Who decides how we spell?

Here I add another of Marsha Bell really interesting posts.
Hope you enjoy reading it!

Many countries have official bodies which keep an eye on the health of their spelling, such as the Academie in France, or the Deutsche Sprachgesellschaft shared by German-speaking countries. People contact them about spellings which make learning to read and write too difficult, or cause too many spelling errors. From time to time, these venerated organisations then recommend spelling changes for tackling them, in some countries more often than others. They reflect how much people care about the ease with which children can learn to read and write.

The Scandinavian countries, with the exception of Denmark, have all tried to make learning to read and write progressively easier. Finland has made its spelling so simple that its literacy acquisition is literally as easy as child’s play now.

Holland and all the German-speaking countries have also gradually made learning to read and write easier, since about 1800. The last German spelling reform was in 2005. After centuries of doing very little, the French Academy has recently also begun to consider which French spelling irregularities hinder literacy acquisition. Portugal decided last year to adopt the spelling changes which Brazil introduced first, and which have substantially speeded up literacy learning there.

There is no organisation which watches over the soundness of English spelling. Speakers of English regard dictionaries as the arbiters on spelling. Yet dictionary publishers claim that they merely list the spellings which are most commonly used. For many words which have no clearly dominant or ‘correct’ spelling, such as ‘bannister / banister’ or ‘pastie / pasty’, they to give both.

This suggests that if enough people decided to spell some of the words which make learning to read and write English much harder than need be (e.g. have, give, live, friend, many, pretty, women) more sensibly (e.g. hav, giv, liv, frend, menny, pritty, wimmen), then dictionaries would soon follow suit. In reality, most speakers of English obey dictionaries as if they were god-given and would not dream of challenging their authority. They even feel uncomfortable about discussing the rightness or wrongness of English spelling, almost like religious believers react to having their beliefs questioned.

Because I was not born to English-speaking parents and did not meet English spelling until the age of 14, its many imperfections became more readily obvious to me from the moment I began to learn it. I could immediately see that they made learning to read and write much harder than Lithuanian and Russian. Our teachers, too, made us constantly aware that English did not use letters like other alphabetic writing systems do, and that trying to fathom out the logic of English spelling was unprofitable.

I found out where most English words came from when I went on to learn German, French, Italian and Spanish. This also showed me how much English spelling needlessly abuses the alphabetic principle. For example, the English words ‘mother’ and ‘brother’, clearly derive from the same Germanic roots as the German words ‘Mutter’ and ‘Bruder’, yet in English they have perversely ended up with ‘o’ for the short U-sound, instead of ‘u’. The modern German cousins of the English words ‘brought, daughter, laugh’, with their tricky spellings, have been amended in accordance with their changed pronunciation and cause neither reading nor spelling difficulties (brachte, Tochter, lichen).

Most English imports from French now have sensible spellings (beef, budge, mustard – from ‘boeuf, bouger, moutarde’), but too many are still spelt according to French rather than English rules (double, group, touch). This is true of many other foreign imports into English too. For ease of learning, the words ‘photo’ and ‘telephone’ have been respelt with ‘f’ for the F-sound in both Spanish and German, while English insists on keeping the more difficult ’ph’.

When I became a teacher of English and modern languages in Dorset in 1976, I discovered that English spelling inconsistencies gave native speakers of English nearly as much trouble as they had done to me as a foreigner. Now that I have spent over 15 years studying English spelling irregularities and the educational harm which they do, I am beginning to find it hard to desist from suggesting some improvements.
Posted by Masha Bell at 03:08
Labels: Dictionaries and spelling 'correctness', roots of English