Spelling Reform

I am a pretty good speller. By that I mean that if you ask me to spell a word, I will almost always get it correct, and if I don't get it I will know that I haven't. (The catch is that I have to write it down to see if it's correct, because I learned all my spelling by reading things). My spelling errors are almost exclusively typos.

So when I say that English is in dire need of spelling reform, it's not because I suffer terribly from mistakes; it's because I can see that it causes problems.

Correct spelling has become a badge of education. English has all sorts of bizarre spellings resulting from historical accidents, like all the different pronunciations of -ough, and the various extraneous 'k's on the fronts of words. If you use words a lot, these odd spellings become second nature, and the phonetic spelling looks bad.

Try it. Rite down yore next sentense in fonetic spelling, and see how it looks to yoo. You have become apparently illiterate and probably stupid. This is why these spellings persist, because almost anyone who knows them will use them to claim status (or avoid looking illiterate, which is much the same thing). And that is much more likely to be true of someone who writes for wide distribution.

But the whole point of using an alphabet the way English does is that you can write down what you hear, and someone else can read it and know what you heard (although you may need to specify the accent of the speaker and/or the hearer; a problem for another day). If we wanted non-phonetic writing, we'd use Chinese, or Hieroglyphics.

So what needs fixing? Well, the letter c should be limited to the 'ch' sound. In other words, it's either an 's' or a 'k' and these letters should be used. Similarly, 'z' should be used instead of 's' in words like, well, used. Silent letters, like the 'k' in "knife", and the 'u' in "guide" or "guard", should be removed. We should use 'j' instead of 'g' where appropriate. I'm sure you can think of more.

Whenever someone brings this up, someone else will chime in with Mark Twain's piece on spelling reform. This is a very funny piece, but it's a deliberate exaggeration for effect. Re-using the old letters for new sounds is guaranteed to make the result unreadable. But also, it illustrates my point about status badging - once the piece starts to use proper phonetic spelling, the writer sounds uneducated, and the reader immediately shies away.

Phonetic spelling is how it should work. There's still room for disagreement, as English tends be rather fluid in what it does with vowels - for example, why do "speak" and "speech" have a different vowel pairing? Also, in some cases, the variant spelling is useful to disambiguate words - "to", "too" and "two" is a classic example. I propose to keep "two" for this reason (or some appropriate variant), because the point of this is to make life easier for English users, not to purge the unholy.

Unlike French, no-one pretends to have a central authority on English, which is good because it would be taken over by prissy conservatives who would try to set the current insanity in stone. So the changes will have to be made by... everyone, acting one by one. Already the US spells organize with a 'z' and meter with the 'er' the right way around. And "lite" and "nite" are creeping into the language.

I call on yoo to help. Wen yoo reed, cut some slak for those hoo spell things the way they sound. Wen yoo rite, always chooze the simpler spelling of the wunz available to yoo. It won't be incomprehensible, even if it duz look a little unfamiliar to start with. And imajine how much easier it will be for children to lern to spell.

We will eliminate the spelling contest, but really, hoo carez?