March 2007

Nobody argues that English spelling is simple, easy, or logical. English often uses different letters or letter combinations to represent the same sound, and it uses the same letters or letter combinations to represent different sounds. That means, quite obviously, that we cannot determine the correct spelling of English words based on our perception of how they sound. Even with some very simple words, phonetic spelling may help us to begin (i.e., to make an educated guess at how a word is spelled), but it takes us only so far. We must learn that "cat" is c-a-t and not k-a-t.

Nevertheless, we have a long history of efforts to simplify English spelling by making it strictly phonetic. Such efforts attempt to obliterate the history of a language that evolved over thousands of years and that borrowed from many other languages. The advocates of simplification want to impose upon an evolved language a primitive principle that simply will not work. Like it or not, we have to teach and learn spelling as it exists, not as we would like it to be.

Now we have yet another misguided attempt to teach simplified spelling. A friend sent me an e-mail that says he saw a report on Fox News about a school district in Kentucky "that's going to start allowing children to spell more 'logically,' i.e., peeple for people, bred for bread, menny for many, etc. They're going to eliminate spelling tests and 'rote memorization.'"

My first question about this latest manifestation of attempts to "dumb down" American education (as if we needed more effort in this direction than we already have) is how we determine what the "logical" spelling is. Who declares that the logical spelling of people is peeple and not peepel, peepul, or peepil? My second question is how, under this system, children learn to tell the difference between the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of pairs of words or sets of three words with the same sound but different meanings. There's already an example in the words my friend cites: How do we recognize bred as the past tense of breed if we spell bread the same way? How do we distinguish among site, sight, and cite? What about to, too, and two? Write, right, and rite? Will the children know weather from whether. Will they be able to tell whether a story is about a frog prince or about frog prints?

The rationale behind the proposed method represents the epitome (or is that epitomy?) of wackiness. According to my friend, the advocates of this approach say that "once the children get older, they'll be able to switch to the correct spelling." Just how will they do that? The method itself acknowledges that English spelling is not intuitive and not phonetic. By what miraculous insight will children who have learned simple, incorrect, phonetic spelling suddenly switch to correct spelling? Any adult who has trouble with correct spelling – because he or she never learned it as a child – will testify that it's a formidable (sometimes impossible) task to learn how to spell correctly when one is an adult. Isn't that a bit like letting children call 2+2 whatever they think it should be, on the assumption that they'll intuitively know that 2+2=4 when they're adults?

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that we all agree that children should be allowed to spell words phonetically. Would or could the children agree on what letters or letter combinations best represent the sounds? Or would they begin to wonder whether blackboard was blackbord, blakbord, blackbored, blakbored, blackborred, blakborred, or something else? We would have no basis for determining spelling other than each child's perception of what letters and letter combinations are most appropriate. Furthermore, children from one region of the country (the North, for example) would spell the same words differently from the way children from another region (the South) would spell them, based on regional dialect. Some, for example, would spell might as myt, but others would spell it as maht.

In other words, this attempt to "simplify" spelling actually complicates spelling. While we now have only a few words with variant spellings (e.g., judgment and judgement), we would have hundreds of thousands of them with numerous variants. If we didn't recognize the particular variants that a child chose, we would have considerable difficulty understanding what the child wrote (as the teachers in Kentucky are going to find out).

Another consequence of this incredibly wacky idea is that children who use this "simplified" spelling will undoubtedly have considerable difficulty recognizing words that are spelled correctly. To put it more simply, they may have more difficulty than ever in learning how to read. They may not be able to learn at all. Oh, sorry, I forgot. When they're older, they will be able to switch to the correct spelling, which, of course, they will have learned somehow despite their inability to read correctly spelled words.

My friend informs me that the spokesperson on Fox News for this new approach was a woman from something called the Simplified Spelling Society. He says, "She went on and on about how illogical English is and how difficult it is to learn." That sounds suspiciously like some bleeding heart who feels that we need to protect our children by making all learning easy and painless, lest we damage fragile egos by putting them through the rigors of study.

Of corse, she mabe rite, and I cood be rong. Lerning a langwidg lyk Inglish with its stranj spellings myt be to difikult for littel kids and cood trowmitize them for lyf. We shood put it off untill layter, mabe teech it at abowt the saym tym as thay lern abowt secs.