the chaos is English's willingness to absorb words from other languages, a process that once again goes back to the Middle English period, where large amounts of the Germanic core vocabulary were dropped in favor of Norman French words. The process of word borrowing has continued through the present, and when English borrows a word from a language with a alphabetic script, it usually borrows the spelling as well; since there's no single system for the native words, why should there be with these?
As a result, English spelling contains multiple levels, tiers, or subgroupings in its lexicon. A literate English speaker can usually make a fairly good guess about how a word will be pronounced from its spelling, but only if they can assign it to the correct group. These tiers include:
- The core Germanic vocabulary: the most basic and native layer of English: make, do, have, be, love, fish, heart, stool, throw. The familiarity and frequency of appearance of many of these words means that many silent letters and ambiguities are tolerated here: to, too, two; light, through, cough.
- Early borrowings from Norman French. There are too many of these to be considered outside the core lexicon: table, chair, court, pork, grain, soup, river, please. The rules for spelling and pronouncing these core level words are similar to the rules for the core Germanic words, but there are differences; compare Germanic gilt, soul with Norman gist, soup.
- Foreign words that still carry a whiff of exoticism about them. Most of these have been borrowed from a wide variety of languages using the Latin alphabet in their native forms, giving rise to a series of oncelers: pizza, lasso, czar, gniess, kraal, coyote, aardvark, kindergarten. Of these foreign words, two subgroups are large enough to be considered separate levels in themselves:
- Learned words formed from Latin and Greek roots. Greek, especially, has many consonant clusters that do not appear in English. The usual response is to just leave the uncomfortable sounds out: pneumonia, psychedelic, xeric, diphthong. Latin words also shift their accented syllable in their inflections. This carries over and turns into a productive feature in English: noun CONtract, "a formal agreement", vs. verb conTRACT, "shrink", also "make a formal agreement". These words change their stressed syllable as prefixes and suffixes are added as well.
- More recent borrowings from French: lingerie, garage, cabernet, taupe, ingenue. There are enough of these that they tend to become a default value for unfamiliar foreign words; when English speakers see the name of the late Chilean dictator Pinochet, they are drawn to a Frenchified pee-no-shay rather than the correctly Spanish pee-no-chet.
Reasons for proposing reforms
English spelling, therefore, is a haphazard collection of inconsistencies assembled by history without plan or purpose. It has in fact adopted some spellings on pure caprice; the spurious 'b' in "debt" and "doubt" was inserted in memory of Latin debitum and dubitum, without regard to the fact that the words had been passed through French without either the sound or the letter. "Island" likely owes its irregular spelling to a false etymology connecting it with Norman French "isle". Reformers point out that these irregularities convey no information or nuance, and that tradition is the only reason for retaining them.
Other reasons advanced for spelling reform would remove the "drudgery" and memorization involved in learning English spelling. Some believe that complex spelling inhibits children's ability to write; it gives cause for self-consciousness, and the writers will choose only those words they know how to spell.[7] The lack of system and planning manifested by traditional spellings just seems to be an esthetic nuisance for some people.
Grander goals
Others, however, have grander ideas about what English spelling reform will in fact achieve, apart from making English possibly easier to spell. Andrew Carnegie thought that spelling reform might lead to world peace under the dominion of English as a universal language:
“”What could be a more effective agency than that all men should communicate with each other in the same language, especially if that language were English? It became his hope that English would become universal, "the most potent of all instruments for drawing the race together, insuring peace and advancing civilization.
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| —Andrew Carnegie |
But Carnegie thought that English spelling was the chief obstacle to this dream: "(t)he foreigner has the greatest difficulty in acquiring it because of its spelling."[8] Jaber George Jabbour, a Syrian banker living in the UK, similarly proposed his own phonetic alphabet called SaypU, and believes that such an alphabet would end misunderstandings and foster world peace.[9]
However, the Bahai Faith, which holds that an international auxiliary language would in fact foster world peace, rejects a respelled version of English as such a language. Not only is English identified with certain world powers, but English spelling reform simply has too slight a chance to succeed to be worth pursuing.[10]
Others suggest that we could save money by changing English spelling. In a 1905 editorial, the Saturday Evening Post, not content with suggesting that world peace would result from spelling reform, estimated that 10% of the letters in written English were superfluous. Getting rid of them would be just like money in the bank. "The unnecessary letters in English are around ten percent -- all deadheads in the communication of ideas." Their removal would save time and money in printing and writing, a "matter of untold millions."[11]
Possible link with dyslexia
There is in fact evidence that the difficulty of English spelling contributes to dyslexia. Some researchers have claimed that languages with deep, non-phonemic spelling systems like English and French contribute to dyslexia. In these languages, readers in general have a harder time learning to decode new words than in languages with shallow spelling systems, such as German.[12] Other researchers, by contrast, have found that dyslexics struggle to decode written language regardless of the depth or regularity of the spelling system.[13] Languages like German and Italian moreover keep their spelling system relatively shallow by a strong prescriptive tradition and official grammar. For many speakers, the written standard doesn't much resemble the speech people actually use in daily life.
Proposed reforms
Advocates of spelling reform propose a variety of reforms which vary substantially in the depths of the changes they propose.
As noted above, a very light reform was in fact proposed by Noah Webster, some of whose proposals gave rise to the relatively trivial spelling differences between British and American English. His proposed reforms centered around ten general points:
- "-our" to "-or"
- "-re" to "-er"
- dropping final "k" in "publick," etc.
- changing "-ence" to "-ense" in "defence," etc.
- use single "l" in inflected forms, e.g. "traveled"
- use double "l" in words like "fulfill"
- use "-or" for "-er" where done so in Latin, e.g. "instructor," "visitor"
- drop final "e" to give: ax, determin, definit, infinit, envelop, medicin, opposit, famin, (others)
- use single "f" at end of words like "pontif," "plaintif"
- change "-ise" to "-ize" wherever this can be traced back to Latin and Greek (where a "z"/zeta *was* used in the spellings) or a more recent coining which uses the suffix "-ize" (from Greek "-izein")[14]
Webster's third and seventh changes were accepted by most versions of English worldwide, and his tenth has made some headway in all varieties of English. All but the eighth and ninth proposals are accepted parts of American English. The two rejected proposals would have made a fairly significant impact on the appearance of written English.[15]
Why nothing major is going to change
Webster's failures are as instructive as his successes. He made no large scale changes in how the system worked. Still, he failed to persuade the newly independent American republic to abandon the use of redundant silent E's because that change was too much to ask. Given this rejection, it seems unlikely that more radical reforms such as "Cut Spelling" --
“”Cut Spelng is a relativly new concept for modrnizing ritn english. It exploits th discovry that redundnt letrs cause lernrs th most trubl, and it therfor ataks that dificlty by removing those letrs. Typicl of th resultng spelings ar: det, iland, burglr, teachr, doctr, neibr, martr, acomodation, dautr, sycolojy. Few letrs ar actuly substituted, wich mens that the apearnce of text is chanjed far less than if evry sound wer respelt acordng to a fixd set of sound-symbl corespondnces. If u ar reading this, u wil hav been able to do so without much dificlty and without any practice or instruction at al.
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-- have much of a chance for acceptance. The spelling system, full as it is of irregularities, one-offs, and historical vestiges, may well seem an irresistible target for Rational Planners and Improvers. Fortunately, they're not getting anywhere. There are many reasons why.
- Public resistance to spelling reform has been consistently strong. The sheer difficulty of English spelling turns it into a prized skill, expressed in traditions like competitive spelling bees. Any significant change would devalue that acquired skill. Spelling reformers have appeared to protest a national spelling bee competition.[16]
- English vocabulary is, as noted, a melding of Germanic, French, Latin and Greek words. Each of thes layers have very different approaches to spelling. Reform proposals will inevitably tend to favor one approach over the other, resulting in a large percentage of words that must change spelling to fit the new scheme.
- The great number of vowel sounds in English and the small number of vowel letters make phonemic spelling difficult to achieve. This is especially true for the three vowels /uː/ (e.g.: fume, moon), /ʌ/ (e.g.: blood, sun) and /ʊ/ (e.g.: look, put) which are represented in English by only two symbols, oo and u. Spelling these phonemically cannot be done without resorting to odd letter combinations, diacritical marks, or new letters.[17]
- Some inflections are pronounced differently in different words. For example, plural -s and possessive -'s are both pronounced differently in cat(')s /s/ and dog(')s /z/. The handling of this particular difficulty distinguishes morphemic proposals, which tend to spell such inflectional endings the same, from phonemic proposals that spell the endings precisely according to their pronunciation.
- English is the only one of the top ten world languages that lacks a worldwide Academy or similar body with regulatory authority over the language, of a kind that can direct at least the usages of governments. Quite simply, no one has the authority to enact changes and make them stick.
- The spellings of some words – such as tongue and stomach – are so unindicative of their pronunciation that changing the spelling would noticeably change the shape of the word. Likewise, the irregular spelling of very common words such as is, are, have, done and of makes it difficult to fix them without introducing a noticeable change to the appearance of English text. This would create acceptance issues.
- Spelling reform may make pre-reform writings harder to understand and read in their original form, often necessitating transcription and republication. Today, few people choose to read old literature in the original spellings as most of it has been republished in modern spellings. Quite simply, the body of library books on the shelves and text on the Internet is a huge sunk cost, and a major reform of English spelling would cost a prodigious amount of money.[18]
- Technical English is understandable to a large number of people whose attainments in colloquial English are modest. The Latinate style of science and scholarship, however esthetically annoying it is as prose, represents an attempt to write technical English using an international technical vocabulary that is fairly easily recognized among most speakers of all languages of European origin. Even a slight attempt to spell these words more in accord with the pronunciation would reveal the large gap between the English vowel system and the Romance systems, rendering these words far harder to recognize for non-native speakers. It would be far less likely that a speaker of a Romance language would recognize "nation" or "psychology" or "judiciary" if they were spelled as they are pronounced in English.
- There are many regional differences in prononciation which make uniform spelling reform virtually impossible. Thus "head" is pronounced "hed" in most areasm but as "heid" in most of Scotland. In the majority version of English, words like father, bother and law all have the same vowel, /ɑ/; in some outlying islands, these words are pronounced with a variety of sounds /a ɒ ɔ/ that are phonemic in those dialects. No single phonemic orthography could handle this situation; the chaos of traditional spellings means that no one expects these dialect differences to make a difference in the spelling.
- ðə sɪm.pləst ʘɪŋ tə du wʌd biː tə ɹəɪt ɪŋ.glɪʃ ɪn ði ɪnt.ɹ̩.næʃ.n̩.l̩ fə.ned.ɪk æl.fə.bet. ðiz sɪm.bl̩z ɑl hæv fɪkst miːnɪŋz ðæt e.ni.bə.dɪ huː noːz haʊ kæn riːd. ðɛɹ ɪz lɪd.l̩ æm.bɪ.gjuː.ə.diː ə.baʊt wət ðiːz ke.ɹək.tɹ̩z miːn. ðɪs ʤəst ʃoːz jə haʊ ʘʌ.roː ðɘ ʧɛɪn.ʣəz mɛɪd baɪ ə truːli fə.ned.ɪk oːɹ.ʘɑg.ɹə.fiː wʌd biː.
English spelling is therefore not phonetically based, because it isn't supposed to be, and making it phonetically based would cause more problems than it would solve. "English orthography is not a failed phonetic transcription system, invented out of madness or perversity. Instead, it is a more complex system that preserves bits of history (i.e. etymology), facilitates understanding, and also translates into sound."[19] "English is one of the few major languages that has been blessed not to have had any large-scale formally sanctioned spelling reforms during its history, this despite the numerous attempts on the part of various individuals for the past three hundred years."[20] Reforms within the system, making the rhymes more consistent, getting rid of sui generis spellings like restoring **tung for "tongue" (ME tunge) and **vittles for "victuals", and similar changes represent the limits of what's possible. It will not be possible to entirely dispel ambiguities or impose complete consistency. More purely phonemic reforms simply do not have any chance of acceptance.
“” For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s," and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c," "y" and "x"--bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez--tu riplais "ch," "sh," and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld. |
| —Mark Twain |
Some proposals
- Christopher Upward's Cut Spelling.
- Harry Lindgren's SR1.
- George Bernad Shaw's Shavian alphabet. Shaw is also associated with the string ghoti, supposed to represent "fish" ("gh" as in "cough", "o" as in "women", "ti" as in "nation"). In fact, Shaw "knew that people, 'being incorrigibly lazy, just laugh at spelling reformers as silly cranks'. So he attempted to reverse this prejudice and exhibit a phonetic alphabet as native good sense ... But when an enthusiastic convert suggested that 'ghoti' would be a reasonable way to spell 'fish' under the old system ..., the subject seemed about to be engulfed in the ridicule from which Shaw was determined to save it." [21]
- Brigham Young's Deseret alphabet.
See also
External links
- Simplified Spelling - from The American Language (1921) by H. L. Mencken
- The Futility of Spelling Reform - Mark Twain
Notes
- ↑ English distinguishes i from j, and between u, v, and w.
- ↑ The iffy ones are /x/ as in "loch", and /ʍ/ as in "which".
- ↑ In most of North America, there is no difference between the vowels of box, paw, bra, and cart. British English usually distinguishes them. British English also introduces a new class of falling diphthongs because it usually drops /r/ from the closing rhyme of the syllable.
- ↑ Julia McGill, Onset and Rhyme
- ↑ Start the Campaign for Simple Spelling, New York Times, Apr. 1, 1906.
- ↑ The group -ough is particularly random: through, though, thought, thorough, tough, trough.
- ↑ The Case For and Against Spelling Reform, The Spelling Society. (I sincerely doubt this. I think the key factor is whether a child likes and wants to read. For the child who reads edited prose, spelling is absorbed along the path and becomes second nature.)
- ↑ George B. Anderson, The Forgotten Crusader: Andrew Carnegie and the simplified spelling movement, The Spelling Society
- ↑ Tom de Castella, Could a new phonetic alphabet promote world peace?, BBC News Magazine, 19 February 2013
- ↑ Robert Craig and Antony Alexander, Chapter Eighteen: A History of English Spelling Revision, in Lango: "Language Organization"], 1996
- ↑ A Step Toward World-Wide Peace, Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 28, 1904
- ↑ Goswami, Usha (2005-09-06). "Chapter 28: Orthography, Phonology, and Reading Development: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective". in Malatesha, Joshi. Handbook of orthography and literacy. Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc Inc. pp. 463–464. ISBN 0-8058-4652-2.
- ↑ Paulesu, E, et al. "Dyslexia: Cultural Diversity and Biological Unity." Science 291.5511 (2001): 2165-2167.
- ↑ Kenneth Ives, Written Dialects (1979)
- ↑ And they add ambiguities; "envelop" is a verb that does not rhyme with envelope.
- ↑ Enuf is Enuf - The Skeptical Eye
- ↑ Lindgren, Harry (1969). Spelling Reform: A New Approach. Sydney: Alpha Books. p. 59.
- ↑ G. L. Wy can't we get it rite? - The Economist, Sep 15th 2010
- ↑ R. L. Venezky, The American Way of Spelling, (Guilford, 1999), p. 4
- ↑ R. Sproat, A computational theory of writing systems (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 192
- ↑ Michael Holroyd, in Bernard Shaw: Volume III: 1918-1950: The Lure of Fantasy (Chatto & Windus, 1991), p. 501