I'm Alan Mole, President of the American Literacy Council, responding to your comments about our picketing the Spelling Bee. Since there were so many postings (116+) and most were negative, perhaps you'll forgive me if I take a little more space to reply than is customary.
Very briefly this is our position:
ALC actually likes the Bee, since it's a good way to make a hard subject fun for kids. But where the Bee glorifies the difficulty of spelling, we think it should be easy. Where the Bee finds the one student in ten million (literally!) who can master it, we want to make it logical so everyone can master it and millions more can read.
We have 22% functional illiteracy in America, some 40 million adults. In Sweden it's 7%, Germany 10% and Norway 12%. All those countries reformed their spelling, some several times in the last century. And their low illiteracy *is* due to their spelling. A paper in Science reports that Italians have just as much dyslexia as English speakers, as measured by trouble repeating syllables and by brain scans, yet there is far less trouble reading. The paper concludes that the difference is due to the spelling systems. (Italian has honest and phonetic spelling.)
Illiteracy often leads to poverty, desperation and crime. The USA has 2.1 million prisoners behind bars, the highest incarceration rate in the whole world. Is this due to spelling and illiteracy? Well, 60% of our prisoners are illiterate -- judge for yourself.
Most European countries have reformed their spelling and lowered their illiteracy. It can be done. And it could be painless here in America because computers can transform documents, to or from reformed spelling, in seconds. So no one would be forced to read or write in reformed, nor is it likely that newspapers would change for a century.
But as a gradual start we want to take some dyslexics who have failed every effort to learn reading in regular spelling, and teach them in reformed. Perhaps some day one will hand you a note in SoundSpel. Would you deign to read it, knowing it made that man literate? Could you read it?
Well, SoundSpel drops silent letters ("no" not "know") and it spells long vowels (AEIOU) as AE (as in steak), EE (as in meet), IE (as in tried) and so on. Heer's a sampl. It is a litl shoking at ferst but being fonetic it's eezy with sum practis. Wuud U tri to reed it, to help a dislexic? To fiend out mor, see www.spellingsociety.org or www.americanliteracy.com/alc6.htm
In answer to typical comments:
1. No, we do not want to reform grammar, and I know of no one among us who likes Ebonics. Spelling is not grammar. Most of the nations of Europe have reformed their spelling; none that I know of their grammar. Norway reformed spelling four times in the last century but never adopted Norbonics.
2. Yes, it can be done, and is not a silly impossible proposal. Just as Arabic numerals replaced Roman numerals (a vastly inferior system requiring a university education to learn to add and subtract), just as Standard Time replaced every hamlet having its own time based on local noon, just as Sweden and Norway and Germany reformed their spelling, so we can reform ours.
3. "Reformers just want to coddle poor widdle kiddies, who should have to learn as we did." Other countries fixed their spelling to make it easy, barely harder than learning to count, which is the way it should be. They have far less illiteracy (7% Sweden VS 22% USA, 20% UK, 17% Canada...) Their children almost all become fluent in one or more foreign languages, while the U.S. performance is pathetic in this area. Of course it takes them two weeks to learn to read and write while it takes us two years. (A third of the first six years of grade school is spent on readin' and writin'.) There are far better things for children to learn than our corrupt spelling. Do reformers want to make it better for children? Yes. But why would *you* be against that? Do you hate children? Do like polio? ("I had to face that risk so they should too. And let's bring back diphtheria!")
4. "Everyone can learn to spell!" Yes -- in Germany. But here literally ten million children compete in the Bee and 9,999,999 misspell a word and drop out, before one is declared champion. If you think one in ten million is everyone you must have taken New Math.
5. "No responsible person would champion spelling reform." In 1908 most responsible people thought it would happen. Teddy Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Tennyson, Shaw and hundreds of college presidents, even the NEA (then more society than union) all vigorously supported it.
6. "Get a life!"-- Oh, I think T.R. had one.
These comments should have convinced you, yet somehow I suspect I can look forward to a vigorous debate. Well, it should be interesting...
Alan
I suspect that almost nobody knows who you are or what you are talking about. Most probably don't care, either.
Besides promoting laziness, it can be down right dangerous for trying to figure out safety and hazardous warnings.
And just why should we all have to run your corruptions through a translator?
Most of us have agreed that 1+1=2 in the accepted base 10 system. If people have to learn the phonetics of each
letter of the alphabet, then it isn't too much to ask to learn most combinations, with the occasional odd legacy.
I can't fully back your plan, though. Modern English spelling has a few benefits you may be overlooking.
These aren't knock-out reasons, but they're food for thought before any major, government-mandated spelling reform.
(It may make you feel better to know that the language is evolving -- when I was in the spelling bee lo those many years ago, 'dialog' was accepted, and both spellings of 'judgment' seem kosher.)
Are you saying (or is it "Ar yue saeing...") that illiteracy can only be mitigated by spelling reform and not by better education efforts? Some of our public schools (or is it "publik skuuls") are pretty lousy.
Another thing: while this sounds like a neat idea whose time, for all I know, may be well overdue, doesn't it sound like an insult to people's intelligence to "dumb down" the spelling system to accomodate our society's more unfortunate members, rather than inspiring them to overcome (or is it "ovrkum") their situation and learn the sophisticated system of spelling that we currently consider "proper?"
You miss the entire point of the Spelling Bee. It's not to teach the masses spelling, it's to reward exceptional individuals who have gone above and beyond what is expected.
"4. "Everyone can learn to spell!" Yes -- in Germany. But here literally ten million children compete in the Bee and 9,999,999 misspell a word and drop out, before one is declared champion. If you think one in ten million is everyone you must have taken New Math."
The logic here is dizzingly stupid. You're pointing to a system that is designed to single out one person out of ten million, and saying that it's success means that spelling in too hard. That's like saying we should reform the presidential election system because only one man out of all of the nominees and candidates succeeds in becoming president.
Give me a break.
Even so, the U.S. 9th graders still scored better than Germany, Denmark, Canada, and The Netherlands. Those scores included ALL ranges of socio-economic classes for the U.S. and only the top 2/3 or so of those countries.
In the event one would want to look up this study, I give the following information.
Elley, W. B. (1992). How in the World do Students Read? IEA Study of Reading Literacy. The Hague, Netherlands: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. Excerpts of this study may be found in the book, What Really Matters for Struggling Readers by Richard L. Allington.
So all that being said, U.S. kids stack up just fine across the world. Does that mean we can't and shouldn't do better? Of course we should.
We can't even settle on how to spell colo(u)r...
Germany has several spelling reforms. Unfortunately for me, I learned German before the last round went into effect. The last one went into effect maybe six years ago. Germans still didn't eliminate ß (Double S), that has been eliminated in Switzerland for a while, but they changed a bunch of the rules governing its use (sometimes you use double S, sometimes ß). And one thing the latest German reform did which I am still confused about is the introduction of triple consanants: Schifffahrt is the word for ship ride. Three F's.
But still, German spelling is easier, very few exceptions...
I jest gotta put ma 2 sents in hyar.
Is what y'all sayin is thet ye gonna change up tha way we is sposed to be spellin dese hyar wards ?
PS What are you going to do about the damn English who accent the wrong syllables?