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More on: Two Archaic Technologies
The
Alphabet and Spelling
Unfortunately,
the twenty-six
letters
of
our alphabet must serve a language having at least forty-four
sounds.
As
a consequence, a complex pattern of spellings in English emerged
over many centuries …
William
T. Stokes from Currents
In Literacy
If
you're flying to Mexico, you can hold in your hand a
little card
that shows the spelling of every Spanish sound.
The
reverse is not true.
No
immigrant coming to the U.S. can hold a card that shows the
spelling of English sounds. Such a card, if it could be made would be the size of a refrigerator door
since we spell our 42 sounds in a potpourri of over 400 different ways.
American
Literacy Council – Spelling Matters
The problem
with English spelling is that the letters do not
correspond predictably to speech sounds.
The
40-odd sounds of English can be spelled in hundreds of ways, and one spelling can represent many sounds.
The Simplified
Spelling Society
When words are spelled the way they sound it
is relatively easy to spell any word you can
pronounce.
On
the average the consonants
can be spelled 9 different ways.
The average vowel
can spelled a phenomenal 20.7 different ways.
The Spellings of Sounds -
Lamar
University
In a phonemic or alphabetic
system, these (total English) sounds would be spelled about 40 ways.
In the traditional English writing system, they are spelled over
400 ways.
Alphabets
for English by Steve
Bett
Why
should we citizens of a supposedly progressive nation, the most
advanced on earth, so unknowledgeably and senselessly cling to
an ancient, impossibly irregular non-system of spelling that has
no place in this space age, this computer age?
Great
Adventure 2000: Wendell H. Hall
In
proportion to what is spent and invested in education, English-speaking countries have the greatest problems of illiteracy
and semiliteracy in the world.
Less than 5% of Britain’s and Americans (and Australians) can
spell in English without mistakes, or without dictionaries or
computer spell-checkers - but the big
and serious problem
is not their inability to write - it is the high proportion of
the population who cannot learn to read
properly.
Spelling
is a social invention by Valerie Yule
History
of the Alphabet:
There is widespread agreement among scholars that spoken
language has had the single greatest influence of all factors
on man’s thought processes and is responsible for its very
origin. Second only to the impact of
speech on thought has been writing.
Richard Logan – The
Alphabet Effect
The art of writing
provided man with a transpersonal
memory. Men were given an artificially extended and
verifiable memory of objects and events not
present to sight or recollection… Man’s
activities and powers roughly extended in proportion to the increased use and perfection of
written records.
Harold Innis
- The Alphabet Effect
There
are about 3000 languages in the modern world. Two thirds of the
world's languages are still unwritten, and there are only several hundred different writing systems.
Written language is a also a human invention, like spoken language, but it is not a universal invention.
Few societies have invented a writing system for themselves - most have been
borrowed and adapted from the original inventors. Civilisations as advanced as the Incas have had no writing. The civilizations of the written word were limited mainly to Asia, Europe and the Middle East.
Writing Systems of the World
While
speaking is a universal human competence that has been
characteristic of the species from the beginning and that is acquired by all normal human beings without systematic
instruction,
writing is a technology of relatively recent history
that must be
taught
to each generation of children.
Ignace
Gelb distinguished
four
stages
in this evolution (of writing), beginning with
picture writing,
which
expressed ideas directly; followed by
word-based
writing
systems; then by
sound-based
syllabic writing
systems,
including unvocalized syllabaries or consonantal systems; and
concluding with
the Greek invention of the alphabet.
Encyclopedia
Britannica: History of Writing Systems
The
transition from consonantal writing to alphabetic writing, writing with full representation of both consonants and
vowels, occurred when the Semitic script was adapted to the Greek language.
This
occurred about 1000-900 BC.
Further
developments of the alphabet resulted from changes in the
phonology of Latin and of the Romance languages that evolved from it. For English,
the differentiation of all the 26 letters was completed only in
the 19th century.
Encyclopedia
Britannica: History of Writing Systems
It
is self evident that the Roman alphabet is superbly well suited
to represent the Latin language. But, it is also clear
that without numerous accents, additional characters, grammatical
rules and even more exceptions,
the same twenty-six characters are a poor choice to represent the sounds of English
or most other western languages
Nicholas Fabian’s Type Design,
Typography and Graphic Images
History of Spelling:
…grete dyversite in English
and in the writyng of our tung.
- Chaucer 14th
Century
The Problem: English can’t
be spelt
- George Bernard Shaw
Throughout
the middle ages, scholars
studied and wrote primarily in Latin, or chose to represent other languages, such as
English, using the familiar Roman alphabet. As the English
language developed, pronunciations, spellings, and grammatical
forms underwent rapid change and dialect variations abounded,
especially during the period of Middle English.
William
T. Stokes from Currents
In Literacy
History
tells us that English spelling made sense back during the reign
of Henry VIII. Written
letters corresponded to speech sounds
in the language, so spelling was reasonably
"phonemic."
Spelling: When English Spelling Affects
Cueing
With the Reformation came a demand for reading the vernacular by the many not just Latin by the few. First Luther in Germany, then the Calvinists, asserted that each person should be able to read and study the scriptures as a means to personal salvation. The Bible was translated and the new invention, the printing press, meant books were available to many more people. In England, the monarchy wanted the boys "to read English intelligently instead of Latin unintelligently."
Borrowings from other languages, particularly French, Latin and Greek,
were already making English a rich and diversified language, but
the accommodation of these words meant that its spelling was so diversified, reading it became far more than deciphering
a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds.
This situation became aggravated over time by changes in pronunciation and the many dialects that have to be
accommodated, so that spellings
have become less and less indicators of sounds.
While
a few people, understood the problem could be alleviated by a
truly English alphabet,
teachers were bewildered or angered when
their pupils who had clearly learned their letters could not
read.
No
longer could someone just learn the basic letters and translate
them into the sounds of words. The same letter or letters could have different sounds and one sound could be
represented by different letters.
Teaching
Reading - a History
Champions of Change and Efforts to Compensate
English has had some spelling reforms in the period from the Norman
Conquest (1066) to the publication of Samuel Johnson's
influential Dictionary in 1754. These included the introduction
of etymological, Latin, and French spellings and conventions.
Few of the reforms were designed to make the English writing system
simpler and more alphabetical or
phonemic.
Alphabets
for English by Steve
Bett
In the middle of the eighteen
century, the illustrious Benjamin Franklin
designed an alternate phonetic alphabet in which each letter represented only one sound and each sound was
represented by only one letter.
Nicholas
Fabian’s Type Design, Typography and Graphic
Images
…as every Letter ought to be,
confin'd to one; the same is to be observ'd in all the Letters,
Vowels and Consonants, hat wherever they are met with, or in whatever Company, their
Sound is always the same.
Benjamin Franklin 1768
(1806)
Webster worked out a system of diacritics to supply a guide to pronunciation and he gave rules for
pronunciation, hoping at best to partially standardize American
speech.
Noah Webster:
Biography of a Spelling Reformer
Alexander Melville Bell's (1819-1905)
Visible Speech
alphabet was another contender to replace the
existing Latin alphabet with a phonetic one, one which better illustrates
the sounds used in the English language (Melville Bell was Alexander Graham
Bell's father and a highly acclaimed teacher of the
deaf, as was Alexander in the early 1870s).
Nicholas
Fabian’s Type Design, Typography and Graphic
Images
Charles
Darwin
and Lord
Tennyson
gave support to the British Spelling Reform Association founded in
1879.
The
Simplified Spelling Board was founded in the U.S. in 1906, and
had a list of 300-plus spellings. One of the founding members was
Andrew
Carnegie.
History
of Spelling Reform by Cornell Kimball
The
trouble with him is that he attacked orthography
at
the wrong end.
He
meant well, but he attacked the symptoms and not the cause of the disease.
He
ought to have gone to work on the alphabet.
A
real reform would settle them (crazy spellings) once and for
all, and wind up by giving us an alphabet that we wouldn't have to spell with at all, instead of this present
silly
alphabet,
which I
fancy was invented by a drunken thief.
Mark Twain to Andrew Carnegie at a
Dedication December 9, 1907
(read Twain’s comical piece on
what reformed spelling would lead to)
U.S.
President Theodore Roosevelt also promoted simpler spellings. Initially, he ordered the
Government Printing Office to use the Simplified Spelling Board's 300 or so proposed
spellings. (Congress ... voted, 142 to 24, that "no
money appropriated in this act shall be used (for) printing
documents ... unless same shall conform to the orthography
... in ... generally accepted dictionaries.)
History
of Spelling Reform by Cornell Kimball
It was (George
Bernard)
Shaw's
opinion that language (or the social inferences made from a
person's use of language) was partly to blame for keeping
the lower classes in the social, professional and educational
gutter.
He believed that the seemingly arbitrary
relationship between the Roman alphabet's letters and the
English language's sounds
contributed to this.
He
gave instructions in his will
that for the first 21 years after his death, the earnings from
the royalties of all
his works should be spent on the creation
and promotion of a phonetic alphabet, using 40 or more letters,
each of which represented one sound -- and one sound only -- of the English language.
On George Bernard Shaw
If
the professors of English will complain to me that the students
who come to the universities, after all those years of
study, still cannot spell `friend,' I say to them that something's the
matter with the way you
spell `friend.'
Richard
Feynman
(Isaac)
Asimov
gives three reasons for why it would be worthwhile for everyone
to take the trouble (to reform our writing systems):
(1)
However much trouble the reforms would be to us, they would make
the lives of our children and
grandchildren immeasurably easier.
This is the sort of sacrifice that parents should be willing to
make for their children.
(2) The reforms, once in place, would promote literacy.
This would boost worker productivity and assist in enhancing national prosperity.
(3) Earth is in need of a common second language, and English is
the most widespread current candidate. Removing the
idiosyncrasies of English would promote its spread, which would promote international understanding and world peace.
Richard
Feynman and Isaac Asimov on Spelling Reform by John J. Reilly
Since 1100, more than 70 phonemic notational systems have been
proposed for English. Had any one of them been adopted,they would have provided a more consistent writing system and
simplified the spelling of English words.
Alphabets
for English by Steve
Bett
For optimal literacy, spelling should show pronunciation, and pronunciation should determine spelling. But over time, as pronunciation changes and new words enter the language, this match between letters and sounds can break down. Then learning to read and write becomes harder, and all education suffers. Most languages have therefore modernized their spelling in the 20th century. English, however, has not done so systematically over the past 1,000 years.
…Yet the demand for higher levels of literacy ensures
continuing global dissatisfaction with the present position, and
research (eg, comparing literacy standards between languages) is increasingly
revealing the harm done by the erratic spelling of English.
The Simplified Spelling
Society
There
have been major or minor reforms in the writing systems of every
major language in the world except English, within the past hundred years. These include Afrikaans, Albanian,
Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Czech, Danish,
Dutch, Filipino, French, Finnish, German, Greek, Greenlandic,
Hebrew, Indonesian, Irish, Itlaian, Korean, Japanese, Malaysian, Niugini Tok Pisin, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian,
Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Swedish, Taiwanese Mandarin,
Turkish and Vietnamese.
… if
literacy is not to be restricted to an elite,
an efficient writing system must be able to respond to needs for
change…
Writing
Systems of the World
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