Spelling is ruining the English language

[Urbane Guerrilla]

I always did well in English and in spelling -- any topic, really, where the primary means of instruction was reading written material. I have excellent spellchecking wetware.

I owe it all to phonics courses in second and third grade. Yes, there's memory involved, but it's better directed than trying aimlessly to memorize wordlists. What a phonics course does is rehearse the various ways English writes its forty-odd sounds with but twenty-six letters, some of them used redundantly. C and QU come immediately to mind, don't they? Where memory comes in is phonics sets out to teach you which words use which ways. This really unlocks the mysteries of English spelling and makes sense of the whole unofficially arranged (if that's the word) schemozzle. English has no equivalent of the Académie Française, which has regularized French spelling and vocabulary into something fairly systematic. We Englishers allow no such authority.

What Kingswood is crying out for is to have been trained in phonics -- clearly he never got it and he knows this is a misfortune. He's right to think so.

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Until early modern English, we did have singular and plural forms of "you," with all its cases. AFAIK we didn't have a separate form for familiar-plural-you such as the Castilian Spanish vosotros forms, but:

Sing.: thou, (to/with/from/obj of verb or preposition) thee. Thy, thine (used after the fashion of a, an; also with thine as a terminal use)

Plu.: you (all cases), sometimes ye (remained plural long after the thou forms fell out of use)

To expand on Dr. Seuss a little: The tough coughs as he ploughs through the dough.

I before E is better gotten if you have the whole rule. I before E except after C, and when sounded like A, as in "neighbor" and "weigh." Of course, you still have to seize onto the weird to grapple with those exceptions.

A coda, and the sort of thing you find in Strunk & White but too commonly misunderstood, is "Possessive nouns, common and proper, always take an apostrophe before their S; possessive pronouns never do." Thus the somewhat curious formation of "its." In most contexts, this is possessive. This rule eliminates ambiguity in written English between the possessive pronouns and their soundalike contractions, condensing conjugations of "to be" into suffixes of pronouns.

Wiki on Strunk & White