Oh, my, oh, my… Anyone who struggled with spelling as a child (and for a while, I did) might stop for a brief moment’s thought at this story.
They’ve been campaigning for a century to make the spelling of the English language easier and recently picketed a spelling bee in the US to make their point. Welcome to the Simplified Spelling Society.
Masha Bell, a member of the society and author of Understanding English Spelling, believes that reform of the spelling of the English language could help children learn to read and make life easier for some adults too.
So, given that the English language is not particularly easy to learn they want to dumb it down rather than improve the quality of education, because that is the nub of the Simplified Spelling Society’s argument. It’s all too difficult, so let’s all revert to leet speek. Try reading some of this nonsense and you get a grasp for just how daft the reasoning is:
If u hav a por memmory yor chances of becumming a good speller ar lo. But wors stil, yor chances of lerning to read ar not good either, because of phonnic nonsens like “cow-crow, dream-dreamt, friend-fiend” and hundreds mor like them.
The problem for the SSS is that most peeple ar not aware of the educational disadvantages which stem from spelling inconsistencies or how they came about.
If I encounter prose that is dumbed down in this way, I find my reading slows down as I attempt to translate it. Indeed, if anyone expects me to struggle through a page of this unintelligible garbage, they are sorely mistaken. I will stop reading and reach for something that is clearly written with the reader in mind; prose that is simple to read; that is, something spelled correctly.
The point that language changes is fair enough:
In the 17th Century hundreds of English words wer shorn of their surplus letters [eg atte – at, worde – word, shoppe – shop}. We could easily resume such culling again. But this will not happen until mor people understand how English spelling impedes educational progress, or the costs which this entails.
However, to completely change the words from their roots makes them unintelligible, rather than easier to decipher. English spelling makes it simpler to define which words we mean to use – witch or which, their, there or they’re for example. When language changes it does so because its use evolves over time. So if spelling alters as a consequence of usage, then so be it. However, this artificial dumbing down because people are too damned lazy to learn the language properly is not something I am prepared to go along with. I will continue to write and spell the English language correctly, thank-you very much and Masha Bell can take her silly spelling society and stick it somewhere unpleasant. These people caused enough harm to literacy during the nineteen-sixties with their phonetic spelling experiments. Enough already.