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.

Re:I like the idea...

[NineNine]

Last I checked, reading and writing (including spelling) is taught in the US at around 6-8 years old. There's no education excuse in the US for ANYBODY not being able to spell. Proper spelling is not a college course.

even German hasn't really succeeded in doing so

[Trepidity]

There have been attempts to reform German spelling [wikipedia.org], and they have not entirely caught on [wikipedia.org]. This is despite a few advantages that attempt has over any potential English spelling reform: 1) There are recognized organizations responsible for the language, at least officially, and they got together in a big conference, agreed upon it, and got all the relevant governments to agree; and 2) the reform was relatively minor, not nearly as enormous a deviation from established spelling norms as these proposed English reforms.

If many German newspapers and normal people simply ignore the reforms under those circumstances, what do you think the chances of English spelling reform ever catching on are?

Wrong Attribution

[Anonymous Coward]

Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson - Not the esteemed Thomas Jefferson.

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.

Re:no, British English makes sense

[Pfhorrest]

I agree that such spelling makes more sense for appending prefixes and suffixes. However, shouldn't you then pronounce the word "sent-reh" instead of "sent-er"? Or is the trailing 'e' silent, and the 'er' sound just a vowel-less 'r'? Silent letters are evil.

A truly sensible language needs spelling that reflects pronunciation (or vice-versa, e.g. dictionary shouldn't be spelled 'dikshunary'; people should learn to dictate properly and articulate the 'tion' [ala 'tyon'] sound instead of slurring it into "shun". Though I agree that damn letter 'c' has to go - we already have 's' and 'k').

So back to your point, I'd say the words should either be spelled and pronounced "centerpedal", "centerfuge", etc, or the stem should be pronounced and spelled "sent-reh" instead.

(Incidentally, OS X's spellchecker thinks centerpedal is a real word).

Re:Not again

[sehlat]

Be it noted: This is only the latest takeoff of Dolton Edwards' massively funny Meihem in ce Klasrum [ecphorizer.com] which was originally published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1946. The more things change...

Re:language reform

[Reziac]

Actually, those are Latin plurals, not Germanic.

Re:Most other countries did it two centuries ago

[Distinguished Hero]

A change must be made by England, Australia, India, South Africa, and America simultaneously for best effect.

You're forgetting Canada (minus Quebec), Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, New Zealand, and a whole bunch of other countries.

Re:Never going to happen

[Pyroja]

Um.. Easy to grasp? As a student at the Presidio of Monterey, I have to disagree. I'm learning Chinese at the moment, and that's classified as a Category 4 language, right up there with Japanese and Arabic. Guess what? English isn't in that category. No sir, it's Category 5, as in, even more difficult to learn.

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

Re:Never going to happen

[illumina+us]

Sadly, you don't know that "thru" and "nite" are the informal spellings of "through" and "night." Moreover, they are also valid spelling which can be found in any dictionary.

Re:Never going to happen

[ametarou]

In the context. Japanese has the same issue and that's how they deal with it.
No, they don't. That is one of the key roles of Kanji, to help distinguish which of up to a dozen homynyms is being referred to, which would be impossible with just Hiragana, and is one reason why the use of Kanji has also withstood calls for simplification.

Re:Never going to happen

[Ignorant Aardvark]

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

Through->thru was one of Webster's proposed spelling reforms. Don't knock it too badly. You may be more familiar with some of Webster's other proposed spelling reforms that did succeed, such as colour->color, programme->program, etc. Through->thru didn't have quite the same level of success but it's still used ubiquitously on road signs for space-saving concerns.

Re:Never going to happen

[CharAznable]

Not really. Take the word "bass". From looking at the spelling, can you derive the pronunciation? Could be a bass guitar, or could be a bass filet. Or it could be a base geetar or a bas feeleah. Or if you hear the word "base" being pronounced without any context, how do you know if it is "bass" or "base"?. Other than English, I only know Spanish, and in it, words are truly spelled like they sound. There is a strict one to one mapping between pronunciation and spelling.

Re:no, British English makes sense

[tim1724]

We spell it "center" for a few reasons:

1. "Center" is the older spelling! Here's what the OED has to say about it:

   The prevalent spelling from 16th to 18th c. was center, in Shakespeare, Milton, Boyle, Pope, Addison, etc.; so the early dictionaries, Cotgr. ('centre, F., a center'), Cockeram, Phillips, Kersey, and all the thirty editions of Bailey 1721-1802; but the technical volume of Bailey (Vol. II.) 1727-31 and the folio 1730-36, have centre; 'an interleaved copy of the folio of 1730 was the foundation of Johnson's Dictionary', which followed it in spelling centre; this has been generally adopted in Great Britain, while center is the prevalent spelling in the United States.

   So "center" was still the predominant spelling even in British usage during the 18th century. The switch to the French spelling "centre" happened too late for us to switch. (But since Canada continued to be British territory for so much longer, they got the new spelling. Although in my experience, Canadians tend to use both interchangeably.)

2. Consistency. We have "-er" words. You have "-er" and "-re". How is that easier?

   US spelling tends to use more Latin word endings than French endings. While the Roman word was neuter rather than masculine (so they spelled it "centrum") if it had been masculine, it probably would have been "center". (It certainly wouldn't have been "centre"). Yes, British usage is fairly consistent (using "-re" for Latin 2nd declension neuter words which ended in "-rum") but in American usage you don't have to know whether the Latin word was masculine or neuter ... it's "-er" either way. And although I think learning Latin is very good for one's understanding of English (and it's "color", damnit, even the Romans spelled it correctly ;-) I don't realistically expect most people to learn it.

Note that in the case of "color" (and other "-or/-our" words) the "-our" spelling was in fact in place prior to the 18th century. (With the curious exception of "honor", which continued to be spelled either with or without the 'u'.) Even Noah Webster himself used "colour" in early editions of his dictionary. It wasn't until he switched to the older Roman spelling that the US dropped the 'u'. Yay, Webster.

The Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] on the differences between American and British English is quite fascinating. The notes on how Canadian and Australian usage are interesting, as it can seem quite random.

Note that I use British punctuation rules for handling punctuation which occurs near quote marks. The American style (which finally seems to be losing hold) is simply illogical.

Re:Never going to happen

[Fallingcow]

First is OK each time, second is only OK in the first example. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to explain why this is (or just why).

The second one ends in a preposition. A preposition must always have an object. We often incorrectly place the object of a preposition earlier in our sentences--"What did you place it on?" should be "On what did you place it?". This is considered OK in informal (and often formal) speech, as the meaning is still clear. The object is there, it's just in the wrong place. The second example in your second pair, however, has no object for its preposition. This makes it incorrect by any standard.

In your first pair of examples, there is no preposition. In the second pair, there is one. It's the same as if you'd stuck an article with no noun on the end of the second example in the first pair.

"Which book did you file without reading the first page?"
"Which book did you file without reading the"

See? An article must have a noun. A preposition must have a noun or pronoun. If you say "on" you have to answer the question "on what (or whom)?" It's a usage rule for prepositions. The reason that the second pair is wrong has nothing to do with why the first pair is right.

Re:Tourette syndrom??

[UbuntuDupe]

Looking back at the context, he was talking about ability to do logic very precisely, so when he said Russians are like a ..., I was expecting him to say "Turing machine", so he may have switched out "Turing" with "Tourettes" (some people pronounce them similarly) and then just added what normally come's after "tourette's". If you don't know what a Turing machine is already, google or wikipedia.

That's just a guess, but I thought I'd share.

Re:Please let it be fruitless jocularity.

[Yunzil]

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.

You misspelled "communication". Hope this helps!

Re:Never going to happen

[bishiraver]

In Japanese, if you ignore the kanji (semi-symbolic alphabet) and focus on the kana (the two different phonetic alphabets - katakana and hiragana), each word is spelled exactly how it sounds. Each letter is a consonant-vowel pairing, except for n. example: ka, sa, shi, tsu, ko, za, etc. There are five vowels, and eight full groups of consonants (with modifiers for some: example, sa can become za with a modifier "accent", and others are not full groups, such as wa & wo, ya & yu & yo, n). Every vowel a is pronounced the same, and every vowel i is pronounced the same, and so on and so forth. If you can read and write hiragana, you can spell any word that you come across - at least, phonetically. English has so many pronunciation and spelling rules, that it quickly becomes one of the most difficult language to become fluent in, in terms of reading and writing (the most difficult, arguably, are the languages which have symbolic alphabets, such as chinese and japanese - where not only do you have to learn how to pronounce each word, you must memorize a symbol to go along with it. Granted, a lot of symbols are compound symbols, and Japanese even has compound kanji, where two kanji put together have a completely different pronunciation than the same two kanji representing seperate concepts). Anyway, once fluent, English is one of the easiest languages to read, due to distinct word-shapes caused by the rising tails and falling tails of letters. If we changed how to spell things, it would quickly become difficult to read - and it would take centuries to change. The English language has changed significantly over the years, compared to something like mandarin, but not as significantly as such a reform would call for. One of the issues with switching to a completely phonetic language, is while the number of hominyms would stay the same, the number of hominyms with the same spelling would dramatically increase. That would make context even more important in reading, and probably increase the time it takes someone to read an average sentence. Some second-language english learners would have an easier time with it - people who learn to speak and understand it before learning to write it would have a much easier time becoming fluently literate. Those who are learning both at the same time, however, probably would have a much more difficult time and would become confused quickly.

Re:Never going to happen

[forkazoo]

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.

The Japanese also have the kanji. This is basically similar to how we have dfferent spellings for things. Our distinct spellings come from different source languages of borrowed words, and different root words. The kanji similarly are different if the word represents a different idea but has the same sound.

Re:Never going to happen

[Dr. Evil]

I hear quite differently from most non-native speakers I run into. English is full of nuiances and exceptions. The best statement I heard is that it is very easy to learn enough English to "get by", but the language is extrodinarily difficult to master.

Unifon Alphabet?

[TFGeditor]

Ever heard of the Unifon Alphabet? http://www.unifon.org/ [unifon.org]

Proof of concept

[vga_init]

I see a lot of posts claiming that engineered writing won't work and that simplified phonetic writing is somehow damaging to the language or impractical for several reasons, but before delving into too much speculation let is try to examine real world applications. My main example is Korea's hangul [wikipedia.org] writing. I actually have taken the time to learn it myself, and it's a wonder to behold and use. Be sure to read up on its history and usage. :)

Re:no, British English makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have consistency. From the very article you linked, Americans still have acre, massacre, euchre, ogre, and other cases where you use both (theatre and theater, specter and spectre etc.). So your point 2) is invalid. Americans also have 'er' and 're'.

Re:Never going to happen

[Sexy Commando]

You mean "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" [wikipedia.org]?

Not just English speaking countries, either

[patio11]

Japan has, let me think, in excess of a hundred million people who spell through "through"? English doesn't just belong to people who grew up speaking English anymore -- its the language (or one of the main languages) of international commerce, politics, science, and essentially everything. Catastrophically large changes to English which make "our" English mutually unintelligible with "their" English just won't happen.

"Fonetik" spelling won't work

[GWBasic]

"Fonetik" spelling wont work for a very simple reason: As we gain experience reading, we no longer look at each letter. We read by looking at the SHAPE of the word; our brains totally bypass the step of converting letter to their corresponding sounds.

How many of you stumbled through TFA's weird spellings? I certainly did! The loose correlation between written English and spoken English is a great teaching aid for youngsters! If we decided to re-spell all of our words, every adult would need to re-learn to read, because all of the words would have different shapes!

Another problem with "Fonetik" spelling is that it blurs distictions between subtle pronouciation differences. In reality, "Fonetik" and "Phonetic" sound slightly different. Even the words "Enuf" and "Enough" sound slightly different!

Perhaps the only real way to improve spelling is to be slightly more liberal with common words; popular changes will stick.