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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