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I am going to have to violently disagree with almost everything in your post. I will not address the Spelling Bee issue itself, as I am not familiar with the post or the incident.

Asian countries that have much more complex languages can have low literacy rates, as well. So many things happened over the years cited, that it is impossible to pin any drop to a particular reform. I do not believe French has been reformed, but I doubt that France's literacy rate is all that bad. For that matter, the article does not inform us of the illiteracy rate among the English and Canadians, who have less standardization than we do. (Cheque, colour, etc.)

This reminds me of the people who trot out the same statistics to argue for a longer school year. They mention that Germany and Japan have longer school years and more literacy and better test scores. They usually omit that Belgium has a much shorter school year and ALSO has better test scores.

So, besides your "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy, you also engage in the straw man of "If we oppose you we support illiteracy." There is more to a language than getting the spelling right. There are reasons why Shakespeare, the original King James and Challoner Douay-Rheims Bible and Charles Dickens are kept in their original form. They are not only for the University educated, either. The look of the word, sometimes subtle differences in sound that cannot be reconciled with a Scando-Germanic sparseness, are important for great literature and poetry.

English differs from many other languages because its vocabulary is vast. English is also a mongrel language, owing its vocabulary and grammar to Germanic, modern Romance and Classical tongues. Oftentimes, the irregular spellings give us an idea of whether the root is derived from Latin, French, Greek or German. It is an advantage in reading that English has alternate spellings for words sounding the same. Homonyms help a reader who cannot "hear" the inflection of voice. But he will know the difference be "no" and "know," or "right" and "write."

There were plenty of brainy people who opposed the standardization movement then. G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc come to mind immediately. Most Freepers have more respect for the writings of Chesterton than for the writings of the Socialist Shaw. Twain's writing is excellent, but he had a poor track record of guessing the future. He would not invest in the telephone, but lost much of his fortune on failed 19th century stenography inventions.

As a traditional conservative, I believe that radical changes like this should not come from literacy councils, playwrights or even presidents. President Carter attempted to impose the Metric system on the people of the United States. We just said no. Now, here and there, it makes its way in, but for most day to day uses, people think and work in Fahrenheit, pounds and feet. Computers do a great job on the conversions, for when working with other countries is necessary. People who have use for both can learn them both. The Canadian government has imposed metric on the Canadians for decades, now. However, when you talk to real Canadians, not a single one describes his weight in kilograms, and the percentage who know what a centigram or a decaliter is corresponds to the percentage of Americans who know what a league or a hundredweight is. People will learn whatever measurements they care to when they need to.

The language, including spelling, is always changing. I would argue that some of the change is bad, especially those inorganic changes that stem from a new class of PhDs and sexual revolution activists pushing their style on Universities, government agencies and editors. Some of the changes are organic, but are possibly the sign of a language in decline. The French people are regularly adopting English words to meet their needs (Walkman and weekend are two very non-French words in the LaRousse dictionary). The best efforts of the French government cannot convince the citizens to use "communique electronique" rather than "e-mail." I hope that Americans will have at least as much backbone as the French in resisting a top-down imposition of a vocabulary that looks like Newspeak.

This was a long post but I'll address some parts:

"I do not believe French has been reformed, but I doubt that France's literacy rate is all that bad. For that matter, the article does not inform us of the illiteracy rate among the English and Canadians, who have less standardization than we do. (Cheque, colour, etc.) "

See my post 103 for other rates. English speakers come off poorly.

The French have a rule that the final vowels are not pronounced. Using that rule they have little trouble reading because the language is then self-consistent and follows its own rules. But upon hearing a new word they have no idea which vowels to append to the part they can hear. So they do have trouble spelling.

"So, besides your "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy, you also engage in the straw man of "If we oppose you we support illiteracy." There is more to a language than getting the spelling right. There are reasons why Shakespeare, the original King James and Challoner Douay-Rheims Bible and Charles Dickens are kept in their original form. They are not only for the University educated, either. The look of the word, sometimes subtle differences in sound that cannot be reconciled with a Scando-Germanic sparseness, are important for great literature and poetry."

I have to guess what you mean by my "original post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacy", since you don't say. I suppose you mean that the fact the reformed languages have lower rates of illiteracy does not prove that reform is the cause. But I addressed that in the *second* paragraph below, which you seem to have ignored:

>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.)

As to keeping things in their original form, Dickens wrote in Traditional Orthography (TO), coming as he did after Johnson's dictionary. Nobody knows how Shakespeare spelled because the only thing we have in his handwriting is part of a deed. The earliest plays were published by two different companies whose typesetters were from (Holland, I think) and did not spell the same as each other. And much of the old material is published in modern TO because the original spellings are so odd at times (and not phonetic like SoundSpel, at least for modern pronunciations) that they are distracting or incomprehensible.

>"Homonyms help a reader who cannot "hear" the inflection of voice. But he will know the difference be "no" and "know," or "right" and "write." "

Yes, just as he knows the difference between the the same-spelled like/like in "I like things like that." It is not inflection but context and word order that enable us to parse spoken sentences, as also in the famous "Time flies like an arrow." that, even tho spelled in TO, can technically be parsed four different ways (As an order to go like an arrow and time flies, or to time only those flies that are like an arrow, or conventionally, or in the sense that "Horse flies like a horse, so Time Flies like an arrow (doubtless the Arrow of Time.)" [Granted inflection helps sometimes, but that is true even of sentences without homonyms spelled in TO.]

"As a traditional conservative, I believe that radical changes like this should not come from literacy councils, playwrights or even presidents. "

I agree with you. They should come from the bottom up. Proponents publicize the problem and solutions, daring rebels adopt "thru" instead of the absurd "through" (and "thru" and "tho" are in the dictionary now as acceptable alternate spellings), some dyslexics who have been unable to learn in TO are successfully taught in SoundSpel, people become familiar with SoundSpel and some demand their children be taught in it to save the time wasted on TO, the movement sweeps the country as the Internet did, and suddenly we have won! Granted that is a dream at the moment, but please note that it does *not* involve government mandates. (Can the dream be realized? Others have been, that of the American Revolution was, improbable as that seemed at first. You never know unless you try.)