I've just been reading the Oxford University Press (USA) blog where an American etymologist, Anatoly Liberman, is arguing the case for 'simplified spelling'. I have heard this argument so often from all kinds of people but never from an etymologist!
As I said in the comments to Liberman's blog posting, I have two objections to 'simplified' spelling.
The first is that the spelling only seems simple if it accords perfectly with your own accent. For a Geordie in the north of England, spelling the word 'house' in a natural way might render it as 'hoos', for some Londoners, 'out' might best be represented as 'art'. As long as there are such strong accents in the English-speaking world, there can be no common, simplified spelling. If you pick one simplified spelling, whose should it be? The English upper-middle class (as with British 'received pronubciation'? Educated New York American? Or (to pander to perhaps the largest English-speaking population) some kind of Asian English? Whichever you pick, the rest of the world will find the simplified spelling just as odd and arbitrary as they do the real thing.
My second objection is that 'conservative' spelling retains (quite a lot of) the etymology of words. Because of this, the spelling helps us understand the word (consider 'rite' and 'right' which might be indistinguishable under a simplified scheme). 'Conservative' spelling not only helps comprehension, it also carries some of the history of the word. Throwing away the richness of this heritage would be an apalling act of cultural vandalism.
The trend to ultra-simplified and abbreviated spelling that we see in text messages and which Liberman seems to suggest is a good thing ('u' for 'you', 'imho' for 'in my humble opinion', etc.,) may indeed change the way words are 'officially' spelled. The deplorable way that dictionaries follow fads (especially American fads) in spelling, sanctifying such travesties as 'donut' with their blessing, means that spellings adopted by illiterate and poorly-educated children, trying to save a few keystrokes in their frantic haste to exchange gossip, may well end up as alternatives for proper spellings. But do we really want our language degraded like this?
Once you lose a traditional spelling, it is gone forever. Dictionaries these days give 'extrovert' as the preferred spelling for 'extravert', 'neuron' for 'neurone', 'program' for 'programme', 'holistic' for 'wholistic' and so on - mostly because they reflect American usage. All these changes have happened within my own lifetime. They all represent a loss of etymology and of history and thus impoverish the language.
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10 years ago
8 comments:
You wrote: "'Conservative' spelling not only helps comprehension, it also carries some of the history of the word. Throwing away the richness of this heritage would be an apalling (spelling?)act of cultural vandalism."
I don't agree: we have to factor in the cultural "richness" of mass illiteracy, and everything that goes with it. A large minority of people (about 25%) are exclude from the culture and economic prosperity by, amongst other things, the archaic and creaking spelling system. This is the true vandalism which you should be concerned about.
As you know it is in the nature of words to change meanings, spellings and diverge from each other - comb/ kempt, lust/listless, ankle/angle, lesson/neglect. It is not the job of a spelling system to be a museum piece carrying all this, often dodgy, history - if you are interested in it you can always look it up in a book. To require a spelling system to carry this burden is to condemn it to go the way of hieroglyphs.
You also make the mistake of conflating a spelling system with "the language". They are too different things. It is not the pronunciation of words that is the problem it is the lack of regularity in spelling. "Berry", "ferry", "merry" but "very", "till" but "until"; just two of the 20,000 contradictory facts that a child has to get past to acquire literacy.
Most European languages, with all their dialects and different pronunciations, have modernised their spelling systems. They are not "vandalised" and what's more have way lower illiteracy rates than ours.
Plenty of etymologists and other lovers of the language have been advocates of spelling reform - they are not all reactionaries after all.
"It is not the pronunciation of words that is the problem it is the lack of regularity in spelling." If only that were true! The US pronunciation of all most 'foreign' words is excruciating eg pasta, cashmere, parmesan, yoghurt. 'A's are prolonged inappropriately, 'sh' is pronounced 'zh', a straight 's' in parmesan also morphs to zh, the short 'o' in yoghurt becomes a long 'o'. How would rationalised spelling render these mispronounced words?
Thanks for that NJH. I would agree that if 25% of people were "exclude (sic) from the culture and economic prosperity by, amongst other things, the archaic and creaking spelling system" it would be cause for concern and it might even make me reconsider my position on spelling. However, I can see no evidence for this in literacy rates for English-speaking countries.
The United Nations Development Programme Report 2007/2008 lists Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the USA as having 99% adult literacy. Even I might quibble with such an optimistic figure but not so far as to push it down to 75% which is what you seem to be suggesting. According to the UN, literacy rates in all European countries are virtually identical, suggesting that spelling reform makes no significant difference.
Can you point me at the evidence you're using for your 25% exclusion figure?
I shall get you some chapter & verse about the chronic problems of running this antique vehicle in the 21st century.
The English language is a multiple car crash with all sorts of loan words from over 6 different systems - 2 types of German, 2 types of French, Latin, Greek and others - forming a coarse aggregate.(However this did not happen with the grammar which is pretty rule-orderly and has been simplified as creoles often are.) If we were to learn all these different spelling systems it might work but it is difficult to predict the origin of a word and therefore which rule to use. And we don't have time. The trouble is that there are too many unpredictable patterns as these words have not been "Anglicized" as would have happened in any other self-respecting language.
To be a good speller in English it helps to have a photographic memory. Only about ?20% have this and the rest of us have to resort to a multitude of alternative unreliable strategies. One of which is to dumb down one's vocab to avoid using words that one is not sure of. Non-confident spelling is the norm. See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2010493/Does-spelling-leave-you-embarrassed.html
So we have a spelling system that is difficult to learn to read and take 3 times longer that most European languages. It uses identical letters, or letter strings, to represent different sounds: 'the - he, go - do, friend - fiend, eight - height, treat - threat, are - care, move - over - oven, count - country - groups - touch, cough - rough - through - although - bought, miners / minerals, later - lateral, menu - emu. See:http://www.englishspellingproblems.
co.uk
I don't call this cultural richness - it is a heritage that we could usefully modernize. Difficult to fix, but our European neighbours have mostly managed it.
Apologies in advance for spelling mistakes.
For psycholinguistic grain-size theory see:
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/54/39/35562310.pdf
In response to your stats about 99% literacy rates in the USA:
"A study reported in the American Journal of Child Development looked at pre-school twins in Wales, UK, born in 1994-5 comparing behavior and reading ability. No genetic link was seen. Those who had difficulties at age five with readiness to read, such as a small vocabulary and poor verbal skills, became increasingly involved in anti-social behavior - mainly bullying others, telling lies, stealing," "Their reading skills had gone down as well. And those who were aggressive when they entered school also fell further behind in reading," This was not exhibited in girls and was not genetically linked to twin siblings.
"A 1999 on prisoners in Texas done by the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston found that 41.5% of inmates scored low enough on reading tests to indicate they were dyslexic.
"More than a third of the adult convicts released from Texas prisons in 2002 were functionally illiterate, and half of those could not read at all according to the Dyslexia Research Foundation of Texas. They found much the same true for youths. Those who could not read were much more likely to end up back behind bars as adults.
"Only 18% of our high school graduates are ready for a good job or college," said Charles McMahen, chairman of Texas Gov. Rick Perry's Business Council.
"In Maryland, 33% of incoming high school freshmen will need extra help in reading, according to the 2006 Maryland School Assessments released last month. In Virginia, 24% of 2007’s high school freshmen needed additional support. And according to 2005 test results in Washington D.C. public schools, 7% of middle and high school students needed special help with reading.
California State University reports that 46% of freshmen entering the college campus last fall were unprepared for college-level English and 37% unprepared in math. The past seven years have produced no changes in English, slightly better in math.
Statistics Canada in 1997 found that among 16- to 65-year-olds for six English-speaking nations 42% to 52% were very poor readers or illiterate.
In 2003 a sample of adults in USA was given a reading proficiency test and only 13% were rated proficient (87% not proficient). Surprisingly, only 30% of adult college graduates scored as proficient in literacy on that test.
For adult literacy, Thomas Sticht, an adult reading expert, reports that testing in 1992 and again in 2003 shows little or no improvement in literacy.
According to a 1992 study by the National Institute for Literacy, "43% of Americans with the lowest literacy skills live in poverty and 70% have no job or part-time jobs. However, of Americans with strong literacy skills, only 5% live in poverty."
A basic writing skills survey in the UK undertaken by educational software developer Basic Writing Skills recently revealed that 67.97% of Britain’s adult population has below average basic literacy skills.
I am quoting from a colleague's lecture on the costs of poor reading skills - there is plenty more.
At the period of the English Civil War literacy was high ~ if you could sigh your name you were considered literate.
Thanks for the references, NJH, especially to Masha Bell's website. The single crucial reference in all of this appears to be to Seymour and Erskine's 2003 paper on acquiring 'foundation literacy'. Sadly, I can't get the full text of this without paying $18 but the abstract suggests that Eglish school children take about twice as long as some others to acquire this 'foundation literacy'. The authors hypothesise that this is due to the orthographic depth and syllabic complexity of English. Which, I believe, is the point you are making.
Without access to the literature, I can't tell if this work was ever validated or replicated. However, it does seem that there could be other cultural or educational causes of the effect that one would want to rule out first before accepting this result. Also, you would expect there to be considerable ramifications in terms of overall literacy rates in English-speaking countries compared to other, similarly-affluent countries with simpler spelling systems. This should be something that is easily verified.
This, I think, is the intended point of the many statistics you quoted. Unfortunately, all of those stats just show that there is a correlation between illiteracy and other bad things (like crime and poverty). They don't show that illiteracy causes them. In fact, it could as easily be argued that, say, poverty causes illiteracy, or that some 'hidden' factor causes all of these things (like low intelligence). That there is high illiteracy in criminal populations or poor populations does not speak to the question of whether the complexity of English spelling causes illiteracy, or that illiteracy per se causes any ills at all.
Given that English being more difficult to learn should lead to higher levels of illiteracy, the lack of any apparent effect in the United Nations Development Programme Report 2007/2008 I mentioned, is problematic for the theory.
Nevertheless, assuming it is correct and English takes twice as long to learn than most other European languages, this still does not mean it is a bad thing. It does mean that improved education, additional education, and more cultural emphasis on the importance of acquiring good spelling would be required to ensure that English is learned well and that people can spell correctly. This is, of course, an additional cost to and burden on society (which was Liberman's main objection) but perhaps it is worth it.
I would happily argue that the richness and versatility of English is a huge boon to our society. It is a fine, precision instrument for expressing ideas with amazing subtlety and accuracy when used well - and part of what makes it so is precisely that accumulation of other languages into our English 'creole' which you and Masha Bell decry. All these Germanic, French, Latin, and other words and spellings that pile up in our language frequently provide levels of nuance and precision which are just not there in languages with simpler lexicons and more phonetic spellings.
I'm sorry to say that, after all your hard work, I remain unreformed. However, I must thank you for the pleasure and the quality of the argument. Definitely not the usual standard of blog comment!
Oh dear, I shall fold my tent . . but and yet . . a few comments:
I agree with some of what you say: poor literacy is implicated in a number of social ills, has many causes and needs to be tackled through a number of approaches. It is a fact that complex orthographies are more difficult to learn and many give up & drop out. This is self evident. While we are struggling and being dispirited with the complexities of this dumbed down system we are not learning important things - we have children leaving school not knowing or caring where Ireland is. By contrast see:www.economist.com/world /international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11622383
Finland has the highest per capita rate of PhD's in the world and a modernized spelling system.
The capaciousness of the English vocab is also a fact, often elevated to a fetish by anoraks [Inuit:(Greenlandic) annoraaq] like me. But we are not talking about this. You confuse a language with its spelling system. Many languages do not have writing systems, some have more than one. Urdu & Hindi are essentially the same thing but have two scripts, ditto Croatian and Serbian. English has American spelling and English spelling and of course you could always write in Braille. We could also write as Chaucer did: lern, iland, yung. Or Shakespeare: cof, mortall coile, etc. Whatever your choice it wouldn't make any difference to the precision or nuance of your expression. I have no evidence (I don't think you do either) that a modernised orthography results in a lack of precision or nuance. I don't complain about the pile up of words in the English lexicon - the more the better if that's what turns you on - but the pile up of irregularities. This is where we are shooting ourselves in the foot.
The impressive Anatoly L - have you seen his latest blog? - is right: the economic and emotional costs are too high.
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