Spelling is ruining the English language
 

Most of us who can read and write English have had to endure a seemingly endless series of lessons consisting of little more than the rote memorization of the spellings of lists of words. Some of these words are so obscure that they are unlikely to be used more than a dozen times in the student's lifetime. Often the meaning of these obscure words isn't even taught to the students, as if the meaning wasn't important, but woe betide the unfortunate child who can't spell them!

Do we really need to subject our children to this monotony? No wonder so many students hate English classes.

The inability to memorize spelling is a source of humiliation for many. Some quite intelligent people cannot spell. It is hardly surprising when one day they learn that "rabbit" is spelt with two b's, and the next they must learn that "habit" is spelt with only one. The reason for the difference is never explained, the unfortunate child is simply expected to remember the spellings of individual words. With inconsistencies like these, is it no wonder that many cannot master spelling?

These otherwise intelligent people are denied many employment opportunities because they don't remember to spell "résumé" with accents on both e's, and spelling is used by lazy employers as a measure of educational standard and competence. To the lazy employer, it doesn't matter if the candidate has impressive qualifications and experience that the employer can check with a little effort; if there's a spelling mistake, the candidate is not considered. And some employers can't spell perfectly either, so the spelling mistake the disqualifies the candidate could well be the employer's.

The inability of some students to learn spelling is considered by many to be a problem, and we then waste huge amounts of money on solutions. We have phonics, whole-word memorization, and other efforts to teach our children to read and write. Yet we consistently ignore the elephant in the room: English spelling is badly in need of reform.

Many people would be appalled and shocked by that idea. "But you can't change the spelling!" they say. "It's the language of Milton, Shakespeare and Keats", they say. This isn't relevant, as modern editions of the works of Shakespeare and other authors are not published in the spellings that those authors themselves used.

Anyone who mentions the name of Shakespeare as a holy incantation against the cause of spelling reform is evidently unaware that on Shakespeare's grave his epitaph uses the spelling "frend" instead of "friend". If the spelling "frend" was good enough for Shakespeare to have it engraved on his tomb in stone, why is it not good enough for us?

Some people oppose the idea of spelling reform because they worry that they would have to learn spelling all over again. This is a more legitimate reason to be wary of spelling reform, but the concern is unfounded. Spelling reforms in other languages take place all the time, generally at intervals of fifty years or so. The old spellings are generally not considered wrong after reform, in that people can still use them if they wish, but they do become deprecated so they can fall out of use. It is usual for spelling reforms to introduce new spellings that are now considered correct. People are free to use whatever spellings they wish. The only material change is that students would be taught the new spellings instead of the old.

Other people do not see any problem with English spelling. Anyone who finds no problem with English spelling has no skills in critical thinking. Here is a short list that shows just a few of the problems of English spelling:

• Why are "habit", "lizard" and "salad" spelt with a single letter after the stressed vowel but "rabbit", "blizzard" and "ballad" spelt with a doubled letter after the stressed vowel?
• Why don't "bomb", "comb" and "tomb" rime?
• Why are the words "island", "doubt", "debt" and "ptarmigan" spelt with silent letters that are not justified by the etymology of those words?
• Why must English have words with multiple pronunciations like "estimate", "house", "lead", "mouth", "read", "use", "wind" and "wound"? Other languages that have regular spelling reforms have no words like these because the reforms systematically eliminate these, but English has accumulate the clutter of over 500 heterophonic homographs.
• Why does "receipt" have a silent "p"? It is related to the word "reception". However, why aren't the words "deceit" and "conceit" spelt with a silent "p" as well? After all, they are linked to "deception" and "conception". For that matter, why does "receipt" have a silent "p" to link it to "reception" when "reception" does not in turn have a silent "i" to link it to "receipt"?

I have asserted that spelling is ruining the English language. It's true. The time wasted in learning all these thousands of obscure spellings is time that is not spent teaching grammar and punctuation. Many kids leave school without knowing that sentences start with capital letters and end in full stops, and some students leave school without even a firm grasp on grammar. Some students leave school without ever studying English literature. English education seems not to care about those things so long as the students can spell.

Requiring students to learn spelling is a false god to which all other learning in English is sacrificed.

To make room for hundreds of hours of spelling classes, we must dumb down the teaching of grammar, punctuation and literature. Thus, spelling reform is not the dumbing down of spelling, as some incorrectly claim, but instead it would be an opportunity to smarten up grammar, punctuation and literature. If spelling could be mastered in three years instead of eight, a lot of additional time would be available in the classroom for the teaching of English Literature from Seuss to Shakespeare. A comprehensive reform of spelling in English could be the best thing for English Literature since the birth of Shakespeare.

Spelling reform of the English language would give students of the future a more balanced education in English that is demonstrably superior to the education we give our children today.

If you don't care about spelling why care about grammar?
I'll use "very unique" if I damn well please and you ain't gonna convince me you won't know what I'm saying. :p

You can use qualifiers with "unique" if you want. I won't stop you. Just don't try it with "pregnant". :headshake

That's fine if your sentence is "me kill tiger" or "me drink gin."

How do you convey the fact that you drank the gin yesterday? Once you're forming tenses, you're doing grammar. You can argue that "I drinked" is logical and conveys the meaning to another English speaker--but you're still dealing with accepted rules of English. You can't unilaterally decide to form the past tense by adding "xx" to the end of each verb--that is, you can't do so and expect other people to understand you. If you can convince everybody you speak with to accept that convention, more power to you. But in that case you've arguably changed the grammar, not discarded the whole concept of grammar.

For that matter, in "me kill tiger," how do you know which is the subject and which is the object? "The subject comes first" may not be the correct answer for every language.

"Grammar" is not just a bunch of musty rules beaten into you by your 4th grade English teacher. It's a common understanding among your group speaking the same language/dialect about how language is structured.

I rather like the idiosyncrasies of English spelling; they inform and honor our language's complex history.

No, "unique" is one of the absolutes that aren't allow a modifier/qualifier.

So is spelling a common understanding, and even very bad grammer can be understood most of the time, that's why we can communicate with people that have little command of English. So why spend more time on Grammar and less on spelling?

What about "not unique"? Doesn't "not" modify "unique" in that phrase?

Not if the spelling of the word tells lies about its origins.

DEBT: This word came into the English language from Norman French, where it was spelt "dette" with not a B anywhere in it. Later on, the hypercorrectionists got a hold of this innocent word, and forced into it a silent b, on the false belief that the word was borrowed directly from the Latin, not French. Although the word does ultimately come from the Latin, it does so by way of French, and thus the spelling should reflect the French origins of the word and not the Latin.

ISLAND: Another word that was mangled by the hypercorrectionists based on a false etymology. In this case, they mangled the word on the false belief that it was related to the Latin word "insula". The word island is actually a Germanic word of long pedigree, with cognates spelt "Eiland" in Dutch and German.

PTARMIGAN: This word is not from Greek roots, and thus has no business whatever having a silent P in front of it. It is of Gaelic derivation where the original word was spelt as "tarmachan". This word has no p at the beginning.

There are other words of this kind that tell lies about their origins. Anyone who advocates the etymological spellings of these and other such words must be made aware that false etymologies do exist.

It's a yes/no absolute and that's OK. One is or isn't unique.

Now if you used a quantifier like "slightly" or "rather", it makes no sense. Something cannot be slightly unique or slightly optimum in much the same way a woman cannot be slightly pregnant.

Don't ask me, I hated English... except in 7th grade when Mr Brown told us about fighting a fire on the roof of a London hospital during the blitz, while his wife was giving birth downstairs, and traveling on a convoy carrying war materials to Murmansk, though U-boat infested waters with ships getting torpedoed right and left, or about writing his book, Folke Wulf. Now that was a good class. :)

I wish I had a copy of that book.

For fuck sake, read some Bill Bryson books, read some poetry, and take a chill pill. Or campaign for Esperanto, at least either approach shows a modicum of appreciation for the beauty of language.

What monotony? Not all students hate English classes. Some of us loved English. Some of us enjoyed learning to spell words and the fact that the rules seemed slightly arcane and esoterical at times made it all the more interesting. I loved it. My youngest niece, who is a lot like me, loves it. It was precisely those early lessons in words that gave me my most abiding passion in life: language, words, their usage, their origins.

You point out the word 'debt' and the fact that the 'b' is a cuckoo in the nest. True enough. But that just makes it more interesting. That is history right there. We carry our history in the words that survive and migrate and change, or that vanish into the distance to be found only in ancient texts.

It's a little like, to my mind, setting aside odd herbs and spices, eschewing the little details like breadcrumbs or nutmeg, and holding up as better, purer, more wholesome, a plain dish of rice and peas. I like herbs and spices, I like the scorched top on a flambed dessert, I like the detail.

Back to children learning their lessons. Unless you have some figures to show that the curent method is resulting in more illiterate than literate children, then I will consider you have a valid point. But since most children do learn and it is a minority who struggle; and since so many children learn from this a love of the English language and books (as can be evidenced partly by the immense popularity of English Literature or Language degrees in universities across the English speaking world), then what you are suggesting is replacing one lot of disillusioned kids who hated English classes, with another. The ones who enjoy the variety and spice of English would hate the classes where they now like them, and those who currently hate classes, might find them fun.


[eta] Well...I don't know about your schooling. But by the time I got to o-level (15/16) those were the sorts of things we were being taught. Those are precisely the kinds of things that our teachers picked up on to catch our interest. In terms of the current education system: a basic understanding of word origins and oddities is tagged to (if I recall aright) either Entry3 or Level1 literacy. That's an equivalent to about an age 10/11 reading age.

What to add, what to add? Oh, nothing!

Also, from now on, I would like the number 5 to replace the number 3. I've never understood the social conventions that numbers are one thing only and should be used correctly. I have developed my own numbers system, some numbers are converted to letters if the previous numbers follow rules that I make up as I go along. There really is no rhyme nor reason to this system, but I expect you to understand what I am saying when I tell you that my new shoes cost 27T41B.

Love English, hate grammar.

BUT - love history of English language.

HATE linguistics and all those fricatives and voiceless stops and all that rot. For speech therapists if you're asking me. Did that dangle?

but even those "hypercorrectionists" are part of the history of the language.

I guess I just never had too much trouble with spelling, although I know people who do. I think it's a right/left brain kind of thing. I even loved grammar! Sentence diagrams . . . (waxes nostalgic)