Time for spelling reform
June 9, 2008
First let me apologise, actually no I won’t apologise, let me warn you that this post will be full of words spelt in a non-traditional British English way. That said - let’s move on.
In my day job as a jurnalist cheking wat I rite for acuracy is a big part of wat I do. In fact it is such a big part, riting this blog post is a real efut.
I’m having to fink realy hard about evry word I typ. Normaly I wil rite an artical, read it to myself on screen, spel chek it, print it out, read it out loud and then giv it to somebody else to read and chek.
In fact wen I rite sport storys I hav to do all of that and then send the story to sub editors hoo then chek to make sure I’ve not spelt anything wrong.
Alright I can’t go on like that anymore - it’s too different to what I’m used to. This paragraph has taken me all of thirty seconds to write - the previous three took me close to ten minutes.
But there was a point to me nearly pointless spell of character skipping senselessness. A few days ago I was watching a programme I rarely watch - it was on, just sitting there.
Image via Wikipedia
The One Show is possibly one of the worst shows on BBC One - however - it sometimes has interesting features and this was one of those. It was all about spelling and why it is such a waste of time.
Well not all spelling - just the pointless letters. Like spelling Ghost with an H - under the spelling reform rules it would drop the H and just be spelt gost - as it sounds.
Another example would be Wednesday - what’s the point of the D and E - the new spelling would be Wensday - that makes more sense.
Having a Dyslexic brother (btw - where is the sense in using a word for people that can’t spell that is a nightmare to actually spell) you learn to quickly understand the importance of being able to spell as words sound.
It’s also the way young children (I have a couple of them as well) learn to read and write - long before spelling is even considered they’re taught to write it how it sounds - the spelling is worked on much later.
So maybe now is the time to reform the language - the Portuguese have already done it - time to drop letters we don’t need, cut silly over the top grammar rules - as long as you can understand the sentiment does it really matter if it’s spelt correctly or not?
Plus, if the rules were scrapped and we could write how we liked (as long as it can be understood) we could tell the grammar nazis to go sit on a large pointy pole.
Then maybe I won’t keep getting e-mails from dozens of people every time I make a typo or get a comma in the wrong place in an article on BBC Jersey.
The latest is the pictures - we published a piece about population figures that used a photo of a large group of people at the top and some For Sale signs in the middle - first comment on the article was from someone complaining the the people weren’t in Jersey and the For Sale signs weren’t local.
PHOTO CREDITS
Alphabet Mosaic (main image) by Claudecf and Alphabet (small index image) by ilmungo.
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3 Responses to “Time for spelling reform”
Posted: Jun 11th, 2008 at 12:30 am
I was thinking, when I was reading the bit about dropping the ‘h’ from ghost, that you couldn’t do that because gost would be pronounced as in lost. At least that’s what my logic tells me: that unless you stick an ‘e’ on the end the vowel in the middle is short, as in lost.
However, and perhaps this is my somewhat limited vocabulary failing me, I can’t think of any other words like lost. The other four letter -ost words I can think of, most and post among them, all have long ‘o’ sounds without an ‘h’ before the ‘o’ or an ‘e’ at the end.
Interestingly, from what I can remember of the very small number of older English texts I’ve seen, there *is* a trailing ‘e’ to make the middle vowel long. Words like most were spelt ‘moste’ - but at some point the ‘e’ must have been dropped, and in my mind words like moste and poste have red squiggly/dotted lines under them. Of course, at the moment they *do* have red dotted lines under them but that’s not the point.
In spite of the fact that what I just said goes some way towards further proving that the coupling between English spelling and pronunciation is utterly illogical in many cases, I don’t really see the need for any sort of “spelling reform.” Being able to spell correctly is something people *should* be able to do, unless of course they have a problem that prevents that.
Correct spelling (and grammar, for that matter) is also a matter of professionalism. The sign you picture in your article is a prime example of this. Did nobody think to pull out a dictionary when creating it? Has nobody noticed? Worse, has somebody told the shop, but they don’t feel it’s important?! If it was my company that had made the sign, and I saw it, I’d have it replaced free of charge because somebody in my hypothetical company had cocked up. It doesn’t matter that it may have been misspelt by the client because somebody at “Sam’s Signage” should have told the client.
Now, that may be to do with the fact that I see using correct English as a matter of personal pride. Unless the context excuses it, such as with instant messaging, SMS and (very) short emails, I won’t put my name to something unless I believe it to be written properly, or at least to the best of my ability - and putting my name to what I write is also a matter of pride, even if it’s a pseudonym.
I’m certainly not trying to have you believe that I’m perfect when it comes to spelling and grammar - Microsoft Word is always accusing me of wordiness, the first sentence of my fourth paragraph is an example of that, and this comment as a whole is much longer than it should be - but I am much more capable of writing properly than many other 21 year olds I know, which is really quite sad. Especially considering that I don’t even have a GCSE in English.
Sam
Posted: Jun 11th, 2008 at 12:35 am
You make some very good points sam - I think five years of writing for a living, getting paid to put words into sentences sort of gives you a bit of grammar fatigue - especially when every tiny little mistake (I can excuse the big glaring ones as that is my fault for not properly checking) is picked apart by dozens of grammar nazis
Posted: Jul 5th, 2008 at 11:01 am
I my very humble opinion, spelling is fine how it is. It’s the same in many languages- French people need to remember whether something is male or female as well as the spelling, and Chinese and Japanese people not only need to remember whether something is a long or short vowel in a word, not only how to write the symbol to express the word, but the order in which you write the symbol too.
Things like this are a part of growing up and another chance for the brain to grow that little bit more. It’s vital for children to take this step. With the case of dyslexia, I’m not so well informed on the subject but I should imagine that it really is a pain in the bum. But we shouldn’t change the language just for those people’s sake, with all due respect.
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