Spelling is ruining the English language

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Honestly? I have absolutely no problems whatsoever reading that soliloquoy in it's original. I similarly have very little difficulty reading Chaucer in the original middle-english.

Also, I wasn't saying that I 'fear' any changes. Nor was I saying that I 'fear' them because I : 'feel that would make it harder to read for those who have mastered the traditional spellings.' As it stands, I wouldn't have any problems reading under the new spelling system. I have learned to read and decode language in a variety of forms. I may, however, have found it harder to master when I was learning to read.

I was making a comment about learning styles. It's something I recognise in my own way of learning: ideosyncracies make it easier for me to spot patterns. I was also drawing on my experience of teaching functionally illiterate adults to read.

For some of those adults, the inconsistencies in spelling made for profound difficulties in learning. For some others it made it easier. My point is this: whatever system you come up with, whatever changes are wrought in our spelling, or indeed in the way we teach, it will advantage some and it will correspondingly disadvantage others. For some of the people I taught, your system would have made all the difference. For others, and this counts for both my students and myself, it would have placed an additional stumbling block in their place.

It's not about what people already know (although, that does suggest that several millions of people would suddenly find their own understanding of their language made arbitrarily obsolete), it's about how people learn.

You are positing this as the solution to people's difficulties in learning to spell (amongst other things). I am saying to you, that in my experience, that is unlikely to be the case. It will help some and hinder some. And then you'll be left with a bunch of people who find it difficult to learn to read and recognise words for whom the old system would have been a breeze...and some people who'd have had difficulty before would find it somewhat easier.

Essentially, you are suggesting we replace one flawed and problematic system with another equally flawed and problematic system. We would simply be swapping one set of problems for another.

Thank you for your post. It is this kind of well-thought out post that I was seeking when I chose to post this thread.

I also did not give you sufficient credit at the time in your previous post, as I had the distraction of a heavy and nasty cold at the time. Only later, as the combination of the cold symptoms and side effects of medication prevented my sleeping did I give further consideration to your little remark about "word shapes". That is important. The French Academy introduced accents to the French language in the 18th century for that exact reason - to reform the orthography without changing the word shapes too much.

Let's suppose that spellings were reformed in a reasonable manner. Many of the changes would involve single-letter alterations (deletions, substitutions and additions). Deleting a letter from hearken, leather would give harken, lether (harken is already an established variant spelling); inserting a missing letter into shadow would give shaddow; substituting a letter in meadow would give meddow. While these spellings won't be liked by the fans of current spellings, these are all plausible spellings that would have resulted had English spelling been updated systematically sometime in the last 250 years. The shape of the word does not change much, but irregularity is removed.

The shape of words would change more if words containing the notorious tetragraph ough had that combination removed. I venture that the word shapes of the ough words is not actually that useful for word recognition, as in some words one must look carefully at the other letters in the word just to work out which of ten different pronunciations to use for the ough. Which is easier to read: tough, though, through, trough, thorough, or tuff, tho, thru, troff or thurro?

Your point about some people being worse off is important. However, if changes were done with care, the number of people made worse off would be substantially fewer than those who would benefit.