SPELLING REFORM
And The Real Reason It's Impossible

The normal reply by your run-of-the-mill wimpish gradualist reformer tends to be something along the lines of "Oh dear!  I'll have to try to persuade you it's a good thing.  Well, er, look; the old system gives <GH> well over a dozen possible pronunciations: <CallaGHan, cauGHt, doGHouse, EdinburGH, eiGHth, ginGHam, hiccouGH, houGH, KeiGHley, lonGHand, louGH, plouGH, straiGHt, touGH, yoGHurt>!  The new system is quicker, easier, more elegantly logical, and less cruel to small children (or indeed the billions of adults apparently doomed to learn English as a world language).  Please try to be a bit more open-minded!"

I on the other hand prefer the kind of reply that goes: Eat leaden death, loathsome bourgeois counter-revolutionary running-dogs!  (Did I say giving me Absolute Power would necessarily be a good thing?)

• Compound sounds like "J" (which is phonetically "D" + "ZH") would have to be clumsily spelled out in full (so <jay> becomes «dzhey»).
• Trivial phonetic distinctions, as between the two kinds of "A" in "CHAMPION'S SWAG", or of "T" in "TEA STRAINER" would require distinct spellings; and subtle dialectal vowel distinctions - as between Glaswegian and Bronx versions of "CAT" - would further confuse matters.
• "Do you want to?" would have to be spelt the way it's pronounced - as one word, «dzhawonnuh?»"

[Terminological intermission - if you don't see what the -eme words mean... well, you probably shouldn't be here, but here's a quick summary:

Grapheme

the basic unit of orthography.  Usually in alphabet-based writing systems equivalent to a letter; however, compound graphemes made up of several parts (eg <Å, NG, Æ>) are also common and may count as separate items.

Phoneme

the basic unit of phonology.  Each phoneme is not so much a particular sound as a set of sounds conventionally grouped together by a given language or dialect.  Variations within the set are disregarded; but distinctions between phonemes are used to tell words apart (eg <Tie, THigh, Die, THy>).  Note that it is quite possible for a single phoneme to be a "compound" of several sounds - <chow> for instance may be analysed as just two phonemes, the affricate <ch> = "T + SH" and the diphthong <ow> = "AH + OO".

Morpheme

the basic unit of morphology; a meaningful building-block in word-construction, either to coin new dictionary words ("derivation", eg <follow + -er = follower>) or just to modify them to suit their role in the sentence ("inflection", eg <follow + -ed = followed>).

"In such a system,

• The compound phoneme /dZ/, which functions as a unit in the English sound system, can conveniently be spelt with the letter «J».
• Phonetic variants of /&/ or /t/ are no concern of a well-designed script; dialectal cases - especially ones as trivial as the one quoted above - are easy to handle (see below).
• If the individual words are pronounced in isolation as «du, yu, wont, tu», nothing is forcing us to put the reduced versions in the dictionary (any more than we need to put glottal stops in the alphabet)."

Reply: "These words already are indistinguishable when spoken, but when did this fact last cause you any significant inconvenience in a conversation?  People naturally avoid ambiguities in speech unless they're trying to contrive a pun, so if you write as you would speak homophones are no problem.  Contrariwise, ambiguous spellings like <bow, close, does, dove, lead, live, minute, number, read, use, wind, wound> currently are a problem; and such misleading homographs (or do I mean heterophones?) could be sorted out by the most moderate of spelling reforms.

Besides, there will be plenty of slack in the system to distinguish between «fisher» and «fisyur», «maynor» and «mayner»; and as for <cession>... what does it mean, anyway?  I'm not making these examples up, you know."

Other major world languages faced with the homophony problem have found solutions such as the following:

• Semantic radicals as in Chinese.  Their logograms generally have two parts, one hinting at the word's sound and the other a clue to its meaning - rather as if we spelt the preposition <to> as «2^@».  This is unworkable in an alphabetic script, though numerals might make sentences such as <We won two to one too> less confusing.
• Differential capitalisation as in German, where <Morgen> ("morning") is a noun and <morgen> ("tomorrow") isn't.  English word-classes are a bit chaotic for this, though it might help for pronouns (to distinguish <I> vs. <eye>, <you> vs. <yew> and so on).
• Stress marking as in Spanish: <se> is unmarked where it means the grammatical reflexive pronoun ("him/herself"), but the homophonous word for "I know" is treated as more significant, and thus "stressed" as <sé>.  Compulsory diacritics like this would probably be unpopular in English, but we might allow for them as an optional extra («no» vs. «nó»)...

Answer: "At present almost every letter of the alphabet is severely overstrained - it's "EY" as in <beAuty>, "BEE" as in <numB>, "SEE" as in <musCle>, "DEE" as in <hanDkerchief>, "EE" as in <siEvEd>, "EFF" as in <oF>, "JEE" as in <Gnomonic>, "AITCH" as in <Hour>, "EYE" as in <busIness>, "JAY" as in <Jaeger>, "CAY" as in <Knee>, "ELL" as in <coLonel>, "EM" as in <Mnemonic>, "EN" as in <damN>, "OWE" as in <peOple>, "PEE" as in <Pneumonic>, "KEW" as in <Quay>, "AHR" as in <comfoRtable>, "ESS" as in <iSle>, "TEE" as in <husTle>, "YOO" as in <bUild>, "VEE" as in <Volkslied>, "DOUBLEYOO" as in <Wry>, "ECKS" as in <rouX>, "WIGH" as in <mYrrh>, "ZED" as in <capercailZie>!  But in a reform, what's to stop us using two-letter graphemes (as in «shown»!)?  That way there are more than enough possibilities; we can even retire <Q>, <X>, and our existing ugly diacritic, the apostrophe!  One new vowel symbol would be handy; I'd go for Scandinavian-style slashed <O> as in <Bjørk>."

But by the way, while we're addressing hypothetical typewriter manufacturers, I'd better warn them that the old QWERTY keyboard will be declared ungoodthinkful too.  Its deliberately unergonomic layout, designed to slow down common sequences on early manual typewriters, will be a doubly pointless legacy when we're typing different common sequences on unjammable machines.

Normal reformers' reply: "Aren't you overreacting a bit?  We'll phase it in slowly, so there's plenty of time to reprint the classics - most of the editing required is simple search-and-replace work.  Compare the gradual process of metrication.  Other languages manage spelling reforms once a generation; and the Japanese seem to be perfectly happy using several very different writing systems in parallel!"

My additional remarks: First - if, as is here conceded, the old orthography looks so very unlike a reasonable one... why stick with it?  People complained about the jarring novelty of electric lights, but I don't hear anyone these days campaigning for a change back.  Second - anyone caught using pecks and bushels after the tenth anniversary of my glorious rule will be branded on the forehead with the word «idiot».  And third - trying to read Shakespeare "in the original" is futile.  As originally composed, it was...

• Handwritten in an inconsistent style, not printed in the modern standard orthography.  Witness the following random sample from "Henry VI Part 3" (III 91-2): <I am a subiect fit to be ieast withall,/ But farre vnfit to be a Soueraigne>.  And remember, he never once spelt his name <Shakespeare>!
• Designed to be declaimed with a thick sixteenth-century accent: "OY AHM UH SOOBJEK FIT TOE BEE JAIST WI-THAAL, BOOT FAR-ROONFIT TOE BEE UH SAWVA-RAYN".  Anything else ruins it as poetry!  To contemporary listeners <pass> made a good rhyme for <was>, and <departure> for <shorter>; the author's name was more like "SHEXPAIRR" than "SHEYKSPEEAH".
• Full of extinct grammatical features - "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" means "Why are you (named) Romeo?"; "Live thou, I live" means "If you should live, I will live"; and "Knock me at this gate" means "Knock on the door for me".  On the other hand, "It's being left on its own" would have sounded utterly ungrammatical to Shakespeare.
• Intended for an audience familiar with Elizabethan idioms, topical references and worldview - Divine Right of Kings, the Four Humours, Jews as bogeymen, etc.  Modern performances ignore most of the puns and subtexts - fortunately for his reputation.

Reply: Actually, there are three skills involved in fluent reading...

• Word-anticipation, guessing what will come next on the basis of context.  This is what speed-reading really depends on, and it's essentially independent of the writing system involved.
• Word-recognition, treating words (or occasionally syllables) as arbitrary units to be memorised.  This can be a useful skill once mastered, but a painful one to acquire - ask any Japanese kid.  The way the current orthography forces learners to handle many common words as single arbitrary glyphs (<doesn't one though?>) is a stumbling-block many schoolchildren never really get over.
• Word-analysis, handling words as collections of sounds.  Even though English makes it unreliable, this is the basic strategy for beginners, and still a constituent of any truly literate adult's reading skills - does the word <squilliform> give you any trouble?  You may not consciously spell out (eg) the word <HANDBAG> as <H-A-N-D-B-A-G>, but if it was just a silhouette you'd have to learn it separately from <handbag> or indeed <Handbag> (look closely at those letter shapes)!

Reply: Ah, yes, a much more intelligent point.  (Okay, I admit it, this one's a plant; I've never seen it considered anywhere else, but I thought it deserved an airing.)  Scrabble-players will have to decide whether to play "historical" or "recalibrated" Scrabble; the rest of us will just have to get used to the idea that the <E.U.> is the «Y(uropian) Y(union)», <K.O.s> are «N(ok)-A(wt)z», the <C.I.A.> is the «S(entral) I(ntelijens) E(yjensi)», and a <G.H.Q.> is a «J(eneral) H(ed)-K(worterz)»!  <A.I.D.S.> may still be «A.I.D.S.», but this is no longer the same as the word «eydz»; and since any serious reform would also change the names of the letters, even the unaltered initialisms may be hard to recognise in speech: «A.I.» for instance becomes "AH EE".  If you think that's confusing, count yourself lucky I'm not reforming the Phoenician-derived alphabetical order!

Come to think of it, <I.D., O.K.> and many others (especially tradenames) are already anomalies, not standing for any particular real series of English words; and acronyms such as <laser>, <quango> or <ufo> are effectively independent of their original forms too.  Do we make it «aydi, leyzer» or «I.D., L.A.S.I.R.»?  And as for <G.N.U.> ("Gnu's Not Unix")...  I don't particularly care what happens in these cases; but the marketing director of <I.C.I.> might.

Reply: True, our Norman-influenced orthography is a bridge between English and French.  But why force everyone to learn it as the only spelling system for English?  Most Asian (or even Scandinavian) learners of English care little for French; and Texans would be better off with a bridge towards Spanish.  Personally, I would have been happy to learn a bit about Anglo-Norman during French O- and A-level, but nobody wanted to tell me anything about it then!

There are three main problems with spelling English as Anglo-Norman:

1. Mediaeval French isn't Modern French.  The three examples above used to be pronounced roughly as spelt ("QUA-LEAFY-CATSY-ONS, DZHO-INTS, TSHAN-DZHES"), but nowadays they're barely recognisable ("KALI-FEEKASS-YAWNG, ZHWAHNG, SHAHNGZH").  French could do with a new broom of its own - I'd suggest «kalifikasionz, jwantz, xanjhz»!
2. Mediaeval English isn't Modern English.  The biggest change is the Great Vowel Shift, which is responsible for our pronunciation of <A, E, I, O, U> as "EY EE EYE OWE YEW" (as in no other spelling system on the planet), rather than approximately "AH EH EE OH OO" (as in Old English, Finnish, Latin, Indonesian, Swahili... etc).  The first hurdle for language teachers is usually to persuade pupils that (eg) <dei> is "DAY-EE" not "DEE-EYE"; a spelling reform that made English less insular would be a great help here.
3. Mediaeval French never was Mediaeval English.  Applying Romance orthographic prejudices to a Germanic language just caused trouble from the start - witness the Norman scribes' use of:
• Cosmetic <O> in place of <U> in <cOme, lOve, sOup, tOngue>, and many others where they thought a <U> would look ugly in clerical handwriting (too many consecutive vertical strokes).
• "Soft <C>" in <Cell>.  Germanic "K"s didn't soften like this.  Result, confusions such as <Celt, sCeptic, Coelacanth>!
• "Soft <G>" in <Gin>.  Again, English "G" sounds never obeyed this rule; hence the inconsistencies in <Give, Gaol, marGarine>.
• Silent <U> to signal exceptions to the above (<gUild, qUoin, tongUe>) - especially unwelcome in that it interferes with the following.
• <QU> for the "KW"-sound in <QUeen> (the Anglo-Saxons had preferred to write <cwene>).
And then there's the confused way they handled the voiced fricative sounds:
• "V" written <V> in <VerVe> (with a pointless final <E>, as usual).
• "DH" written <TH> in <THiTHer> (hopelessly mixed up with the "TH" in <THinkeTH>).
• "Z" written <S> in <uSerS> (leaving idle the more appropriate <Z>).
• "ZH" written <S> in <viSion> (never properly recognised as a distinct sound).
• And the now-silent sound written <GH> as in <liGHt> (simply <liht> in Anglo-Saxon).

Reply: English is hospitable to immigrant words because it has simple morphology, rich phonology and a cosmopolitan tradition.  Spelling is irrelevant - witness the words <fatwa>, <glasnost> and <futon>, taken from languages that don't even spell them in the same writing system as we do!  My policy on imports would be:

• Words that retain foreign citizenship are immune to English spelling rules, and are spelt as the source language prefers, but italicised to alert naive readers to the fact that (for instance) «Fräulein» isn't pronounced "FRAWLEEN".  They may not be able to guess how it is pronounced, but that problem will if anything be reduced by the reform.
• Some imports may have debatable transcriptions, either because of changes Back Home (technically it's «chateau», without the recently-reformed French circumflex accent) or doubt about the best romanisation («Koran» or «Qur'an»?  «Shintô» or «Sintoo»?).  Never mind.
• Words which have made English their permanent home must conform to its rules.  If there really is such a word as <connoisseur>, it's an English one with no special right to a funny spelling - the French say <connaisseur>.  The same applies one way or another to all the "French" words and phrases in the following list: <blancmange, bon viveur, double entendre, épergne, forté, locale, morale, nom-de-plume, papier-mâché, resumé, table d'hôte>.
• Foreign-language placenames can ignore the reform, but many places have English names independent of the forms used by their inhabitants.  <Spain, Munich, Peking> are English words, and so get reformed («Speyn, Myunik, Piykinh») no matter what the locals call them.
• Many terms from classical languages (<alias, Hades, nisi, Julius Caesar>) have acquired "anglicised" pronunciations.  These are genuinely problematic; should they be respelt («Juwlius Siyzar»), or even repronounced ("YULI-OOS KY-SAR")?  And come to that, the Shakespearean tragedy was <Iulius Cæsar>, originally pronounced "JOOH-LEE-OOS SAY-ZAR"!  Fortunately, some shortcuts can be taken; archaisms can be treated as foreignisms.
• Personal names are rather like historical spellings in that your birth certificate may be regarded as definitive; Mr <Geoffrey Ewan Quinn> won't necessarily have to re-monogram all his possessions as the property of Mr «Jefri Yuan Kwin».  However, new names should be spelt sanely; and anyone who wants to avoid constantly telling people "Well, okay, it's pronounced "FANSHAW" but it's spelt <Featherstonehaugh>" should switch.  I for one would be perfectly happy to become a romanised «Ray».

Reply: If etymology is a sufficiently important subject that primary school children are forced to master a Mediaeval Reenactment spelling system on this basis, why are those children never actually taught even the basics of linguistic history?  Surely any kid who has gone to the trouble of learning an etymological spelling for <wrestling> (etc) should be entitled to go on and take the subject at GCSE level!  But somehow I suspect that most people find etymology supremely unimportant in their lives... If anyone ever needs to know the origin of the word «reslinh», there will still be dictionaries about.  Come to that, they will be easier to use (you can find the word under «R») and have more room for etymologies (as they need less room for pronunciation guides)!

Besides, why stop at Old English?  Why not write everything in Proto-Indo-European?  English spelling is much less help as a guide to lexical history than it would be if anyone cared, featuring as it does...

• Double Standards - inconsistent cut-off points for retaining silent letters.  My favourite example is the homophonophobes' <reign/rain>.  These spellings might seem to imply that <reign>, unlike <rain>, was until recently pronounced "REAGAN".  However, a millennium or so ago, <reign> was a Latinate word pronounced "REH-NYUH" (with no "G"); <rain> was a Germanic word pronounced "REGHN" (with a defininite "G").
• False Resemblances - there's no <bread> in <gingerbread> (Old French <gingembraz>); likewise for the apparent components of <arrowroot, cockroach, crayfish, forlorn hope, lapwing, outrage, penthouse, pennyroyal, recoil, wheatears, woodchuck, wormwood>.
• Crypto-Doublets - spellings which disguise rather than demonstrate the connections between such surprising cognate pairs as <ague/cute, apron/mop, coy/quit, cryptic/grotesque, epée/spade, equip/skiff, gopher/waffle, tradition/treason, tulip/turban>.
• Red Herrings - spellings which are neither phonologically nor etymologically justifiable, as in <aCHe, agHast, aiSle, aLmond, ancHor, bUry, (musical) cHords, coLonel, couLd, crumB, deliGHt, dingHy, foreiGn, gHastly, gHerkin, gHost, hauGHty, iSland, lacHrymose, postHumous, Ptarmigan, QUeue, rHyme, rHumb, roWlocks, Scissor, sCythe, sovereiGn, spriGHtly, thumB, tongUE, Whole, Whore>.  All the capitalised letters are spurious, and often they were deliberately added as "improvements" by incompetent etymologists.

Reply: At last we're getting to the non-trivial arguments!  Yes, there's an important problem here that the system has to deal with carefully.  But its nature is still obscured by several layers of misunderstanding, which I'll try to handle quickly:

• Who said I'd send out "dialect police" to arrest persistent aitch-droppers?  This is a spelling reform, not a speaking reform!  Besides, if it's only the pronunciation we're talking about (rather than grammar), the approved linguistics jargon is "accent", not "dialect".
• As things stand, everyone is forced to learn a "standard spelling accent" that has been dead for centuries.  At least becoming bilingual in Cockney and BBC English might be useful...
• Why assume the spelling accent would a posh one?  It would have to be a sort of artificial "Highest Common Factor" archi-phonology everyone could agree on.

1. Phonetic (or "realisational") variation.  Trivial but obvious features like the way Cockneys pronounce <bay> almost as "BUY" (while <buy> becomes more like "BOY" and <boy> like "BOOY").  Cockneys have no trouble distinguishing them and lining them up correctly with the spellings, so this is irrelevant to the orthography.
2. Phonemic (or "systemic") variation.  Added or lost distinctions, such as between "TH" and "F" (Cockneys pronounce <thin> the same as <fin>).  If the spelling system makes more distinctions than you do, you can ignore them while reading, and your difficulties in learning to write will be nothing new or serious ("Hmm, is it spelled «theft» or «feft»?").  On the other hand if it makes fewer distinctions you'll have serious trouble reading ("Hmm, does it mean "THREE" or "FREE"?").  The lesson I draw from this is that the spelling system should make all the available phonemic distinctions - and not just the ones the Queen makes.
3. Phonotactic (or "distributional") variation.  This is variation dependent on the phonetic context, like the way Cockneys - and in fact the English generally - drop any "R" sound that isn't followed by a vowel (so that "LARDER" = "LADA").  Again, the orthography should side with those who keep the distinctions clear, which in this case means spelling a lot of words with an «R» omitted by BBC newsreaders.
4. Lexical (or "selectional") variation.  Disputed idiomatic cases such as "GRASS/GRAASS" or "DOSSLE/DOHCYLE".  Where these are real regional standards rather than merely outbreaks of "spelling-pronunciation" (like saying "CUP-BOARD" for "KUBBERD"), they have as much right to be tolerated as alternative spellings as they have to be tolerated as alternative pronunciations.  Obviously, you ought to be consistent, but if your recipes refer to «tomeyto» they will communicate at least as effectively as if you "standardised" it to «tomahto».

• <Cats> and <dogs>, which would have to become «katS» and «dogZ», with two different plural markers.
• Stress-shifting <PHOtograph - phoTOGrapher - photoGRAPHic> (or less dramatically, <REal - reALity>).
• "Softening" <critic/critiCism, analogue/analoGy, fuse/fuSion> etc.
• Vowel-shifted <sanity/sAne, obscenity/obscEne, divinity/divIne, conical/cOne, punish/pUnitive> etc.

Reply: Absolutely - the morphemic principle (One Spelling Per Morpheme) conflicts with the phonemic system and is worth making concessions over.  Affixes that still work as productive processes, like plural <-s> or past tense <-ed>, should be given consistent single spellings wherever possible (including words such as <pianos/potatoEs, publicly/toxicALly, fortnight/foUrteen> where the conventional spellings are flagrant breaches of this principle).  Likewise, compromises can be found for the stress-shift and consonant-softening cases, though there is room for debate about how far it should be allowed to complicate things...

• Foreign languages - even those with exemplary orthographies - flout this principle all the time.  Portuguese doesn't exactly signpost the link between <nação> and <nacional> - and Welsh doesn't even enforce stable initial letters: "nation" is <cenedl>, but "in a nation" is <yng nghenedl>!
• Stress-shift is troublesome only if the unstressed "schwa" sound is treated as a phoneme in its own right needing to be uniformly represented with a special unique symbol.  But accents vary widely in where they use schwas (spelling reform proposals from the US always impose reduced vowels where I use distinct sounds - eg rendering both "pidgIn" and "pigeOn" as «pijun»).  It makes more sense to allow the schwa to be written with any convenient vowel letter («pijin/pijon») and rely on the reader to apply appropriate stress rules.
• While I'd be happy to compromise on <fuSion> and its many relatives, which are easy to accommodate, I am unconvinced by the idea of special treatment for "softening" <C> and <G>.  Are they really live phonological processes?  The suffix <-ic> hardly deserves a special spelling rule of its own to cover "IKAL/ISSITY"!
• Vowel-shifted doublets in particular need no special privileges.  With so many cases - I could also quote <natural/nAture, recess/recEde, senility/senIle, colony/colOnial, humble/hUmility> - it should be self-evident no matter how we spell it that (eg) "short IH" is often related to "long EYE".  It would be a step forward if English-speakers recognised this explicitly, rather than just vaguely taking the two sounds to be "the same thing".
• Where do we stop?  There are plenty of morphemic links that are concealed by the Anglo-Norman orthography.  Should we insert rules into the spelling system to connect <abound/abundant, destroy/destruction, fool/folly, join/junction, ordain/ordination, receive/reception, solve/solution, voice/vocal>, and all the crypto-doublets quoted above?

Reply: Well, I'm certainly glad I didn't say that...

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