Having just seen English, the language that I know and love, described as "putrid", I have decided to reinstate this article and damn the consequences.
Sometimes an idea pops up which appears to have potential but which, after further consideration, you realise is not only impractical but also potentially damaging.
There is a campaigner for spelling reform who infects Internet forums like a virus. She has a bee in her bonnet that changing English spelling will improve education, reduce crime, reduce the incidence of teenage pregnancy and mitigate any number of social ills.
Her justification for these claims is her “research”. This “research” involves no peer reviewed studies of teaching and learning, no statistical analyses of the “problem”; no longitudinal studies, in fact, nothing that one normally associates with the term research. Her “research” consists almost entirely of copying from the dictionary and counting, words which have irregular spellings, are homonyms or retain their foreign roots, assembling them together and saying, “look, these words sound the same but are spelt differently. It's obvious that they are the cause of many educational and social problems. It's common sense.”
As the eminent scientist Lewis Wolpert has pointed out,(1) common sense is an unreliable guide and provides the wrong answer more often than not. It is why research is not about trying to prove what you believe to be true. It is not about selling a theory or a book. It is about testing it.
Our spelling heroine does not like the idea of testing her theory. She is also incredibly hostile to discussing it. She spams links to her books and blogs. She posts interminable lists of words, claiming that “you only have to look at them to see that it is obvious there's a problem.” Obviously, everyone who looks at her lists can't see a problem. After all, they can read and there is not a single word on any of her lists that an average reader doesn't know the pronunciation, spelling and meaning of. Her defence of wanting to change the language is that it would benefit those who can't read. There is, again, no justification of this claim other than, “it's obvious.” Criticising this particular doctrine is risky. There have been suggestions of legal action to defend it.
Our heroine has been compared to a Jehovah's Witness in the way she promotes her doctrine. This is not an unfair comparison. The Evangelists have a message and an assumed duty to convey that message to as many people as possible. The Book, in their case the Bible, contains all the evidence that the end of the world is nigh and that they have a duty to save all those who accept their message. Anyone who has met one of these evangelists will have noticed that they may be nice people, but they are unable and unwilling to take on board counter arguments and evidence. Anything not in the book must be wrong.
Our Language Maven(2) is no different. She has the fall back position of her lists of words. These are all the evidence she needs. Counter argument and evidence are rejected as being unhelpful and rude, or as she says, “rood”. More on the New English later.
Part of the unwillingness to discuss spelling reform comes from the belief that being an English speaker is proof that you lack the intelligence to understand the problem. People with a different perspective are stupid.
English is, apparently, a trivial and inconsequential language. It is argued that:
"It is because English dictionaries include so many words which are not really English that has created the myth that English has far more words than other languages."
Remember that this observation comes from "the world's leading language expert." What it demonstrates is a woeful lack of understanding of how language develops. A more rounded and insightful observation on how English has developed can be found in the work of lesser experts. I recommend John McWhorter's(3) entertaining account of how English developed from the early Celts to absorb words from various invaders and from the study of religious and philosophical texts. English has grown as Britain became a World power. I can't help wondering if our status in the world would be enhanced by our being called Grayt Britn.
Many Countries have institutions devoted to preserving the integrity of the language. The Academie Francaise has the responsibility of maintaining the French dictionary and protecting the French language from loanwords. This has had varying degrees of success because language is dynamic and responds to the needs of the people who speak it rather than to the dictates of people in ivory towers. These institutions have proved remarkably ineffective in keeping English words out of their language.
Britain does not have such an Academy nor does it need one. The Oxford English Dictionary is maintained and updated on the basis of usage. If a word becomes current and is persistent then it finds its way into the dictionary. The latest edition, just published, contains some two thousand new words.
Samuel Johnson was well aware that trying to maintain an established orthography was pointless. He observed:
"With this hope, however, academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse intruders; but their vigilance and activity have hitherto been vain; sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength."
If all the English speaking countries were ever to agree on spelling reform, they would be agreeing to an endless process of argument and revision because the language would simply refuse to stand still long enough for them the establish any meaningful rules.
The claim that most English words are foreign is disingenuous. English has the remarkable ability to take on board any new concept wherever it comes from. Meeting with coastal glacial valleys in Norway, the word fjord served the descriptive purpose admirably and became an English word. Scientists looking for a word for special kinds of tidal waves could do no better than tsunami. Quisling proved an ideal word for a collaborator , being the name of one such person. There are no hangups. Words are for communication. The three examples are now English words but recorded alongside their origins in dictionaries. We borrow, but we also give credit.
The history and origins of the English language as explained by our heroine reveal some remarkable insights. It is summed up thus:
"U need to understand that English spelling did not ‘evolve’ like the language. It was fixed by a few printers and, above all, by Samuel Johnson 253 years ago, a man with an amazingly good memory, but not fond of children and weird in many ways."
So that's Samuel Johnson out of the way. The fact that he was a great poet, writer, biographer and essayist is of no consequence. He was "weird." This means that his dictionary is not to be trusted. He obviously made it the way it is because "he was not fond of children." All the more reason to scrap it and start again.
Johnson's dictionary was a supreme piece of scholarship, not at all weird and bearing no grudge against children. He certainly didn't underestimate the task:
"When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated; choice was to be made out of boundless variety, without any established principle of selection; adulterations were to be detected, without a settled test of purity; and modes of expression, to be rejected or received, without the suffrages of any writers of classical reputation or acknowledged authority."(4)
He had to make choices, to make compromises, to choose one spelling over another and he explains these choices in the preface to his dictionary. To understand the scholarship of this work you need to read it. There are choices that you may not agree with, but to write the man's work off in a sentence is criminal.
What Johnson clearly understood was that a dictionary is of use if people can use it to look up word they find in their reading. It was for that reason he established the methodology, still in use to day, of polling usage. It was too big a task for one man even then, but his achievement cannot be underestimated. Modern dictionaries poll millions of books and documents to track new words, changes of meaning and changes of use. Etymology is also important. Johnson understood that and it remains a vital part of maintaining a dictionary.
The OED is quite different from institutions like the Academie Francaise. It is not about managing and controlling English, but about maintaining an accurate and up to date record of it.
Having written off English as an inconsequential language made up of borrowed words, our researcher goes on to tell us yet more of the consequences of English spelling. Not only does it account for the entire range of socioeconomic problems in English speaking countries, it is also the reason that Britain has never achieved anything of note in the fields of literature, science, engineering, art, philosophy or much else. We are, it seems, a nation of non achievers and all because our spelling is not as transparent as high achieving countries like Finland, Greece and Lithuania.
Make no mistake, we can learn a lot from the education of Finland. True, they have a more transparent system of spelling, but other features of the language make it rather more difficult to learn than English. What the Finns also do is start formal education several years later than in the UK. They prioritise reading in a way that hasn't been the case in the UK and they rapidly intervene when faced with children who are struggling. To isolate spelling as the key variable is at best sloppy and at worst dishonest. You really have to look at the whole picture.
I've just watched a Discover Ireland advert on the TV. It's message is that everyone discovers Ireland, or some aspect of it, for themselves. It appears that our language expert has had a similar experience in discovering English. In the same way that you have the irritating person who returns from holiday somewhere and talks about it as nobody else has ever been there before, out expert does the same with English. She assumes that nobody else has ever noticed that, for example, weird does not seem to obey the rules and feels the need to tell everyone again and again and again. The difference, I think, is that most of us discovered English as our first language whereas she discovered it as a second language. What we take for granted, she needs to feel concern about.
Or expert doesn't believe in accents. She describes some British accents as "horrendous," mine included. The spelling of everything written has to reflect RP. That is something it certainly doesn't do right now. There have been endless discussions about accents and how they might be handled and all objections have been dismissed out of hand. A recent BBC programme about language observed that RP is spoken by about 3% of the population of England and by a tiny fraction of the World's English speakers. Just who is this proposal serving? Rather than raking over old ground, I'll just look at the 'garage' problem.
One of the funniest, (based on audience response), one liners comes from Hancock's Half Hour Radio show. Hancock has a car parked in the road, where it is causing an obstruction. A council official addresses the problem:
"It's got to be moved!"
"It cannot be moved I have got nowhere to put it"
"Put it in a garage!"
"I have not got a garage"
As it stands you might wonder where the joke is, but it stems from the pronunciation ofgarage. The script says "garage," but the actors know what they should say. "Put it in a garridge," says the official. "I have not got a garahj," Hancock replies, separating the snob from the common man. Since out expert neither understands the joke nor finds it funny, it is no wonder she dismisses the problem.
We all read the word garage and pronounce it as out accent or attitude dictates. I say something like "garrudge". So how should it be spelt? At present it's neutral. If it's changed, will it be common man or snob? The same question must be asked of every word we all can read but say differently.
There are plenty of proposals. "Let's change all the words that sound as if they end with an -er sound or schwa to -r." So we would have doktr, aktr, awfr, armr, centr, injr, vendr, dolr, sofr, quotr and the cuddly black and white bear, pandr. On what basis are these changes proposed? A survey of English speakers, perhaps? A detailed analysis of recordings of different people speaking? No! We are told, "That's how I have always heard them and always pronounce them myself."
So English spelling should be changed to suit how a Lithuanian with English as a second language speaks and hears.
We routinely use the term spelling mistake, when we more correctly should refer to a writing error or an inaccuracy in rendering a word.
Not all spelling errors are the same and many of the errors that occur in English are equally common in other languages. Transcription and transposition errors are common, s for z and vice versa and the use of the wrong vowel. Low use words might be guessed as may guessing from unknown etymology. Writing (and typing) quickly can also result in omission errors.
One possible reason for a decline in reading standards in a decline in early vocabulary. We learn to speak by hearing and repeating words, phases and sentences. If parents do not talk to their children their vocabulary doesn't develop. Teaching reading, by whatever system, is necessarily based around a child's vocabulary and if that is significantly less than what might be expected, reading is likely to suffer. The view that children are not spoken or read to and are simply stuck in front of the TV or farmed out may be part of the reason. This is certainly the view of the charity I-CAN.(5)
Spelling is an unwritten and unspoken agreement between people who share a language that it will be written according to a particular set of rules. While these rules vary slightly between countries, there is a great deal of consistency. The important thing is that a person reading a piece of writing can understand it.
Spelling is not something that can be changed easily. A change in spelling represents an enormous change in a language. Spelling is something which maintains the unity of a language for people all over the world. It is the glue that hold it together. If you change spelling unilaterally in one country then it effectively becomes a foreign language for everyone else. Worse than that, it becomes a foreign language for all the people within the country who have internalised their spelling and sight read efficiently. They would be forced back to reading by decoding.
It is not entirely clear, but it would appear that our expert has assumed that all people always read by decoding individual words. While you might have to for Icelandic football teams like Hafnarfjordur, most words will be familiar. If they cease to be because someone has changed them, then most people will be worse off.
What might be lost if we were to change the language? According to our expert, not a lot, given that the language is of no consequence. A few examples might amuse people with a love of English, although our expert does not find them worthy. Let's take Flanders and Swann's "Gnu Song". Does it work with a revised version of English?
'I'm a G-nu, I'm a G-nu The g-nicest work of g-nature in the zoo
I'm a G-nu, How do you do. You really ought to k-now w-ho's w-ho
I'm a G-nu, Spelt G-N-U. I'm g-not a Camel or a Kangaroo
So let me introduce, I'm g-neither man nor moose
Oh g-no g-no g-no I'm a G-nu
or
I am a noo, I am a noo, duh nysest work of naytur in duh zoo
I am a noo, How do U do. U reelee awt to no hoos hoo
I am a noo, spelt N-O-O, I am not a camel or a kanguhroo (probably bufalow)
So let me introjews, I am nyver man nor moos,
O no, no, no, I am a noo.
The first version always earned long applause when Flanders and Swann sang it. I can't imagine anyone seeing the point of the second. How many of us, I wonder, having heard Flanders and Swann, always refer to the eponymous animal as a g-nu?
What we learn from this song was that Flanders was very much in tune with his audience. He had a masterly grasp of English but he knew that the audience would understand. Unlike out heroine, he treated them as intelligent people who would understand his creative use of the language. Flanders songs are examples of the creativity that English, with all its idiosyncracies, allows.
One of the frightening things about spelling reformers and the current crop of phonics ideologues is just how arrogant, authoritarian and illiberal they are. They need to be in control of the spelling and of the learning. What they say goes. Synthetic Phonics is already well on the way to crippling a generation of readers and how long will it be before they decide that the way forward is for them to take control of the language ad strip it of any semblance of originality, sacrificed on an altar of claimed common sense.
On a more optimistic note, English is littered with names who claimed to know better then anyone else. I wish the current crop would just leave it alone to evolve as it will.
