Saturday 9 March 2019

How do you spell...?

Who were those people who bedevilled our spelling with their ...ough's, gu...s, qu...s, silent bs or ws or ks and more. Why did they do so? And why have we silently accepted their whims and fancies?

Actually, not everyone has. Proposals for spelling reform are as old as the hills. Well, not quite, but can be traced back to a 12th century monk and various scribes in Elizabethan England, while their successors have included a US President and any number of other statesmen writers and other prominent figures from Benjamin Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt to Milton, Samuel Johnson, Dickens, Tennyson, Mark Twain, Darwin, H.G.Wells and George Bernard Shaw.

But not many people have listened to them. Theodore Roosevelt ordered the Government Printing Office to use the proposals put forward by the Simplified Spelling Board that was founded in 1906, but Congress put a stop to that. Shaw left money for a new alphabet, but members of the Simplified Spelling Society, which he supported, could not agree over the terms of his will and that too, came to nought.

The only one to have any real success since the 17th century, when a gentleman named Howell managed to change the spelling of toune to town, for example, and logique to logic, was Noah Webster in the US. He can claim credit for most of the differences between British and American spelling, such as color for colour, and theater for theatre. But how well do they correspond to the way we pronounce the words. The vowel sound of the last syllable in those words is the most common one in the language, but no letter represents it. Shaw wanted to use an upside-down e, but you are not likely to find one on your keyboard any time soon. And by no means all of Webster's suggestions were adopted.

The trouble began with the introduction of the Roman alphabet by Christian missionaries. Prior to that, scribes used runes. The problem was that there weren't enough letters to represent all the sounds. One or two were added later, but the problem remained. After the Norman Conquest some French ways of spelling were introduced, though spelling was not consistent. The printing press helped eventually to stabilise it, but was initially part of the problem. Many of the early printers came from the Continent and brought their own ways of spelling with them, as well as making lines of equal length by adjusting the length of words! Then there were Rennaissance scholars who added a silent letter here and there to show, not always correctly, the Latin or Greek origin of a word.

A further problem is that pronunciation has changed since spelling became more stable. But should words always be spelt the way they are pronounced? Should scent, cent and sent all be spelt the same way? How about clause and claws, or pause and paws and pores and pours? And there are many more such words. Then whose pronunciation should we go by? Also, unlike many other languages, English has avoided accents and other marks over, above, or through letters, which is considered an advantage. And though there have been, and still are, many would-be reformers, they have seldom agreed among themselves.

So the k in know, the w in write, the b in doubt and so on are not under threat, spelling bees are not likely to get easier and children learning to read and write will continue to face the same problems we did. Except when they are texting, that is.

Spell-checkers are a help, but beware. They only know if a word exists. Write witches instead of switches, for example, as I once did, and they have no objection.


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