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Surplus Cut Spelling

The Proposal to Remove Surplus Letters

Adding three rules to the spelling of english would remove over 50% of the common spelling errors
Index Page

A Streamlined Writing System for English:  Modernizing English spelling by removing redundant letters

|   Rules   |   Background   |  Hanbdbook   |  Spelling as a Social Invetion  |  References   |
 Streamlining  |  Why Reform English Spelling  |   Savings

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The simplest form of clipt or cut spelng removes the redundant silent letters - letters that provide no clue as to the pronunciation of a word. Next, double letters and letters standing for the neutral unstressed vowel (or shwa) are eliminated in unstressed syllabic terminals The word little becomes litl and the word turner becomes turnr.  Irregular but frequently used words such as THE are not changed.

Additional Steps Toward Ryt Rytng
More complex forms of CUT SPELNG remove letters that provide an unreliable guide to pronunciation (the becomes th) and make a few substitutions to eliminate ambiguity and confusion: flight becomes flyt, write becomes ryt, and register becomes rejistr.  The reduction of the to th and who to ho are perhaps the most controversial recomended changes in Cut Spelling and can be left out.

Cut spelling is not highly phonemic but it is more phonemic than traditional English orthography. Phonemic or 100% alphabetic spelling looks a little strange to those brought up on a steady diet of the traditional English orthography that is consistent only about 40% of the time.

The removal or omission of redundant letters reduces the amount of text by 8 to 12%. This combined with a more regular pattern of spelling can increase reading speed under certain conditions and makes English easier to spell.  Cut Spelling does remove about 50% of the common spelling errors: when to dbl consonants, where to put the silent vowel, how to spell /S'n/ cion, sion, tion, etc.

Because the basic pattern of English is retained, readers have little difficulty in adjusting to the new orthography. Within a couple of hours, most people can be reading streamlined semi-regularized English as fast as traditional English.

There are many full text versions of books and article on the Internet.  These can all be converted to cut spelling by a simple cut and paste operation.  Check out the automated spelling converter. PERL converter

The benefits of Cut Spelling  [more]

• Easier to spell than TES  [traditional or historical English spelling].
• Reading ease only slightly more difficult in the beginning.  Potential for faster reading due to being 10% more compact
• Faster to write although not abbreviated to the point of speedwriting.
• Easy to convert to --Just run the text through the on line converter.
• More compatible with Saxon [Old English], German, and other European languages.
Steve Bett, Ph.D. [pic]

Th Basics of Cut Speling ritn in CS D' Beisycs ov Cvt Speliq .rytn yn World English d' BeisIcs ov CLt Spelih  rit'n in IPA Cut Spelng (CS) is a simplifyd, partialy regulrized orthografy wich omits thre categoris of misleadng letrs:  Letrs irelevnt to pronunciation (eg, ‘debt’ becoms CS ‘det’).  Letrs standng for shwa with l, m, n, r (eg, ‘bottle’, ‘bottom’, ‘button’, ‘butter’ becom ‘bottl’, ‘bottm’, ‘buttn’, ‘buttr’); simlrly in inflections and som sufixs (eg,‘waitd’, ‘waitng’, ‘fishs’, ‘eatbl’, ‘edbl’).  Most dubld consnnts ar ritn singl (eg, ‘bottl’, ‘bottm’, ‘buttn’, ‘buttr’, ‘accommodation’ becom ‘botl’, ‘botm’, ‘butn’, ‘butr’, ‘acomodation’).  Othr rules simplify th use of capitl letrs and apostrofes. Aditionly, thre rules of letr-substitution aply:  Th sound /f/ is spelt f (eg, ‘fotograf’, ‘enuf’, ‘fon’).  Th sound /j/ is spelt j (eg, ‘jymnast’, ‘jinjr’, ‘juj’).  ig pronounced as long y is spelt y (eg, ‘sigh’, ‘sight’, ‘sign’ becom ‘sy’, ‘syt’, ‘syn’).  Readrs unfamilir with CS ar advised to ignor unusul spelngs at first and read as fluently as posbl. With a litl practis, CS becoms esy.

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RULES OF CUT SPELLING

By Chris Upward
Chairman of the Society's Cut Spelling Working Group
and author of the Cut Spelling Handbook, 2nd Ed., 1996
Simplified Spelling Society
61 Valentine Road, Birmingham, B14 7AJ, England
Tel. +44 (0)21-444 2837, Fax. 021-359 6153

Cutting rules

• These three problem areas of traditional spelling

correspond to the three main rules of Cut Spelling (CS).

Rule 1 Letters irrelevant to pronunciation

• About 20 of the 26 letters of the alphabet are sometimes used with no bearing on pronunciation at all. Some, like <e> in love, <gh> in though and <w> in answer, were once sounded, but fell silent centuries ago. Others were taken from foreign languages, like <ch> in yacht (Dutch), <h> in honest (French), and <p> in psyche (Greek), but are always silent in English. Yet others were inserted by analogy (<gh> in haughty to match naughty, <l> in could to match would) or to show a dubious or imagined derivation (<b> in doubt, <c> in scythe). Two vowel letters are often written when the pronunciation only needs one; thus <a> in measure, <e> in hearth, <i> in friend, <o> in people, <u> in build are all redundant. CS removes letters such as these from hundreds of often common words; most strikingly, CS eliminates that most grotesque of all English spelling patterns, the <gh>. List of ghost letters. redundancy.

Rule 2a Unstressed vowels before < l, m, n, r >  letr litl dubl comn othr

• Thousands of English words contain <l, m, n> or <r> after an unstressed vowel, though the pronunciation fails to tell us which vowel letter to write. In fact, it is often redundant and can be cut, as seen from such rhyming pairs as apple/ chapel, centre/enter: CS Rule 1 cut the silent <e> in apple, centre, and the resulting appl, centr show that unstressed <e> can be cut in chapel, enter too, giving CS chapl, entr. Likewise the forms rhythm, mustn't show that the unstressed <o> can go in fathom and the unstressed <a, e> in resistant, insistent, giving CS fathm, resistnt, insistnt. Sometimes two letters can be cut: CS reduces curtain, luncheon, fashion to curtn, lunchn, fashn. CS Rule 2 cuts a swathe through one of the areas of greatest uncertainty in English spelling.

Rule 2b Vowels in certain suffixes     eatabl edibl can be cut to eatbl edbl

• Similar is the cut of vowel letters in some major suffixes: the plural of ax(e) is cut to CS axs, distinguishing it from the uncut plural of axis (axes); the verb form learned is cut to CS lernd, but the adjective is distinguished as lerned. Strange at first is the cut of <-ing> to just <-ng> in verbs whose root ends in a consonant (waiting, hating diverge as CS waitng, hating), but an important gain from this cut is that it allows numerous troublesome doubled consonants to be simplified by Rule 3. A notable simplification is that the confusing <-able, -ible> suffixes are mostly reduced to just <-bl>, turning eatable, edible into CS eatbl, edbl.

Rule 3 Doubled consonants simplified

• Doubled consonants sound like single consonants, so the writer cannot tell when doubling is required: frequent errors are the inevitable result. CS simplifies nearly all of them, as in CS abreviate, embarass, omitd/comitd/benefitd, travld/ compeld and (by Rule 2) hopng/hoping for hopping/hoping. The main exceptions are disyllabic words ending in <y> and words ending in <ss>; furry, tinny, hiss, discuss therefore remain distinct from fury, tiny, his, discus.    World Spelling distinguishes these words by clarifying the vowel: f'ry fury,  tiny tainy, his hiz, discus disc's

Substitution rules

• The key feature of CS is that it removes rather than replaces letters. However, 3 simple substitutions are also made:
• 1 When <gh, ph> are pronounced /f/, they are spelt <f>.

This produces forms such as CS cof, tuf, fotografy, sulfr.
• 2 When <g, dg> are sounded as <j>, they are spelt <j>.

This produces forms such as CS juj, jeolojy, jinjr.
• 3 When <ig> is pronounced as in flight, sign, it is spelt <y>,

producing aligned forms such as fly, flyt, sty, sy, syn. 
The above outlines the CS proposal for modernizing English spelling.
A full account is given in a three-part Handbook. (see below)

Cut Spelling Handbook 2nd Edition - 1996 The simplification of written English by omission of redundant letters" 306pp, Simplified Spelling Society, 1992, £10 or US$20    how to order Part I. Rationale and Main Features Part II. Analysis of the present irregularities of English spelling Part III. a dictionary of over 20,000 of the most common words with redundant letters, giving their simpler CS equivalents Bibliography

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What ideas will people buy into? Would it be a good idea to simplify and rationalize the spelling of English? Those who don't know how to write English would support such a change. Those who have spent 8 or more years learning TO (the traditional spelling system) are typically not ready to adopt a program that would help others but might create more work for themselves.  There are some 80 rules that govern the spelling of 80% of the words in English. The remaining 20% are so irregular that they don't seem to follow any rule.  What this means is that few people can spell without a dictionary or spell checker close at hand.  (Judge for yourself after taking the spelling test) What if the number of spelling rules could be reduced from 80 to 10 or less? What if this changed not only made English easier to spell but also easier to write and read? Would you support such a reform?  Hwats rong with spelng w'rds the wey they sound? There are some benefits to standardized spelling, namely speed reading. It is difficult to quickly adopt a new standard. The change over would probably take ten years and there would still be a mix of traditional and reformed spelling.  Ðer ar su'm benifits tu standardaizd spelng. It iz dificult tu kwikli adopt a nu standard. Ði cheinj ov'r wud proba'bly teik ten yirz and ther wu.d stil bi a miks 'v tradish'n'l and reformd spelng. (New Follick)

The Background on Cut Spelling Why reform English spelling? English spelling is notoriously hard to master. It is a centuries-old writing system whose contradictions and eccentricities were never designed for a fully literate society. We all suffer from its clumsiness and inconsistency: it takes far longer to learn than more regular systems; it limits people's ability to express themselves; it causes mispronunciation, especially by foreign learners; most people acquire at best an erratic command of it (even skilled writers are prone to uncertainty and error); and many millions are condemned to functional illiteracy. It is therefore small wonder there is such concern about standards of literacy in English-speaking countries today. Yet many of those countries have in recent decades seen the benefit of modernizing equally antiquated systems of currency and weights & measures. Similar modernization of English spelling is badly needed.  Is reform possible? Spelling reform is an unfamiliar idea to the English-speaking world, but other languages show it is feasible and indeed a normal way of preserving a writing system from obsolescence. The letters of the alphabet were designed to stand for the sounds of speech, but pronunciation evolves in the course of time, and confusion sets in when letters and sounds cease to match: the way we speak words now no longer tells us how to write them, and the way they are written no longer tells us how to speak them. That is the central problem of English spelling. In the past century many languages have modernized their spelling to improve this match between letters and sounds, and so aid literacy. To ensure continuity, only small changes are usually made, and while schoolchildren learn some new, improved spellings, most adults continue to write as before. It may therefore take a lifetime before everyone uses the new forms. Ideally, spelling reform needs to be an imperceptibly slow, but carefully planned and continuous process.  Problems of regularizing Many schemes have been devised for respelling English as it is pronounced, but apart from some small improvements in America none has been adopted for general use. Several fully regularized systems have however been tried in the past 150 years in teaching beginners, with dramatic success in helping them acquire basic literacy skills, the best known recently being the i.t.a. (initial teaching alphabet). However, all these schemes have required learners to transfer to the traditional irregular spelling as soon as they can read and write fluently, and much of the advantage is then lost.  Ideal though total regularization may ultimately be, the effect such schemes have on the look of written English is so drastic as to be a major deterrent to their adoption. The following sentence, in the Simplified Spelling Society's New Spelling (1948), perhaps the best thought-out and most influential of these fully regularized orthographies, demonstrates the effect: Dhe langgwej wood be impruuvd bie dhe adopshon of nue speling for wurdz The langwij wud bi impruvd bai the adoption ov nu speling for wrdz. [Spanglish] Less radical proposals have therefore been made since then, so as to avoid such visual disruption, suggesting for instance that at first only the spelling of one sound, like the first vowel in any, should be regularized; or a single irregularity, like <gh>, should be removed. However, the immediate benefit of such a reform would be slight.  A new approach is called for if today's readers are not to be alienated, yet learners are to benefit significantly. (more)

Streamlining

Cutting redundant letters

In the 1970s the Australian psychologist Valerie Yule found that many irregular spellings arise from redundant letters. These are letters which mislead because they are not needed to represent the sound of a word. Writers then cannot tell from a word's pronunciation which letters its written form requires, nor where to insert them, while readers are likely to mispronounce unfamiliar words containing them. A group within the Simplified Spelling Society therefore decided to explore which letters are redundant in English, and the effect their removal has on the appearance of the resulting 'cut' text. This Cut Spelling (CS) is now demonstrated.

Esy readng for continuity

One first notices that one can imediatly read CS quite esily without even noing th rules of th systm. Since most words ar unchanjed and few letrs substituted, one has th impression of norml ritn english with a lot of od slips, rathr than of a totaly new riting systm. Th esential cor of words, th letrs that identify them, is rarely afectd, so that ther is a hy levl of compatbility between th old and new spelngs. This is esential for th gradul introduction of any spelng reform, as ther must be no risk of a brekdown of ritn comunication between th jenrations educated in th old and th new systms. CS represents not a radicl upheval, but rather a streamlining, a trimng away of many of those featurs of traditionl english spelng wich dislocate th smooth opration of th alfabetic principl of regulr sound-symbl corespondnce.

Furthr Advantajs

Savings

Th secnd thing one notices is that CS is som 10% shortr than traditionl spelng. This has sevrl importnt advantajs. To begin with, it saves time and trubl for evryone involvd in producing ritn text, from scoolchildren to publishrs, from novlists to advrtisers, from secretris to grafic desynrs. CS wud enable them al to create text that much fastr, because ther wud be fewr letrs to rite and they wud hesitate less over dificlt spelngs. Scoolchildren cud then devote th time saved in th act of riting (as wel as that saved in aquiring litracy skils) to othr lernng activitis. Simlr time-saving wud be experienced by adults in handriting, typng, word-procesng, typ-setng, or any othr form of text production. Th reduced space requiremnt has typograficl benefits: public syns and notices cud be smalr, or ritn larjr; mor text cud be fitd on video or computer screens; fewr abreviations wud be needd; and fewr words wud hav to be split with hyfns at th ends of lines. Ther wud also be material savings: with around one paje in ten no longr needd, books and newspapers wud require less paper (alternativly, mor text cud be carrid in th same space as befor), and demands on both storaj and transport wud be less. And th environmnt wud gain from th loer consumtion of raw materials and enrjy in manufacturng and from th reduction in th amount of waste needng to be disposed of.

Targetng spelng problms

Less imediatly obvius is th fact that CS removes many of th most trublsm spelng problms that hav bedevld riting in english for centuris. Ther ar thre main categris: ther ar silent letrs, such as <s> in isle or <i> in business, wich ar so ofn mispelt eithr as ilse, buisness, or as ile, busness; th latr ar th CS forms. Anothr categry is that of variant unstresd vowls, as befor th final <r> in burglar, teacher, doctor, glamour, murmur, injure, martyr, wich CS neatly alyns as burglr, teachr, doctr, glamr, murmr, injr, martr. Thirdly ther ar th dubld consnnts, so ofn mispelt singl today, as found in such words as accommodate, committee, parallel(l)ed; CS simplifys these to acomodate, comitee, paraleld.

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