Posted on 07/06/2006 9:29:22 AM PDT by WestTexasWend
WASHINGTON (AP) - When "say," "they" and "weigh" rhyme, but "bomb," "comb" and "tomb" don't, wuudn't it maek mor sens to spel wurdz the wae thae sound?
Those in favor of simplified spelling say children would learn faster and illiteracy rates would drop. Opponents say a new system would make spelling even more confusing.
Eether wae, the consept has yet to capcher th publix imajinaeshun.
It's been 100 years since Andrew Carnegie helped create the Simplified Spelling Board to promote a retooling of written English and President Theodore Roosevelt tried to force the government to use simplified spelling in its publications. But advocates aren't giving up.
They even picket the national spelling bee finals, held every year in Washington, costumed as bumble bees and hoisting signs that say "Enuf is enuf but enough is too much" or "I'm thru with through." Thae sae th bee selebraets th ability of a fue stoodents to master a dificult sistem that stumps meny utherz hoo cuud do just as wel if speling were simpler.
"It's a very difficult thing to get something accepted like this," says Alan Mole, president of the American Literacy Council, which favors an end to "illogical spelling." The group says English has 42 sounds spelled in a bewildering 400 ways.
Americans doen't aulwaez go for whut's eezy - witnes th faeluer of th metric sistem to cach on. But propoenents of simpler speling noet that a smatering of aulterd spelingz hav maed th leep into evrydae ues.
Doughnut also is donut; colour, honour and labour long ago lost the British "u" and the similarly derived theatre and centre have been replaced by the easier-to-sound-out theater and center.
"The kinds of progress that we're seeing are that someone will spell night 'nite' and someone will spell through 'thru,'" Mole said. "We try to show where these spellings are used and to show dictionary makers that they are used so they will include them as alternate spellings."
"Great changes have been made in the past. Systems can change," a hopeful Mole said.
Lurning English reqierz roet memory rather than lojic, he sed.
In languages with phonetically spelled words, like German or Spanish, children learn to spell in weeks instead of months or years as is sometimes the case with English, Mole said.
But education professor Donald Bear said to simplify spelling would probably make it more difficult because words get meaning from their prefixes, suffixes and roots.
"Students come to understand how meaning is preserved in the way words are spelled," said Bear, director of the E.L. Cord Foundation Center for Learning and Literacy at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Michael Marks, a member of the National Education Association's executive committee, said learning would be disrupted if children had to switch to a different spelling system. "It may be more trouble than it's worth," said Marks, a debate and theater teacher at Hattiesburg High School in Mississippi.
E-mail and text messages are exerting a similar tug on the language, sharing some elements with the simplified spelling movement while differing in other ways. Electronic communications stress shortcuts like "u" more than phonetics. Simplified spelling is not always shorter than regular spelling - sistem instead of system, hoep instead of hope.
Carnegie tried to moov thingz along in 1906 when he helpt establish and fund th speling bord. He aulso uezd simplified speling in his correspondens, and askt enywun hoo reported to him to do the saem.
A filanthropist, he becaem pashunet about th ishoo after speeking with Melvil Dewey, a speling reform activist and Dewey Desimal sistem inventor hoo simplified his furst naem bi droping "le" frum Melville.
Roosevelt tried to get the government to adopt simpler spellings for 300 words but Congress blocked him. He used simple spellings in all White House memos, pressing forward his effort to "make our spelling a little less foolish and fantastic."
The Chicago Tribune aulso got into th act, uezing simpler spelingz in th nuezpaeper for about 40 years, ending in 1975. Plae-riet George Bernard Shaw, hoo roet moest of his mateerial in shorthand, left muny in his wil for th development of a nue English alfabet.
Carnegie, Dewey, Roosevelt and Shaw's work followed attempts by Benjamin Franklin, Daniel Webster and Mark Twain to advance simpler spelling. Twain lobbied The Associated Press at its 1906 annual meeting to "adopt and use our simplified forms and spread them to the ends of the earth." AP declined.
But for aul th hi-proefiel and skolarly eforts, the iedeea of funy-luuking but simpler spelingz didn't captivaet the masez then - or now.
"I think that the average person simply did not see this as a needed change or a necessary change or something that was ... going to change their lives for the better," said Marilyn Cocchiola Holt, manager of the Pennsylvania department of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.
Carnegie, hoo embraest teknolojy, died in 1919, wel befor sel foenz. Had he livd, he probably wuud hav bin pleezd to no that milyonz of peepl send text and instant mesejez evry dae uezing thair oen formz of simplified speling: "Hav a gr8 day!"
Good point. Shows how little thought is put into these "movements". No wonder they can't spell. They are not very bright at all.
We need an American St. Cyril to devise a phonetic alphabet for English. At present, we don't have one.
Lord Jesus, please deliver us from the lunatics!
Wel, I must sae that thiss iz a readickulus eyedeeuh. How stoopid kan u b?
Ahmo -- regional dialect for "I am going to"
presenunitedstates -- universal these days for President of The United States. This one really, really ticks me off. Bunch of lazy-assed people who can't be bothered to actually say separate words.
They have the TIME to protest, of course.
They keep writing their own resume`s, and maiing them out, but for some reason, the DPW refuses to hire them as garbage collectors or ditch diggers.
Have you read Jeff Foxworthy's redneck dictionary?
Why is it stupid?
Only English and French have spelling so utterly divorced from the pronunciation of the language. Is it really a good thing that Samuel Johnson froze the spelling of English spelling a few generations before the previously fluid spelling would have simplified itself naturally?
Sure the parodic phonetic spellings given are absurd (Who actually pronounces "capture" "capcher"?). It's been done before: Korean is written with a constructed script that actually gives instruction on how to form the mouth to make the sounds once one knows the system, the Scandinavian languages have all undergone spelling reforms, the Chicoms simplified their pictographic script, Russian was given a rational system of spelling when the Rus converted to Orthodoxy.
We Americans even simplified our spelling so that our children have coloring books, not colouring books, and we harmonize rather than harmonise. I guess Noah Webster was stupid for doing that?
"Have you read Jeff Foxworthy's redneck dictionary?"
I haven't, and if you ask me again, ahmo kick your a$$! [grin]
LOL.
European - "Ah'm tellin' ya, y'all drink too much beer and european all night long..."
why is it stupid ?
cause it becomes ebonics for white people and that ends up makin Mad Max Waters right.
can't have that.
ptrn recagntion alows us undrstnd all knds ov wrtin stuf at a glance. try it yorself -- its amazng! Ov corse many ar usng a sort ov intrnet short hnd alrdy.
tar arn - used to remove hubcaps and lugnuts from automobile wheels..
You have a point, but there are several problems with it. When reading silently, the spellings of the words give important clues to the meanings. Since English is a hodge-podge language, made up of borrowings from many other languages, the spelling of words enhances our ability to understand what is being written.
Further, with as many homophones as exist in English, reading would be very difficult if they were spelled alike.
There, their, and they're are good examples of this. Each spelling adds information to the written word.
My other example of regional pronunciation differences is another reason to retain current spellings. It's even worse in England.
True. I first heard of this stupid idea in the late 60s. I thought then -- and think now -- that the main thrust is to cut off students even more from access to the past. It's not enough that the textbooks are full of left-wing propaganda; what if someone should actually read, for example, the founding documents.
This looks like ITA spelling from the 1960's
The Bolsheviks simplified Russian spelling after they took over. The pre-Revolutionary alphabet had several redundant letters which represented the same sound.
"The Bolsheviks simplified Russian spelling after they took over. The pre-Revolutionary alphabet had several redundant letters which represented the same sound."
Correct. Earlier Russian is as easy to pronounce as modern Russian, but there were some supernumerary letters, at least one of which, the tvyordisnak, did not have a sound at all, and was truly redundant. They did retain the myakisnak, however, since it did modify the pronunciation of the preceding consonant, even though it, too, has no sound of its own.
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