Spelling reform

Written and spoken languages are different.  Should they be made more similar?

The end of last week’s post was, of course, tongue-in-cheek: regardless of the wealth of material available nowadays, it takes dedication and an extended effort for most people to learn a foreign language.  Our tutoring consultant was reminded of one stumbling-block during a French lesson a week or two ago: the student had trouble pronouncing some of the words she’d written.  While there are more or less reliable rules for going from writing to speaking, they are undeniably different languages, and learning one does not mean you have mastered the other.

This is normally masked by the fact that most classes teach both at the same time.  And indeed in some languages it’s relatively easy: Spanish is pronounced very much as it is written, and the Soviets cleaned up Russian a bit (even getting rid of some letters in their alphabet) when they came to power a century ago.  Spoken French, though, deviates much more from the written form, not even pronouncing the ends of most words, and many different words are pronounced identically.

But everyone agrees that English is worse.  There are rules, but all have exceptions.  Indeed, spelling English is so difficult a skill that we have competitions in it and give prizes to the winners, something that must be bewildering to (for instance) a native Spanish speaker.  We have lots of words spelled the same but pronounced differently (wind, a movement of air, and wind, what you used to do to a spring-powered clock), and others pronounced the same but spelled differently (night and knight).  It’s hard enough for native speakers to learn, and must be a major difficulty for anyone else.

So should we finally admit it’s a mess, and clean it up?  Proposals are made at intervals to do just that.  It would simplify life for millions of people.  But we don’t expect it to happen.  The practical difficulties are immense.

First, there is no central authority on English, as there is (at least in principle) for French and Spanish.  Second, and related to it, English is spoken in many places by many people, with many variations.  If the spelling system were to match the sound of the words, we would have to choose whose sounds to use.  We could construct local variants to match the local language; but that would mean fragmenting English into mutually-unintelligible dialects.  And third, it would only work for a while.  Languages evolve.  Many of our current spelling oddities come from the fact that, just when printing was coming into wide use for English, the language was shifting pronunciation.  When Caxton printed Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (in English despite its French title), “knight” was indeed pronounced with a k-sound in front and a gutteral sound inside represented by the letters “gh.”

And last, it’s not really possible.  There are many more distinct sounds in English than letters, or combinations of letters, in our alphabet.  Linguists have to learn a number of additional symbols even to have a hope of representing them.

So there’s no danger of extinction for the spelling bee.