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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The hardest part of being an ex pat is the language

The worst part of living in a different country is not the diseases you may catch, it's not the new climes you must weather, and it's not the disorientation of being a stranger in a strange land.

The worst part is the language.

When you don't speak the same lanuage as everyone else around you, you have the mind of an adult burdened by the survival skills of a toddler. You're fully cognizant of your needs, and fully aware of how helpless you are to do anything about them, or even to articulate what they are. In the best of times, you bear this with grace and laugh at your difficulties. The rest of the time you want to run away and cry.

When you don't speak the local language, you are unable to communicate or understand the most basic aspects of life, from "Where's the bathroom?" to "How much do you want for that mango?" In no time at all, you feel like the stupidest person on the face of the earth, such as when I told the yard boy, "Remember, I am garbage" instead of "Remember to take out my garbage."

Eventually you learn important phrases like, "I don't speak your language." This helps, but only moderately. There are times that come too frequently when you trust this trusty phrase out only to discover that the national who is speaking to you is speaking English, and speaking it tolerably well, but they are putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable, or pronouncing a silent letter, or committing some other minor gaffe that makes their speech unfamiliar to you.

Stupidest person on earth is too mild for how you feel on those occasions. Now you don't even understand English, and what's worse, you've just insulted someone who was trying to connect with you by inadvertantly telling him that he's too stupid to speak English properly.

Go get a shovel, dig a hole and climb in. Your only hope as a missionary whose enthusiasm outpaces your mastery of the language is that the Spirit will move, and people will connect with God despite your failings.

I was a missionary in Haiti, but not the sort who did led open-air services and tried to win converts. I initially worked with STEM Ministries, which brought teams to Haiti and other countries for two weeks at a time; and then with Cradle of Life Christian School, teaching English grammar and composition to middle-schoolers.

As a result, I didn't do much preaching in Haiti, but I did try to share the gospel with a other people occasion, if for no other reason than they expected me to and I had the feeling that I should. My first conversation along those lines went something like this:

"If you accept Jesus Christ, he will take away your dogs."
"My dogs? I don't have any dogs."
"Everyone has dogs, ma'am. But when Jesus forgives them, it's though you never had a dog your entire life."

Bill Smith, an Assemblies of God missionary whom I knew, told me he once preached an entire sermon in Kreyol once he felt he had gained sufficient mastery of the language. The sermon went well and the Spirit evidently was moving, so he decided to take an altar call and appeal to the congregation that if anyone wanted to follow of Christ, they should signify it by raising their legs into the air and coming forward on their hands.

He got plenty of puzzled looks, but very little response to the altar call. The Holy Spirit was quenched.

Still, my favorite embarrassing gaffe was committed by the late Dale Preiser, another Assemblies of God missionary who had left the country before I arrived. I met him once after I had returned to the United States, when he came to visit my church.

Dale had been in Haiti for a while, and was concerned that he saw a number of believers who were mixing voodoo and Christianity, and going to the voodoo priestess for help when problems arose. The word he wanted was mambo. Unfortunately, the word he used was mamba, and for three solid months he went along Highway One, using this word in his sermons.

"Stay away from the mamba," he warned them. "Mamba is of the devil. You cannot use the mamba without shipwrecking your faith and endangering the faith of others."

Mamba is peanut butter.

Still, the Spirit was moving. I am told that people were very open to this teaching, and sales of peanut butter plummeted wherever Dale went.



Copyright © 2004 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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'correct' english

From an article on grammar myths:

Those examples make it clear that a split infinitive is sometimes not only permissible, but necessary. While the notion that split infinitives are wrong has wide currency, another language myth seems perpetuated chiefly by the journalistic community. That's the odd and insupportable practice of unsplitting perfectly clear and natural split compound verbs (should probably go, will never be). Like the split infinitive, the split verb phrase is not an error. Good writers and speakers split them all the time.

Well, duh. Split infinitives and split verb phrases have a long, proud history in the English language, as do most other grammatical constructions that one group or another perceives as erroneous.

"Correct English" is a myth; what matters is the standard you adhere to. I'm a journalist, so for my writing the last word on good grammar is the Associated Press stylebook, even when I think they're dead wrong (as I do with split infinitves, split verb phrases and leaving out end series commas).

The truly bizarre grammar rule everyone "knows" is one that's not found in any style book I know -- not the MLA, not the AP, not the Chicago Manual of Style, not even one stinking grammar textbook. And that rule is: "Never end a sentence with a preposition."

That rule is actually a grammatical rule for Latin, not English. It's never been observed in English, was never established as a rule in English, and is the cause of more awkward grammatical constructions than the "no split verb phrases" rule I think the Associated Press should drop.

Esperanto's back seat to English

I had a friend in college who learned Esperanto because she loves languages, but  my chief exposure comes from the "Red Dwarf" novels by Grant Naylor.

In those books, which are adapted from the BBC show, Esperanto is the universal auxiliary language of diplomacy of the future. From what I have read, that is one of the original end goals for the language. Its creator and early adopters had dreams that it would become the global lingua franca, making international communication a cinch and putting everyone on equal footing since no one would have the hometown advantag.

I had been under the impression the language was created in this century and never really caught on, but some estimates claim as many as 2 million Esperanto speakers globally.

That's not as much as a "natural" language, but it's nothing to sneeze at either. Esperanto is the most successful constructed language ever made. It is at least enough to make someone with a passing interest in linguistics waste a little time reading about it.

Judging by the web sites, at least some Esperantists still share that goal of a universal auxlang. They note that English has a global penetration rate of only 8 percent; i.e., that the population of native English speakers is limited largly to Great Britain and the United States, and a few other former or current territories and colonies of those two great powers, such as Australia and New Zealand.

Now criticism of English as a global language has some legitimacy. English is irretrievably connected to hundreds of years of Colonialism via Britan and the United States, and as our sun sets, it's likely the influence of English also will wane.

Other linguas franca historically have diminished when the power behind them disappears as well. Witness French, for instance. Once the language of international diplomacy and culture, it still has some added sway because of France's prominence in European and global history, but it's been bumped from its pre-eminent seat as the language to learn.

But the Esperanto criticism of English is exaggerated, and also rests on a faulty or inconsistent definition of what constitutes a speaker of the language. While they claim that only 8 percent of the world speaks English, these sites keep claiming that there are 2 million Esperanto speakers globally.

That's impressive, considering it has no homeland to speak of, but that figure surely includes speakers beyond the estimated 4,000 or so for whom Esperanto is their mother tongue. With that same definition in place, English has a much higher than 8 percent penetration rate globally. There are English speakers in almost every country on earth.

They may be confined to the wealthy and the powerful in some countries, but they're there. And in the countries of Europe, and many other places as well, English proficiency is part and parcel of getting a basic education.

English today is like Greek and Latin were in the days of the Roman Empire. While it's not universally spoken or taught in other countris, it is the de facto "second language" of the world and generates the bulk of new words in most major lanaguages.

Like Greek and Latin, English itself is fragmenting as it spreads and produces hybrid languages in different parts of the world. Singaporean English, or "Singlish" uses a hefty amount of English vocabulary, but follows Singaporean grammar. Similar things have happened in Russia with "Russlish" and in Mexico with "Spanglish." In the long run, international English may have less to do with the Queen's English than with its children.

Long and short of it? English is deeply entrenched into the affairs of the world. Expect it to last long after the United States recedes from the world stage.



Copyright © 2001 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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