Reforming English spelling?

Learning how to spell in English is difficult.  Reforming the system would be harder.

Our tutoring consultant is preparing for his Saturday sessions, reviewing the particular subjects and lessons he’ll be explaining.  In the next cubicle, a tutor who works as a Middle School teacher during the day will be working with younger students, teaching basic reading and writing and some beginning mathematics.  Our tutor is impressed with the skill and enthusiasm she brings to the task; he would be quite at a loss if faced with teaching someone to read.  We’ve commented on the difficulty a written language has in reproducing the spoken language; English seems to take it to extremes.  It’s not that there are no rules.  It’s that there are many rules, so that there are (for instance) seven different sounds that can be represented by the combination “ough.”

Certainly it would be easier to learn to read if the standard spelling were reformed to be phonetic.  Spanish does this very well.  Even French, with its mutitude of silent letters, is more systematic than English.  Reform has been called for many times over the years.  It’s unlikely to happen.

First, not only would the task be enormous, there is no clear body to carry it out.  French has the Académie Française, founded by Cardinal Richelieu specifically to take charge of the language; Spanish has the Real Academia Española.  English has nothing of the sort.

And there’s the question of whose pronunciation to use.  One of our consultants remembers an account of a South African traveling in Texas.  South African vowels are extremely short and the words are clipped; on the other hand, Texans can spend all afternoon, seemingly, on a comfortable word.  It required a Czech (whose English was a second language) to translate between them.  None of our consultants can understand the Geordie accent of northern England at all.  There are many other variations, major and minor.

As a practial matter, a complete reform would make all previous writing obsolete and unreadable: the past would suddenly be a foreign language.  That isn’t a small thing.

Perhaps the most compelling argument against trying to fix English spelling is the fact that it’s futile: language changes, and any standard spelling would in time fail to match the spoken form.  In fact that’s what has happened.  The words knight and night used to be pronounced as they are written, with the initial k sounded and the gh representing a guttural sound like the final consonant in the Scottish loch.  (The Scottish dialect of English has its own peculiarities!)  English is perhaps unfortunate in that printing was invented, thus fixing the spelling of words, just before the Greal Vowel Shift changed the way many were pronounced.

But note something useful: we can distinguish a mounted warrior from the dark part of the day at a glance, even though they sound exactly the same.  There are many pairs of this sort.  As a complement, there is the pair “wind” (the motion of air in the atmosphere) and “wind” (to circle around, as collecting yarn on a ball).  It’s possible for the wind to wind around an obstacle, though it’s confusing if not said out loud.

The written and spoken forms of a language are different objects.  The fact that they are so different in English makes it hard to learn, but also more versatile.