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[igotthisguitar]

Push For "Simpler" Spelling Persists
By DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press Writer
Wed Jul 5, 5:23 PM ET

WASHINGTON - When "say," "they" and "weigh" rhyme, but "bomb," "comb" and "tomb" don't, wuudn't it maek mor sens to spel wurdz the wae thae sound?



http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060705/ap_on_re_us/simpl_wurdz ... etc

Those in favor of simplified spelling say children would learn faster and illiteracy rates would drop. Opponents say a new system would make spelling even more confusing.

Eether wae, the consept has yet to capcher th publix imajinaeshun.

It's been 100 years since Andrew Carnegie helped create the Simplified Spelling Board to promote a retooling of written English and President Theodore Roosevelt tried to force the government to use simplified spelling in its publications. But advocates aren't giving up.

They even picket the national spelling bee finals, held every year in Washington, costumed as bumble bees and hoisting signs that say "Enuf is enuf but enough is too much" or "I'm thru with through."

Thae sae th bee selebraets th ability of a fue stoodents to master a dificult sistem that stumps meny utherz hoo cuud do just as wel if speling were simpler.

"It's a very difficult thing to get something accepted like this," says Alan Mole, president of the American Literacy Council, which favors an end to "illogical spelling."

The group says English has 42 sounds spelled in a bewildering 400 ways.

Americans doen't aulwaez go for whut's eezy � witnes th faeluer of th metric sistem to cach on. But propoenents of simpler speling noet that a smatering of aulterd spelingz hav maed th leep into evrydae ues.

Doughnut also is donut; colour, honour and labour long ago lost the British "u" and the similarly derived theatre and centre have been replaced by the easier-to-sound-out theater and center.

"The kinds of progress that we're seeing are that someone will spell night 'nite' and someone will spell through 'thru,'" Mole said. "We try to show where these spellings are used and to show dictionary makers that they are used so they will include them as alternate spellings."

"Great changes have been made in the past. Systems can change," a hopeful Mole said.

Lurning English reqierz roet memory rather than lojic, he sed.

In languages with phonetically spelled words, like German or Spanish, children learn to spell in weeks instead of months or years as is sometimes the case with English, Mole said.

But education professor Donald Bear said to simplify spelling would probably make it more difficult because words get meaning from their prefixes, suffixes and roots.

"Students come to understand how meaning is preserved in the way words are spelled," said Bear, director of the E.L. Cord Foundation Center for Learning and Literacy at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Th cuntry's larjest teecherz uennyon, wuns a suporter, aulso objects.

Michael Marks, a member of the National Education Association's executive committee, said learning would be disrupted if children had to switch to a different spelling system. "It may be more trouble than it's worth," said Marks, a debate and theater teacher at Hattiesburg High School in Mississippi.

E-mail and text messages are exerting a similar tug on the language, sharing some elements with the simplified spelling movement while differing in other ways. Electronic communications stress shortcuts like "u" more than phonetics. Simplified spelling is not always shorter than regular spelling � sistem instead of system, hoep instead of hope.

Carnegie tried to moov thingz along in 1906 when he helpt establish and fund th speling bord. He aulso uezd simplified speling in his correspondens, and askt enywun hoo reported to him to do the saem.

A filanthropist, he becaem pashunet about th ishoo after speeking with Melvil Dewey, a speling reform activist and Dewey Desimal sistem inventor hoo simplified his furst naem bi droping "le" frum Melville.

Roosevelt tried to get the government to adopt simpler spellings for 300 words but Congress blocked him. He used simple spellings in all White House memos, pressing forward his effort to "make our spelling a little less foolish and fantastic."

The Chicago Tribune aulso got into th act, uezing simpler spelingz in th nuezpaeper for about 40 years, ending in 1975. Plae-riet George Bernard Shaw, hoo roet moest of his mateerial in shorthand, left muny in his wil for th development of a nue English alfabet.

Carnegie, Dewey, Roosevelt and Shaw's work followed attempts by Benjamin Franklin, Daniel Webster and Mark Twain to advance simpler spelling. Twain lobbied The Associated Press at its 1906 annual meeting to "adopt and use our simplified forms and spread them to the ends of the earth." AP declined.

But for aul th hi-proefiel and skolarly eforts, the iedeea of funy-luuking but simpler spelingz didn't captivaet the masez then � or now.

"I think that the average person simply did not see this as a needed change or a necessary change or something that was ... going to change their lives for the better," said Marilyn Cocchiola Holt, manager of the Pennsylvania department of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

Carnegie, hoo embraest teknolojy, died in 1919, wel befor sel foenz. Had he livd, he probably wuud hav bin pleezd to no that milyonz of peepl send text and instant mesejez evry dae uezing thair oen formz of simplified speling: "Hav a gr8 day!"

___

On the Net:

American Literacy Council: http://www.americanliteracy.com

Simplified Spelling Society: http://www.spellingsociety.org

National Education Association: http://www.nea.org

[Woland]

The simplified spelling movement has failed over time because it's nonsense.

First, the claim that current standard spellings are unsystematic is untrue. What they mean is that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes in English; however, a many-to-many relationship can be systematic as well when multiple factors are considered together. English spelling is complex, but systematic. It is complex because it represents the interaction of a variety of subsystems related to different levels of language (phonology, morphology) and other factors (historical origins of words).

I won't go into detail here, but I wrote my qualifying paper for my PhD on the structure of writing systems and my dissertation on the lexical processing of orthographic representations. I read just about everything available at the time (it's not a huge literature) and have kept up since, though my research interests have turned in other directions. Basically, the English spelling system is really designed to serve the purposes of adult native speaker readers and in doing so effectively, its complexity does create difficulties for writers and learners, but those are smaller groups of users (at least at the time the system was codified).

The simplified spelling people also fail to realize that their fantasy of one-to-one correspondence between phoneme and grapheme is equally problematic. For starters, whose pronunciation is going to be the basis of this correspondence? Americans? Brits? Australians? Indians? And among them, which particular regional or social class dialect will be chosen? (One can imagine the fights between the one-syllable and two-syllable pronouncers of 'orange' over its spelling; see another thread going on on this board.) I'm sure that the majority whose dialect is not chosen will just go along with the educational privileging of those who are lucky enough to speak the dialect that matches the new spelling. Current standard English orthography, with some built in flexibility for certain variants, actually privileges no one. It is one of the factors that holds English together around the world.

But beyond this, should we fix the spelling to the pronunciation of one dialect, what are we going to do when that dialect changes, as it inevitably will? Will the spelling change with it, resulting in a system that is unstable over time? Would that be a good idea, consistently rendering historical documents unreadable by later generations somewhere down the road?

What bothers me most about the simplified spelling thing popping up every so often is that it is so easy to show that it is a stupid idea, but doing so it takes away time that could be spent on working seriously on improving education.

[Ya-ta Boy]

[Qinella]

If we're gonna go changing all the spelling, completely erasing the etymology of words and thus the very basis of the language, we may as well just go off and create a whole new language that's easy to learn and that draws common elements from various languages. Why hasn't anyone thought of that? Leave English alone, go make your own damn language.

[Juregen]

[out of context]

You can also look at the example of creole languages, like Haitian Creole. There are many words that are based in French but have a more transparent spelling-to-pronunciation correspondence (e.g., mauvais>move, comment>kouman). As such, the etymological background may be less clear, but it does seem to have had an effect on literacy rates.

I think there's an unconsciously protective reaction to suggestions of spelling reform. Illogical though the English writing system may be, we're attached to seeing things the way they are now, and regard simplified spelling as foolish, misguided and/or condescending. Furthermore, correct spelling functions as a gauge of intellectual ability, and writing that contains misspellings is often devalued even when its content is intellectually sound. (You don't have to look any further than this site to see evidence of that.) I'm sure native speakers of standard French are amused by the writing system used by French creoles, and I imagine some of them extrapolate to larger conclusions about the intellectual abilities of their speakers.

It's easy to imagine a sort of creole-spelling effect emerging as English becomes more of a world language, though I'm sure purists would be boiling over with rage about it. However, I don't see it as happening as a conscious effort within the countries that are already dominated by English first-language use, but rather as an emergent effect of the use of English as a lingua franca.

[huffdaddy]

Woland -

How would you rate Mencken's An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States? I found a copy on-line, and it looks like a worthwhile read. Any comments before I delve in?

[Qinella]