23 October 1998

IF you are reading this note as I wrote it in 1998 the spelling of many of the words may be very different that that you are used to. I certainly hope that this is the case. The spelling of many words we use today was derived from the many language sources that have come together to make modern American English. The most infamous example was developed, as I recall, by Ernest Hemmingway. It concerns the word "ghoti". He contended that it could reasonably be pronounced "fish", as follows:

gh as in enough

o as in women

ti as in nation

Or consider the following paragraph I copied from the web site of the ?????

About Spelling Reforms

Current spelling is a horrible, inconsistent system that just happened by accident. In the classic nonsense sentence " Though the rough cough and hiccough plough me through, I ought to cross the lough. ", the letters "ough" are pronounced eight different ways! Phonetically, the sentence reads "Tho the ruff coff and hicup plow me thru, I aut to croos the lock. ". No one could guess this from the forms of the words. No learner can tell if "cough" should be spelled as it is or as "coff" or as "cof". Italian has a fairly consistent spelling, and learning to read and write take an Italian child a few weeks -- after which she can read practically anything, and write correctly (or nearly so) almost any word you can pronounce for her. In contrast, English children take years of gradual progress to learn to read and spell all the words commonly used in adult writing. Some marginal children never learn to read. All waste a year, overall in several grades, learning spelling that takes just weeks in a rational system. A wasted year that could be spent on useful things! And another one learning to read.

There is no conspiracy for this diversity of spelling, but it makes the language maddeningly difficult for people to learn who are no longer children. Children can learn anything, of course.

I consider that at this point, American English will almost certainly become the ultimate de facto standard language for the human culture in the entire world. Almost anywhere in the world you go you can readily find some person who speaks English well enough to make yourself understood. It is not that I think English is a superior language. I have no idea whether it is or not. Nor do I necessarily believe that our culture or economic system are inherently superior. They may or may not be. However, for the last 200 years or so the dominant economic power in the world has been an English speaking nation. First it was the British with their colonial empire. Next it has been the Americans. Especially since the Americans played such a large role in the Second World War, and many foreigners owed their very lives to Americans, our language has come to play a dominant role in the world.

For better or worse, several developments have happened that are hastening this dominance: For most other parts of the world, languages are concentrated in fairly small areas. For example, France is about the same size as Texas. People living in some especially small countries such as Belgium have several official languages. As a result, people in most of the other countries of the world grow up to be multilingual. For them, learning another language is relatively easy. It is common for most other people in the world to study English as a second (or third or more) language.

The airlines use English as the legal standard for communicating with control towers, so all international pilots, air traffic controllers, and control tower operators speak English at work. The development of the global communication networks and the world wide availability of the television network CNN International has made world wide news available very quickly anywhere in the world if you speak English.

The evolution of the European Economic Community will lead to increasing economic and cultural exchange among the various member countries. The path of least resistance for those doing business in other countries will be to use English.

The inertial part of the spelling problem has to do with the difficulty of making a transition to a new format. From time to time an author will attempt to spoof spelling reform by writing a sentence or two in a more condensed form. It quickly becomes obvious that it will not be a trivial exercise to learn to read and write using reformed spelling. For non-English speakers it will be easier to learn, so that if such a transition were to occur now then the users of reformed spelling would soon outnumber the users of old spelling. There are lots more people in the rest of the world than there are in the United States of America.

Fortunately, we now have at our fingertips a tool that can help us make the transition - the computer. Many Americans are becoming at least semi-computer literate. Word processing systems can easily be fitted with lexicons that check new spelling and translate either from new to old or vice versa. We could easily develop special training tools such as automated flashcards that will help us learn the system more easily.