Groucho Marxism

It is generally agreed that English spelling is a mess. There is less agreement about whether anything should be done about it. To be sure, we can all agree that there are good reasons to reform English spelling. It would make English easier to learn to read, write, and pronounce, as well as making it more useful for international communication and reducing educational costs, therefore enabling teachers and learners to spend more time on more important subjects. Spelling reform would particularly benefit people with dyslexia, a condition which primarily impacts phonological processing and memory. The complexity of English spelling forces learners to remember many specific, arbitrary rules and exceptions, which places a heavy burden on dyslexic individuals.

Paradoxically, the irregularity of English spelling is what makes some so resistant to the idea of reforming it. There is a large cognitive investment that goes into accurately learning English spelling, and those that have made that investment are reluctant – consciously or not – to make changes that would render that investment unnecessary. This has led to correct spelling being used as a kind of shibboleth people who believe themselves to be well-educated use to distinguish themselves from, and look down upon, those they consider to be less well-educated. I’m sure we have all been guilty of this linguistic chauvinism at times. I know I have. Even now, the sight of a misplaced apostrophe can send me into an irrational rage.

Another reason spelling reform has never taken off in the English-speaking world is that nobody can agree on how English spelling should be reformed, or even what alphabet should be used to reform it. One suggestion is to use the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, which is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. The IPA has the advantage of being internationally recognized (as the name suggests), so using this would make learning English much easier for non-native speakers. The IPA has the disadvantage that it uses symbols that do not exist on standard keyboards and would therefore not be practical to use in a spelling reform. Realistically, a reform would need to be based on the standard Latin alphabet to have any chance of widespread adoption.

A better approach is to start with the Latin alphabet and to assign each letter a unique phoneme (sound value). This is straightforward for the letters a, b, d, e, f, g, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, v, w, y, and z, all of which have a clear default phoneme assigned to them under current English spelling. The same applies to the digraphs ch, sh, zh, and ng. The digraph th represents two different phonemes, one unvoiced and the other voiced; it would be logical to use dh for the latter. Similarly the letter u represents two vowel phonemes, one rounded and the other rounded. It makes sense to use u for the former, but not for the latter – the so-called ‘schwa’ sound – as that can be spelled using either o or u in stressed position, and any vowel letter in unstressed position.

The fact that any vowel letter can be used to represent schwa under current English spelling creates perhaps the thorniest problem any spelling reform must solve, namely: how should we represent schwa whilst remaining as aligned as possible with current spelling? However, current English spelling has some clear patterns that point to a solution. The letter e is usually used to represent schwa before r, and the letter o is usually used before w; elsewhere, the letter u is usually used in stressed position, and the letter a in unstressed position. It would make sense to carry these conventions over to a reformed spelling system. Unfortunately, this solution runs into a difficulty where the same letter is used to represent multiple sounds.

This is not as big a problem as it seems though, as there are few pairs of words that differ by only one sound where that sound would be represented by the same vowel letter. And where that does occur – for example, in the words ‘put’ and ‘putt’, which would both be spelled ‘put’ under the proposed system –  the context would resolve any ambiguity. It should also be noted that this is a problem with current English spelling too, as there are many words that are spelled the same as other words but pronounced differently, such as ‘lead’, ‘live’, ‘read’, and ‘tear’. These words would be spelled differently under the proposed system: ‘led’/’liyd’, ‘layv’/liv’, ‘red’/’riyd’, and ‘teer’/’tier’. In fact the proposed system would have a lot fewer of these so-called heteronyms than the current system.

Sow dheer yuw hav it. A nyuw and kampliyt speling riform prapowzal fer dhiy Ingglish langwij. Wot da yuw think?