Why English Spelling Reform Is Doomed
As we saw last week, the main reason that spelling is not a one-to-one correspondence of sound-to-letter is because our writing system was created a long time ago, when English sounded different than it does now. It sounds different now because all human languages, everywhere, are in a constant state of change, and there is nothing anyone can do about that. Over very long periods of time, those changes are what create new languages.
The changes in different areas of language occur at different rates and in different amounts. Sound changes can happen fast, and are often the most noticeable, in that we use most of the sounds in our language almost every time we speak for a few minutes. Word changes—like the addition of new words—happen to individual words, so such changes are not quite as noticeable. Language syntax (word order) changes the slowest. You can see cases of this from Shakespeare’s time, when people said things like “I know not.” Now, we put the not before the verb know, and we add an auxiliary verb do as well. Syntactic changes like this take time.
Let’s talk more about how the actual words we use change a little faster than the order in which we use them, or at least, we can witness some vocabulary changes. In the past few decades or so, we have seen hundreds of words added to our language, as things are invented and discovered, such as GPS, zoodles, and unfriend. We can also notice shifts in meaning, which is when a word that used to mean one thing now means a new thing. For example, gay, which a few decades ago meant “happy.” Another type of meaning shift is when words that had a neutral connotation become more derogatory, like retarded, which is very offensive now but quite recently meant “delayed,” or “slow” (like the music term retard).
Now, the thing about these language changes is that they do more than occur over time: They also exist at a single point in time, across regions and social groups. The English in the United Kingdom sounds very different from American English—few words are pronounced the same. These differences in the way people from different regions sound are so reliable and systematic that actors can “put on” the accents of people from another speech community.
Like sounds, words in a single language vary at a single point in time as well. Just like those slow changes over time, regional vocabulary differences are less noticeable than sound differences. Only a limited number of words are different. For example, a lift in Britain is an elevator in America, and a climbing frame in Britain is a jungle gym in America, and you might not hear any of these words in a five-minute conversation. Even across the U.S., we have multiple words for rubber band (called a gumband in Pittsburgh), milkshake (called a cabinet in Rhode Island), and hundreds more.
Finally, the syntax of one language, as expected, does vary at a single point in time, but it varies the least. One example is that many British speakers say “You could do,” instead of “you could,” and American English speakers do not. For example, if I ask “Should I go home?” in the United States, someone might respond, “Sure, you could,” but in Britain, someone might respond, “Sure, you could do.”
There Isn’t Really a Better Way: English Has More Sounds than Letters
Now you know the main reason that spelling doesn’t perfectly match speech. Let’s imagine we ignored those facts about language changes over time, and across space, and still wished to “update” our spelling standards. In reality, that would be nearly impossible using our current alphabet! Let’s take an example: The present-tense verb read seems to have an extra letter, and, it is a homograph (also called a “heteronym”) with the past-tense verb read. So, let’s say we take out the A. Now we have the color, red. Let’s try an I for the verb, then. Well, now we have R-I-D, rid, which is already taken by a different word. If we add a second E, we get R-E-E-D, reed, and that is also already a different word in English. This means that our remaining options are to add new letters to the alphabet, or add extra letters to the end of R-E-D. Even if we assigned the present-tense verb read to be spelled R-E-D-E, what do we do with the past-tense version, except combine its form with R-E-D like the color?
The main reason that this spelling ideal is more imaginary than realistic is that English has a pretty large vowel inventory (there are some gray areas, but at a minimum, there are about 11 vowel sounds and about three diphthongs in most American English dialects). However, as you know, we only have five letters to indicate vowels in writing (six if you count Y). This means that we cannot have a one-to-one correspondence from sound to letter. (4) To do so, we would have to add letters to an alphabet that is already well-known and deeply ingrained in millions of people who read and write in English, all over the world.
In addition to the 14 vowel sounds, English has about 26 consonant sounds. That makes around 40 distinct sounds for the 26 letters in our alphabet (plus, technically, there are more sounds in English, but we produce them unconsciously, so we would never spell them—a topic for another article!). More importantly, this inventory varies from one English dialect to another. We’ll come back to that.
It Makes Sense to Maintain Written Conventions
A third reason to keep spelling standardized is that writing human languages is an artificial process. Unlike spoken and signed languages, which are acquired by young children without instruction, literacy skills are taught laboriously in a controlled setting, and take years to master. The earliest writing systems date back only 5,000 years in all of human history of people talking to each other. If you met an adult who grew up where you did, but had tragically been denied access to literacy education, you would not be able to know that by having a conversation with the person. You may have met preschool-age children who can’t read yet, but can correct you if you make a mistake in their native language! In that way, trying to alter the way human beings speak naturally is futile, but continuing to set standards for the way we write is understandable, and pretty enforceable.
We Can Share Written Materials across the Anglophone World through Space and Time
One of the best reasons not to spell more like we speak is that to do so, we would have to choose one pronunciation. Imagine if we couldn’t read any books or signs written in England, Australia, Mississippi, or Canada, because everyone tried to spell English words like a local pronunciation! There is an imperfect correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, and it’s a good thing. Besides, how would we choose which pronunciation to follow? For example, many British English speakers, and Southern American English speakers, and African American English speakers, do not pronounce the sound “R” unless it comes before a vowel. That means there is no R sound when those speakers say “murder” (the first R is followed by a consonant, and the second one comes at the end of the word), but there is a definite R sound when they say “inherent” (R before a vowel). Removing all those R’s in spelling would be very strange, because those speakers know that they belong in writing, no matter how they pronounce them. Plus, if a word starting with a vowel comes after an R at the end of the word, like “murder express,” that R pops right back in for those speakers! Ask a British friend to read “murder” and “murder express” out loud to you, and you’ll hear it.
In addition, don’t forget that much classic literature was written at a time when English was pronounced completely differently, as we learned in Part I. Leaving writing standardized allows us and future generations to preserve ideas, study history, and enjoy literature while spoken language continues to evolve.
We Can Distinguish Homophones
In writing, context alone is not always enough to clearly let the reader know whether the writer intends weight the measurement or wait the verb; there, their, or they’re; the sentence “The flower is on the table” could be flour or flower, and it would be a lot more confusing if we could only spell that series of sounds in one way. If we tried to make spelling match the way we speak, we would run into more confusion. Even when context clears up the ambiguity, it’s helpful for the reader to know which word is intended as soon as the word appears in the sentence.
We Can See Relationships in Word Families
Although it can be tricky when we first learn to read and write that you don’t pronounce the G in design, leaving it there is useful in order to see the relationship between its cousin-word “designate.” This is a pattern that can be found in many examples, such as bomb/bombard, receipt/recipient, and sign/signature. This is related to the homophone reason, too, because the spelling S-I-N-E, for example, is already taken for the mathematical term sine.
Loanwords
Another area in which spelling reform is futile is loanwords, which you can read about here, and English has many! Borrowing words like karaoke and Renaissance from other languages increases the number of words that are unlikely to have a one-to-one sound-to-symbol correspondence. Leaving them spelled as-is helps us when we see those words in signs and other writing in that language, when we travel and study.
Education
Some people argue that spelling should be modified to be more intuitive because reading can be difficult at first for children in school. One huge problem with this is that all of the adults have already learned to read with the current spelling, and that would mean we would be teaching children to read a spelling system that only applies to things written recently, if anything! Moving forward in this scenario, imagine how it would feel for all adults to have to re-learn our ingrained literacy skills, late in life. More importantly, if we were to change our writing system, then we would actually have to teach children twice: how to spell the new way, and then how to read the spelling of nearly every written document in existence, and that would not simplify the teaching process.
In addition to that, some studies show that when we read in any language spelled with the Roman alphabet, we don’t actually sound it out once we become fluent readers; we analyze the words in a chunk, much like traditional Chinese characters that have a single symbol per word (called a “logographic” writing system). This means that we all read words that we know more by memory than by how they are spelled, so standardized spelling that doesn’t correspond perfectly to pronunciation doesn’t turn out to be a problem for the average reader, especially with practice. (3) As a reminder, even if it did correspond perfectly, half the people reading English pronounce those words completely differently! Learning English spelling, while challenging, is nowhere near impossible. In fact, if you think about it, the fact that standardized spelling has endured so powerfully indicates that our writing system is working well.
As a side note, when people discuss learning to read and write English, they often express the belief that Spanish is an “easy language” to read and spell, but that isn’t fully true. Spanish does have a smaller vowel inventory than English, and that leads to less vowel confusion. However, syllable stress, which is an integral part of both English and Spanish, must often be marked by accents in Spanish (but not in English), which can be tricky to learn. Furthermore, Spanish does indeed have silent letters! All languages have loanwords, and Spanish is no exception: There is a silent C in the Spanish word for “adolescent,” just like English. Also, Z and S are pronounced the same in many varieties of Spanish, which means those school children have to learn that zapato is spelled with a Z, etc. The letters G and J can share a single pronunciation in Spanish, as can the letters B and V (in many Spanish-speaking countries, though not all).Click here for more information is a link to an enormous book on the details of Spanish spelling, andClick here for information is a link to a middle-school Spanish spelling bee in Puerto Rico. Although spelling bees are generally rarer in Spanish-speaking countries, they do exist!
In fact, just as English sounds completely different based on where you hear it, Spanish (like most languages) also varies enormously, yet maintains a standardized spelling system. For example, there are parts of the Caribbean where Spanish speakers replace the R sound (called a “flap”) with the L sound, only in very specific environments (like “pol favol” for “por favor”), and drop the D in very specific environments (like “al la-o” instead of “al lado”). These variations are automatic, and there is no need to reflect them in writing.
What about Abbreviating Words in Texts, Chats, and Informal Emails?
This leads us to a question many of you may be wondering at this point: Is it OK to abbreviate and break the spelling rules when we chat and IM? Absolutely! Abbreviating texts and chats is completely normal, and does not suggest that we should change or drop standardized spelling, nor does it mean that anyone who does so is uneducated! The arguments in this article apply to documents, newspapers, textbooks, road signs, research, and the like. It is critical to learn standardized writing in schools, and then the beauty of human language is that it is creative and exploitable. The most educated professionals in the world send informal, abbreviated texts, and so the idea is that we can all be competent in multiple writing genres of the languages we speak. In fact, informal text abbreviations are actually very rule-governed—if they weren’t, texters would really struggle to communicate—in ways that we learn and use unconsciously. A related example is students, who have been abbreviating lectures for centuries, in similar shorthand. Also, people may spell out their individual pronunciations to other speakers of that same language variety, in a way of expressing solidarity, or to create humor the way some kids use slang spellings like K-E-W-L for cool. As long as people go through school and learn both forms of communication, nothing is lost. In fact, studies show that this writing genre, which is often referred to as “Computer-Mediated Communication,” or CMC, is classified as more like spoken than written language, in that those messages are produced almost in real time, like spoken conversation. There’s nothing wrong with saving time and space (and possibly avoiding a fight) by using an emoji instead of texting out “Read that last sentence sarcastically, not accusatorily.” These forms of shorthand emerge and catch on spontaneously, and are not imposed on us in an artificial way, like a spelling reform would be.
Abandoning Spelling Conventions Would Be Especially Problematic
One last point deserves consideration. Occasionally, people suggest that reforming spelling is a bad idea, but then take it a step further, and suggest we abandon standardized spelling altogether. At this point, you can probably imagine that many of the same arguments against spelling reform apply to “spelling abandonment.” There are a handful of additional reasons not to abandon spelling conventions. One is that spelling allows computers to parse written language—critical for doing any sort of research in languages or linguistics, or even in your own papers. Think about how helpful it is to use functions like “ctrl+F” to find each instance of a word in a document, or on a webpage, when we’re looking for something specific. Another good reason is speed: When words are spelled any which way, our reading time is slowed down. Beyond that, you could argue that spelling any which way would be more challenging for children learning to read—at least, at this point, the word spellings, tough or not, are consistent across books. Our civilization has billions of printed words, spanning hundreds of years. Therefore, if you add spelling alternatives, by definition, you are now doubling the task of the child in school learning to read, just as it would be if we reformed spelling.
Some say that abandoning all spelling conventions would help when you want to send a creative spelling and your autocorrect overrides you. But, as we saw, there is nothing illogical or uneducated about text abbreviations, so a better solution might be to turn off that autocorrect in the phone settings! Furthermore, it is worth pointing out that many who say they don’t need any spelling conventions have substantial educational privilege. People who have mastered reading and writing can deftly produce correct and well-written English, so it’s easy to say they don’t need it; people who struggle with spelling deserve a chance to get more practice with it, in one consistent form, and to get better at it.
In sum, as a society, we can work to learn and teach writing conventions, and we can be mindful of the fact that all languages vary across time and space with no “better” or “worse” forms. Finally, we can allow abbreviated “text speech” to coexist peacefully with formal writing!
That segment was by Syelle Graves who has two master’s degrees in linguistics. You can read more about her at syellegraves.com.
References
1.Cowell, A. (1997, July 31). All the sturm und drang! It’s not just umlauts. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/31/world/all-the-sturm-und-drang-it-s-not-just-umlauts.html.
2.Curzan, A., & Adams, M. (2012). How English works: A linguistic introduction (3rd ed.). Longman.
3.Ehri, L.C. (2005). Learning to read words: Theory, findings, and Issues. Scientific Studies of Reading 9(2), 167–188.
4.Fromkin, V., Hyams, N., & Rodman, R. (2014). Introduction to Language (10th ed.). Boston: Wadsworth.
5.German orthography reform of 1996. Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1996
6.Johnson, S. (2005). Spelling trouble? Language, ideology, and the reform of German orthography. Multilingual Matters. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/2rQbWu6
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About the Author
Syelle Graves has a PhD in linguistics and is the assistant director of ILETC (Institute for Language Education in Transcultural Context). She was also a 40 under Forty alumni award honoree at SUNY New Paltz. You can find her at syellegraves.com.
