Spelling reform? Not for me, thanks

Back when I was teaching Evangeline how to read, I was struck by how many written words you "just have to remember" how to pronounce.

No wonder spelling -- and reading -- can be tough. You have to memorize practically half the written language. So I guess it's not surprising that there are groups that push for spelling reform of written English on a massive scale, to boost literacy and to ease the torment of spelling.


It's a long and storied history. No less august a man than President Theodore Roosevelt, who reportedly had spelling problems himself, pushed Congress a hundred years ago to adopt some 300 simplified spellings, such as thru and program. Congress wouldn't budge, but a number of those simpler spellings became the accepted American spellings anyway, from curb and jail, to the words we dropped the British U from, such as honor, color, rancor and armor.

Sight words, which defy "standard" spelling rules, come by the truckload in written English. Some follow auxiliary rules of their own, like silent E, the -ight ending, and "I before E, except after C, or when sounded like A as in neighbor and weigh," but plenty don't.

Depending on the region, T can be pronounced like ch in tree or like D in kindergarten; the D in dress sounds like a J, making a phonetic "jress"; and almost no one ever pronounces the first R in February. (Let's not even touch Wednesday.) And regardless of region, come and home don't rhyme, and neither do bomb and comb.

Whatever the intent of these latter-day reformers, their goal of widespread reform is unattainable.

That's partly due to regional variations in pronunciation. In New England, the word aunt phonetically would be spelled ont. Elsewhere in North America, its homonymous with ant. Similarly, roof can be pronounced with the double-O sound in whoops, or with the long U sound in rude.

Those are picayune examples, but they illustrate what I'm talking about. Relying on phonetics to produce proper spelling either would create multiple spellings that would complicate written communication, or it would require establishing a uniform pronunciation as well.

Logistics aside, the best reason not to alter the spelling of English words lies in the threat such reform would pose to our linguistic heritage. Changing our written language, even if only a fraction of the scope outlined by advocates of simpler spelling, would sunder us from Chaucer, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and other giants of the English language, except "in translation." Given that words derive their meaning from their use in literature, with such a loss, we might as well not even bother having the language anymore.

Also lost would be the history embedded in the words themselves. Candidate has the Latin root candida, white, because those seeking public office in ancient Rome wore white to announce their candidacy. That golden nugget of history would be buried with a spelling like kandidaet; in the case of Wensdae, the day's etymological roots in North myth would be wholly obliterated.

The English language still has literary roots as far back as "Beowulf," an Anglo-Saxon poem written about 1,500 years ago; within its vocabulary -- and yes, within its spelling -- it carries nuggets of history pertaining to trade, politics, religion and a vast panoply of culture and literature. Remove the spelling, and you eradicate that record for all but the most scholarly.

The measure of reform that American English saw a hundred years ago wasn't due to the advocacy of men like Roosevelt and Andrew Carnegie, another advocate for simpler spelling. Rather, it was an organic process that grew out of the popular sentiments and attitudes of the American public. '

This is, after all, the same sort of unconscious force that produced the English language in all its richness and depth in the first place, by mingling Angles and Saxons. They in turn later fell to French Normans invaders in 1066. Over the years the speakers of the Middle English that grew out of that conquest have begged, borrowed and stolen phrases and words from all over the world, often adding new words and almost as often jettisoning an old word in favor of a new one.

The result? A thoroughly mongrelized modern English with roots everywhere.

And still it evolves. Feminine forms of many nouns are fading out of use, as the masculine forms become gender-inclusive. The Motion Picture Academy now refers to "male actors" and "female actors," and professional writers have stopped referring to women as comediennes. Similarly, even scientific writing increasingly doesn't use plurals like indices, appendices and formulae.

The spelling reform most likely to succeed already is underfoot by virtue of already being in use for effect. Words like tonite, nite, lite and brite -- all of which take advantage of the Silent E rule to replace the -ight -- have gained some limited acceptability, thanks to advertising and marketing gimmicks, along with other shortcuts like thruway.

I have to admit that my own sensibilities see the appeal to phasing out PH to make way for F (fotografy), replacing more C's with S's and K's (sirkle), and eliminating the soft G in favor of an old-fashioned J (jiraffe). And like playwright George Bernard Shaw, I can see the wisdom in eliminating apostrophes from contractions where its absence will not change the word's pronunciation.

But it's not going to happen that way.

If the goal is improved literacy, I'd suggest the would-be reformers find better means to that end than demonstrating at spelling bees and lobbying dictionary editors to list spellings like altho and hanus.

New spelling rules won't make half the difference that spending more time writing and reading will, particularly when done with children. That we do that less than ever is a far greater cruelty and a far worse tragedy than any of the spelling headaches written English has ever afflicted us with.



Copyright © 2006 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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