Why Reform English Spelling?
Phonemes are the smallest units of sound in a language. There are 44 of these units in English (some say 43.5, but whatever).
Phonemes are sounds like "k" and the short "i" sound and the "s" sound... "kiss" is those 3 phonemes. (So is the word "sick").
Graphemes are the written version of phonemes. In a "pure" alphabetic system, one grapheme represents one phoneme...
But since the English Alphabet has only 26 letters, many of our 44 sounds must be made up of some combination of letters. This is one way in which the English language runs afoul of the alphabetic principle.
But the situation is far worse than that. In many cases, more than one spelling (grapheme) represents the same sound (phoneme).
These 10 words rhyme, and they all represent the same sound (the phoneme /uː/, long "u"):
But they're spelled 10 different ways.
The opposite happens, too. Here are three words with the same spelling, but representing different sounds:
We can make hundreds of these lists because English has 185 spellings representing its 44 sounds. (I won't get into the history of "why" in this post... okay, I will briefly. Basically English is a Germanic language but with a bunch of French and Latin words, and then there was the Great Vowel Shift, and now everything is wonky).
Anyway, having 185 ways to spell just 44 sounds isn't just weird. It's actually incredibly inefficient, which is problematic. Maybe not in a day where only professional scribes and the elite needed to know how to read and write. But certainly in the modern era. (The average for other European languages is 50 spellings.)
In other words, this actually comes to a huge educational cost for English-speaking countries (and since educations cost money, a large economic cost as well; and since poor educations contribute to social ills, there's a societal cost, too).
A spelling system that is 3 times as difficult as it needs to be means children (and second language learners) are at a disadvantage compared to other languages. Indeed, research has born this fact out: English-speaking children take significantly longer to learn to read than children in other languages. (For more, visit: http://spellingsociety.org/research).
And since English is becoming a de facto international language, it would certainly behoove us to look more seriously at reforming English spelling.
While calls for English spelling reform stretch back centuries, some of my favorite are:
Phonemes are sounds like "k" and the short "i" sound and the "s" sound... "kiss" is those 3 phonemes. (So is the word "sick").
Graphemes are the written version of phonemes. In a "pure" alphabetic system, one grapheme represents one phoneme...
But since the English Alphabet has only 26 letters, many of our 44 sounds must be made up of some combination of letters. This is one way in which the English language runs afoul of the alphabetic principle.
But the situation is far worse than that. In many cases, more than one spelling (grapheme) represents the same sound (phoneme).
These 10 words rhyme, and they all represent the same sound (the phoneme /uː/, long "u"):
- blue
- shoe
- flew
- through
- do
- you
- two
- too
- gnu
- coup
But they're spelled 10 different ways.
The opposite happens, too. Here are three words with the same spelling, but representing different sounds:
- through
- dough
- cough
We can make hundreds of these lists because English has 185 spellings representing its 44 sounds. (I won't get into the history of "why" in this post... okay, I will briefly. Basically English is a Germanic language but with a bunch of French and Latin words, and then there was the Great Vowel Shift, and now everything is wonky).
Anyway, having 185 ways to spell just 44 sounds isn't just weird. It's actually incredibly inefficient, which is problematic. Maybe not in a day where only professional scribes and the elite needed to know how to read and write. But certainly in the modern era. (The average for other European languages is 50 spellings.)
In other words, this actually comes to a huge educational cost for English-speaking countries (and since educations cost money, a large economic cost as well; and since poor educations contribute to social ills, there's a societal cost, too).
A spelling system that is 3 times as difficult as it needs to be means children (and second language learners) are at a disadvantage compared to other languages. Indeed, research has born this fact out: English-speaking children take significantly longer to learn to read than children in other languages. (For more, visit: http://spellingsociety.org/research).
And since English is becoming a de facto international language, it would certainly behoove us to look more seriously at reforming English spelling.
While calls for English spelling reform stretch back centuries, some of my favorite are:
- The 1920 Handbook of Simplified Spelling (along with the SoundSpel system, perhaps the easiest to actually adopt)
- The Soundspel System, dating to 1910
- Benjamin Franklin's Phonetic Alphabet
- Lojikl Inglish
- This site has a cool toy for converting text of your choosing into several varieties of reformed English spelling
These were all inspirational in creating my own reformed English... Stay tuned.
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