Would you support English writing reform?
- Who do I have to kill to make it happen?
- Yes. It’s a good idea.
- I’ll go with the flow.
- I’m against it.
- Suggestions like this is why God invented the lynch mob.
0 voters
The Problem: A Complicated Spelling System
You know what really makes teaching Engish more difficult? How we spell things. The sound /n/ can be written ‘n’, ‘nn’, or ‘kn’. The symbol “c” can represent the sounds /s/ (alone or prefixed by a “s”), /k/, or combined with something else to make /ts/. Vowel sounds… well, talk about unnecessary complication.
Given time, we natives master the spelling rules by a process of induction. We see patterns of words (most of which we can already say) repeated enough times and we subconsiously generalize them into a correct set of rules for all the variants of spelling in English.
On the other hand, we sit in classrooms trying to explain to children rules for all these things so that they can deduce how to spell or read a word. But there are so many rules, so many exceptions, and a lot of it just doesn’t make sense without a PH.D in language history. Learning how to spell all these words is really a terrible burden.
Rationale
Now, it isn’t really incumbent on anyone to change a language to suit outsiders trying to learn it as a second language. But English is an exceptional case. It has become the international language of business, power, and global community in the space of just a little more than 100 years. Not because of some superiority of the language, but perhaps in spite of some of its drawbacks.
It wouldn’t take much to knock English off as the world’s dominant language. What happened in 100 years could be undone in 50. It is in the interests of English speaking people, who derive advantage from having their mother tongue be so prestigous, to promote English’s continued utility as an international lingua franca.
More importantly (in this forum), as English teachers, our profession would be made much easier if spelling was a minor issue. Not to mention we’d have less problems spelling words ourselves.
Solution
There are already systems out there for transcribing language phonetically. First and foremost there is the IPA, which theoretically will be able to accurately transcribe human speech in any language. Secondly, there is KK, a modified and simplified version of IPA made specifically for English. Either of these systems would eliminate all guess work and complex spelling rules. You’d have one symbol for one sound.
The chief problem of using either IPA or KK as a system is the trouble with typing. It would simply cause too much trouble to create a new typing system and software for printing using all the symbols that would be needed. On top of that, native English speakers would be reluctant to learn new symbols to write with.
What we need is a new system using the old symbols that will be intuitive so that resistance to language reform will be minimized while still being able to simplify spelling rules to one symbol to one sound.
I originally thought of creating my own suggestion, but much of what I would do was already proposed by others. If you look at ship.edu/%7Ecgboeree/epa.html and scroll down to "a slightly less phonemic script) that idea matches my own with only a few exceptions.
I would revise as follows:
All short vowel sounds would simply be the vowel alone (no change)
All long vowels would be the vowel + e (no intervening cononants)
cake=caek, meat=meet, kite=kiet, coat=coet, moon=muen
The double ‘o’ sound in “look” would still use the double ‘oo’
the y symbol will be used only as a consonant as in “yes”
edit: I forgot to put the ‘e’ in the moon example
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