Words that should be respelt
 

The English language has a bizarre spelling system. No doubt you have sat through countless hours of spelling memorisation. You may have found the occasional word that you believed could be spelt better another way.

Here is my list:
friend - the silent i is useless, frend is more logical.
island - this word is a victim of the hypercorrectionists. The s does not belong here because the word is derived from Norse igland, not Latin insula. iland is a better spelling.
debt - another victim of the hypercorrectionists. The word is derived from Norman French dette, not Latin debitum. dett (or perhaps det) are better spellings.
answer - the w fell silent centuries ago. anser fits better.
give - the e is unnecessary, but has been there since the days when English was always written with quill pens and before U and V were separate letters. The word does not rhyme with five or dive. giv works better.
health. Drop the a and the word's spelling fits pronunciation better: helth.

What words do you believe could do with a more logical spelling?

memorization?

nite, tonite

A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling

by Mark Twain

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in themaindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

though, through, tough, trough, thought, naught,

conceive, their, weight, height, sleigh

I like your post Happy Monkey!

This gets into the whole issue of evolving language, dialect, and "proper" usage, which can be a very, very hot topic. Witness the acrimonious debates over the usage of Jive or Black Vernacular, or text message speak in schools. Or the microdebate with my friends over the use of "gauge" as a verb to stretch piercings ("Gauge is not a verb!" they cry).

I personally take a moderate stance on most things. Language does evolve, English faster and more richly than most, both historically and currently. As the piece from Mark Twain highlights, rapid and extreme changes can make such a complex language difficult to understand. A common sense approach toward evolving forms, without taking it to extremes, is best in my view.

Goodnite.

:)

From here

respelt

I live in a country where -ise- spellings are standard. -ize- spellings, although more phonetically accurate, are not the norm here.

Besides, "memorization" is not a good spelling either: what about that -tion suffix? Why can't this be spelt as -shun? Then it could be spelt "memorizashun".

I like to able to see a word's origins.....even when the origins have been played with (like with debt), they tell a story.

Words are words are words, made up of letters in assorted combinations. "Simplifying" spelling would be another instance of the dumbing down of America.

Words are art...leave them alone! ;)

...but think of how much faster we'll be able to communicate when we make changes like:

"To/too" should become "2"
"Your"..."ur"
"are"..."r"
etc

Just think of what it would be like to read an entire book written this way.

In the word debt, the b was inserted erroneously by the hypercorrectionists. It has no business being there because the word was derived from Norman French dette. If the spelling of this word reflected its origins accurately, it would be spelt dett like it used to be before the hypercorrectionists did their damage.

A similar case can be made for island as discussed above.

The only story that words should tell is pronunciation. I would rather put the origins of a word in the dictionary and correct pronunciation on the page, rather than the illogical current practice of putting the origins of words on the page and correct pronunciation in a dictionary.
If English words were art, they would be classified as belonging to the Rococo period. This is apt because the first dictionaries for English were written during the Rococo period.

This has nothing to do with the alleged "dumbing down" of America. English is spoken in many countries all over the world.

English-speaking students who learn Spanish, Italian, Finnish or several other languages can achieve a greater spelling proficiency in those languages after a year of instruction than they had in English after six years or more. Native speakers of such languages can spell any word reliably after less than two years of instruction. Does that mean their languages have been "dumbed down"? Or is that because such languages have an orthography that is easy to learn?

No, I disagree with that, sorry. Orthography often carries clues to the word's meaning, both overt and the subtle connotations associated with the word. This is useful for the reader and for the writer.

Further, pronunciation changes over time, and a word's spelling shouldn't necessarily have to change every time a language shifts.

Exactly my point. The journey that word has gone on tells a story. It tells us of the sensibilities and aspirations of those people who changed the word to \make it more latinate. By attempting to 'correct' the spellings, you take the place of the 'hypercorrectionists' you seek to displace.

I don't know what you're talking about when it comes to Spanish, because I'm deep into my second semester on it and am frustrated beyond my wit's end as to how many forms there are of any given verb when compared to English. The conjugation is madness and irregular verbs/stem changers are very difficult to remember. Just like the students in my class that complain about why Spanish isn't easier, you need to realize that you can't approach a language that has been developing for thousands of years and simply request it change because you have a tough time remembering certain technical aspects of it.

I prefer to think of it as reducing the systematic child abuse that is spelling in English. It is only the English language that can have an annual competition to prove that all school students except one in a country of 300 million people will misspell at least one word - the National Spelling Bee of the USA.

One does not need to know the history of a word every time one puts that word to paper. Most people couldn't care less about that. How often in a lifetime does the average person need to know the history of a particular word? Maybe once or twice? How often do people just need to spell words? A lot more often than that. Most people don't know or care that the -gh- digraph was originally a letter called yogh (Ȝȝ) that was purged from the orthography by Norman French scribes who despised non-Latin letters. But I'm sure most people have had trouble learning the ten or so different ways that the ending -ough can be pronounced, and assigning the correct pronunciation to each unfamiliar word with that ending.

Most people won't shed a tear for lost history if "debt" lost its silent b. The history can still be found in a good dictionary if anyone wants it. Yet English-speaking children all over the world would not mind a bit if you told them that "frend" was now an acceptable alternative spelling for "friend". (Derived, btw, from OE "freond", via ME "frend" - so "frend" is actually a historically plausible spelling.)
I didn't say that learning Spanish would be easy. If I was learning Spanish, I would also be complaining loudly about irregular verb conjugations. (I know I did when I studied French. ;)) I said that spelling in Spanish is easy compared to English, once you've spent some time learning the basics. Had you heard these conjugated verbs spoken out loud, you would have had a decent chance of spelling them correctly.

You want to be "most people?" I do not.

English is one of the most spoken, most complex, and richest languages in the world, if not the most (Mandarin has more speakers). It will evolve on its own, without people trying to "fix" it.

Hey Kingswood, where abouts are you from anyway? You are another one of us (aussie) aren't you?

Cellar = Sillier

That is happening, yes. "Thru" appears in my dictionary as a variant spelling of "through". Change in English spelling may proceed at a glacial pace, but it does occur.

Here are some more words with knotty spellings:

ptarmigan. This word is of Gaelic derivation (Scots Gaelic tarmachan), not Greek, yet it has apparently taken a silent p from another word as if it has gone home with the wrong clothes after a party.
lieutenant. Americans are satisfied with the silent i in this word. The Brits, not satisfied with this, have shown remarkable innovation with their pronunciation of this word by managing to morph a "u" into an "f". Yes, the proper way to say this word in Britain is leftenant.
colonel. Military ranks appear to be a rich source of interesting spellings. The pronunciation of colonel is like a traveller that goes from point A to point B via the scenic route.

The end result of total, rigorous phoneticization of English orthography is the expansion of the alphabet from twenty-six characters to around forty. And this will only do, if fixed and unmodified, for a century or two.

See Omniglot, and suchlike neo-alphabets. All interesting, none likely to see use.

French is even more nuts about silent letters than English is, although its usage is more regularized owing to assigning authority over usage and orthography to the Academie Francaise. [French characters omitted] We get a lot of our use of silent letters used as signals to modify the sounds of letters preceding them from the French, which has four E sounds (conveniently indicated by four diacritical marks counting an occasionally used umlaut, and the absence of a diacritical) and a silent E, used to soften C, S or G, as well as a grammatical-gender indicator.

I agree. Public acceptance of such an extended alphabet would be unlikely. The USA still does not use the metric system in everyday life for similar reasons.

Well, I'm certainly not that good, but I can say that it became even more difficult this semester as I came from a class taught by someone who spoke South American Spanish and am now being taught by an instructor that speaks the dialect spoken in Spain. Suddenly, many of the sounds became "th" where there was none, before. Spelling based upon listening to the spoken word got thrown out the window, entirely.

So, for English, what standard do we use for all these spelling changes? The north and south are going to fight over "peacon" versus "puhcon" pie, people from Bahstan will get the "idear" to have "r" swapped with "h" in many words so they can drive a "cah", and Pittsburghers are still going to put their clothes in a "worsher". Let's hope to god we never change "schedule" to "shedule" in an attempt to standardize on Queen's English, although I do agree they need to start dropping those "u"s in "colour" and "favourite".

Besides, all these words get underlined in red no matter where I type them in, so I can correct common mistakes from hearing and learn over time. Autocorrect in MS word, however, will be the dooming of us all...

It's pecan

How does the knowledge of other languages following into increased proficiency have anything to do with being "dumbed down."? I don't get the connection.

What I'm talking about is the penchant for making everything easier. If we make words "easier" then kids will get better grades on spelling tests and we'll have smarter kids? The logic doesn't follow. I was talking about America; I actually do know that there are other English speaking cultures around the world. [/green acres]

Better yet, let's give test answers, let's not make the kids learn to do addition and subtraction without calculators, let's do everything in our power to make life easier because having to learn something is for the birds. :rolleyes:

For why? I happen to like the 'u' in colour and favourite. Just because one of the english speaking populations doesn't use it, why change the way we've been spelling the words for centuries?

Hey, I'm just following Kingswood's suggestion and if we're going to do it, we're going to do it right. ;)

A quotation from The Matrix:
Kids who don't have to waste their time on rote memorization of 500-year-old pronunciations, 600-year-old printers' typos, 700-year-old scribal conventions and other odd spellings can put their time in the classroom to another use. Would kids be smarter then?
Do you put a "u" into words like color, flavor, honor? Do you use -er or -re on words like center? Do you use -ise or -ize endings? Do you spell jail or gaol? If you use American spellings for these words, you are already using the products of spelling reform. Noah Webster, who wrote the first American dictionaries, was a supporter of spelling reform and introduced simpler spellings in early editions of his dictionaries. Some of those spellings became standard in American English.

But you seem to think that changing spelling is a bad idea. Does that mean you will also reject American spellings for such words and use the older British spellings? Maybe you would also put the silent e back onto words such as shop and run? And maybe you would also use "u" for "v" and "i" for "j" because if it was good enough for Shakespeare then it is good enough for you? And while we're at it, let's make all the kids learn them too, because we don't want them to go to school just to have a good time learning easy stuff. Let's make learning as hard as possible for our kids. Why stop at bizarre spellings? We'll make them multiply numbers using Roman numerals, learn to tell the time using a sundial, make them calculate the epicycles in planetary motions and calculate the proper number of gargoyles to place on a new building. :rolleyes:

So colour should really be culler? or kuller? or kulla? Should people with different accents spell things differently?

Learning to spell teaches our children a lot more than just how to spell. It teaches them about rules and exceptions to rules, it teaches them about guesswork and approximations, it teaches them about making fine distinguishments (their there they're). They learn about patterns, about symmetry (b/d p/q), about shape. They learn about sounds and how to make them. They get to experience multitasking (c) and redundance (qu).

How much of this would be lost if spelling were simplified? Is there a gain that can justify that loss? Let's simplify spelling so a simple AI program can do it. Do we really want to reduce the challenge to our children to that level? Is reducing mental obstacles really a good thing?

Spelling may seem a boring thing when you are on the learning end, but frankly, so does potty training to some kids. That doesn't mean it's not a good thing. Maybe, in some instances, the teaching approach could be improved. But then learning to deal with a little tedium is also a valuable life skill.

So you're going to teach them more by...teaching them less? What? Kids could save time in math class by using a calculator the entire time, too, but it isn't going to offer much overall improvement.

Taking the time to learn the rules and exceptions to those rules is the least of the worries facing our education system, today.

I have no qualms about words with reasonable spellings. "Color" is a reasonable spelling because it has no unnecessary silent letters and the consonants are all correct. The vowels aren't to my taste but otherwise this word is not particularly difficult to spell. I just feel that it's the words with the most bizarre spellings that could do with some TLC. Every word I have quoted as being difficult to spell satisfies one or more of the following criteria (1) has one or more unnecessary silent letters, (2) is a common exception to a spelling rule, and (3) has a spelling that is a particularly poor match to pronunciation. Other people have listed words that mostly follow these rules as well.

I see nothing wrong with finding out what words people think could do with an overhaul.
Rules with exceptions grow weaker as rules the more exceptions there are. There are only four words that have an "-efy" ending instead of "-ify", so this rule is easy to learn - just teach the "-ify" rule and the four exceptions. On the other hand, "I before E except after C" only correctly predicts the spelling of about one third of words with "CEI" in them; the other two thirds of the words have "CIE" instead.

Kudos, by the way, to anyone who really knows the full "I before E except after C" rule. I don't know the proper way to phrase it, but it's something like "I before E except after C when the sound of the vowel rhymes with BEE". Many adults don't remember the bit about the vowel. When many adults cannot remember all the spelling rules, it's no surprise that many adults cannot spell.
English spelling is not about guesswork and approximations (otherwise plausible yet incorrect spellings would not be stigmatised); many people do not in fact learn to make "fine distinguishments" (otherwise there wouldn't be so many people confusing "lose" and "loose", "their" and "there" and so on); the patterns often have no meaning (otherwise "tomb", "bomb" and "comb" would rhyme); symmetry of letter shape is only useful when learning to write letters, not spelling with them; learning sounds is not very useful after two years because many words cannot be sounded out using the methods taught in the first year of education; and multitasking and redundancy are only further evidence that English spelling could be in better shape than it is.

Many students also get to experience the joys of not ever becoming competent spellers in English, of being more likely to be diagnosed with dyslexia than students in other countries with more regular spelling systems, and the unbridled joy of being permanently shut out of many higher-paying fields of employment because their spelling skills are substandard.
How many years of education does it take to become truly proficient in English spelling? Six to eight years is a rough estimate. How long does it take a child in Italy to learn to read Italian with the same proficiency? One year, maybe two. Does that mean Italian children are not challenged in the classroom? Of course not - it's just they are not challenged by the need to learn to spell in their native language. Some languages don't even have a word for "spelling".

Let's imagine that spelling was simplified. What would we lose? Good question.

The biggest risk with wholesale change would be an inability to read literature in Traditional Spelling. However, few people really read Shakespeare in the original these days. We don't study "The Tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet" or need to puzzle over spellings like heauen and neuer. The spellings in reprinted literature are updated to more modern spellings. If orthographic change does occur, this will also happen to modern works when they are reprinted.

Suppose some words with redundant silent letters received alternative spellings with the redundancy removed. For some time, kids would still need to be able to recognise the older spellings so they can read older books that contained them. They may puzzle for a moment when they see "friend" instead of "frend" for the first time, but they would be able to cope. "Oh, that's just old-spell for 'frend'" they might say, then read on. Learning to recognise Traditional spellings does not take as much time as rote memorization of them.

And what would we gain? We would have higher rates of literacy, a greater percentage of people that can confidently read a newspaper after eight years of education, and less likelihood of being denied employment because someone misspelled a word in a job application.
The mathematics analogy is false. It's more like having to write the number "37" as "317", "874" as "6174" and "45" means either "45" or 54" depending on context, and having to spend an entire life doing this because great stigma is attached to the practice of writing numbers more sensibly.

With more streamlined spellings, one would be able to teach the kids less and yet they learn as much. No longer would they need to learn the sound signs for the letters, then separately learn the spelling of "friend"; instead "frend" would be recognisable from the sound-signs alone and one less word needs to be learnt by rote. Do this for other common words that cause particular trouble and kids would still know how to spell the same number of words - but spend less time learning them. It's pretty obvious, really.

Some people appear to have overreacted to the idea of even considering alternative spellings for words that are most badly in need of them. The world is not going to end tomorrow just because someone had the temerity to consider dropping a totally useless silent letter from a word that one might use a dozen times in a lifetime. The sky won't fall because the latest editions of some dictionaries list "thru" as an acceptable alternative spelling for "through". The moral standards of society will not be degraded for daring to point out that some words in English are in need of better spelling.

So lighten up please.

Feyen, Eye will liten up.

:neutral:

back atcha

Why so defensive? Why so unwilling to allow the topic to develop into a discussion? You almost seem bitter -do you feel that you have suffered because of the difficulties of learning English? I ask to gain perspective on your pov, not to attack.

I did not say spelling was about guesswork and approximations. I said learning to spell was. Etc. Rules with exceptions, redundancy and the like may not be desirable or efficient, but they are facts of life. Familiarity with those concepts is not a bad thing.

Education is about learning to learn, not just learning to read. Reading is a tool. With a good teacher, learning to spell can give a child so many more tools that just reading.

You also seem to draw the conclusion that learning to spell and learning to read are almost the same thing. There is a lot of evidence that word shape is of greater importance than letter order when you read. That's why lower case is easier to read than upper case and why is its so easy for perfectly competent spellers to make typos and not notice them. Beginning readers have many sight words that they cannot yet spell.

The complexity of the English language may have drawbacks, I was merely pointing out some of its benefits. Italian children may learn to read more quickly, but does that mean they have a better education? It's not a race to the finish line, it's about what you collect on the way.



You mentioned greater likelihood of dyslexia diagnosis. Are you implying that the complexity of English causes dyslexia? Or that it causes people to be incorrectly diagnosed? Or what? You clearly seem to think this is a bad thing. You also don't support your assertion, but I assume you have some evidence.

...and the biggest loss of all if English were to be simplified is the good old American Spelling Bee! :eek: Competitive Spelling would never be the same again, and you suggest this is a good thing? :lol:

You're right about my math analogy being incorrect, but I don't understand how your idea to improve literacy by dumbing down spelling is going to improve much. Why not improve teaching methods, instead? You're trying to alter something that has slowly evolved and changed over centuries overnight and you don't think there will be side damaging effects?

You still haven't addressed the issue of what dialect/accent we're going to standardize on, either. How is that going to be decided, or should we simply allow anyone to select whatever version of a word they desire?

No, but any "rezoomay" that ends up on my desk with spellings like you suggest is going right in the trash, as in any business related e-mail that begins with "let me ax you a question".

In a parallel universe exists the exact opposite of a forum spelling nazi. Instead of correcting errors in other people's posts, they attempt to correct the language, itself. We may be witnessing the opening of a gateway...

I, for one, have very little trouble spelling in English, and never have.

A better idea than all this revisionism would be teaching kids how to use a dictionary, and encouraging young people to read more so that their vocabulary and spelling proficiency increase naturally.

Can we simplify math instead?

Think of the labor savings we could accomplish by removing the alphabet's whiskey!

Amen, Cloud! Also, I would really like to see that pesky quantam physics simplified.
The way it is now is just too much! :p

Not an awful lot different from the change in the way kids are taught to read, write and spell. That also went from one extreme to the other and now I think it's settling down a little to find a happy medium. I hope. I found the "kidspell" thing weird at first, being another fortunate who has no problem with spelling, but having seen how it helps them have confidence in expressing themselves, it's grown on me a little. But not enough to want to "simplify" the language to a kidspell version. Learning to spell after they've learned to write their ideas down seems to encourage the children to use and then learn to spell words that they might have otherwise avoided, and learning to spell after they've learned to read is so much easier because they already 'know" the words. I'm speaking solely from my observations here. I have no paper to cite on this.

And while I'm offering anecdotal evidence, back to reading and spelling only being distantly related, my 5-year-old can read pretty fluently, (probably at what is officialy 2nd grade level) but spells entirely without vowels and only manages about two thirds of the consonant sounds. If people cannot confidently read a newspaper, it's not necessarily the complexities of the language at fault.

Huh? One third? You just said two thirds have CIE? I before E, except after C, or sounding like A, as in neighbor and weigh. That sounded like tw.
Of course they have to learn to spell in their native language. How in hell would they ever write without spelling? Reading is not the same as writing.
Trying to get a job with an eigth grade education, spelling is the least of your problems.

Screw that! I had to do it, along with tests without using a calculater and a lot of other things the little wimps don't do any more. If you make it too easy for them, the terrorists have won.
Chill out, we're all friends here. You appear to be the one that should lighten up. You can't denounce people that disagree and ever expect to make any headweigh. :lol:

I posted previously while suffering from a lung infection. This infection made me feel unwell, and also contributed to a lack of sleep along with a few days of humid summer weather with hot, muggy nights. No wonder I was grumpy. I am not yet over the infection.
Well, I did lose a high school spelling bee once when a stutter caused me to misspell a word that I could spell correctly (lieutenant). I don't have difficulty with English spelling. Yet that doesn't mean it's an easy skill for the population as a whole.
Such concepts can be learnt in a simpler way.
Exact letter order is indeed unimportant when reading. Cmabrigde Uinervtisy aellegdly did smoe rscheach itno tihs (Google for "Cmabrigde Uinervtisy").

With word shape being as important to word recognition as the letters in that word, it does suggest that spelling can be somewhat flexible without impacting on word recognition.

As for learning to read, I cannot remember how I learnt to read, having done so at the age of three or so. From what I remember from school, the early years focused on the sound of the letters. Later reading taught a different method.
Many Italian children also learn English at school, as do children in many other countries. So mastering English spelling is by no means confined to native English speakers.
The journal "Science" published a study in 2001. This study showed that dyslexia has the same rates for speakers of the languages studied (English, French, Italian), but dyslexia caused less reading difficulties in Italian which has a regular orthography.
Source: Study: English a Factor in Dyslexia (AP, 15 March 2001)
Wikipedia: Dyslexia

You can also google for "dyslexia" and "English" for additional links.
Even if English spelling was simplified, I'm sure the spelling bee would still exist. Many of those words are words that many people would never use in their lifetime. Not only is English hard to spell, it also has the largest vocabulary of any language. This contributes in part to the appeal of the spelling bee.

No teaching method can give a student the ability to spell an unfamiliar word reliably.
I am not trying to alter anything. I'm merely pointing out a few of the more bizarrely-spelt words in the overgrown garden that is English orthography and suggesting that they could do with a better spelling.
All I did was post a few words that could do with better spellings. I don't see why I must also post a dissertation on these other topics. Do you plan to explain why all existing spellings must be preserved, why they are the best ones available, and why all such spellings must remain in the orthography in perpetuity?

As for selection of spellings, that already happens with many words. Colour/color, centre/center, zeros/zeroes, flamingos/flamingoes.
Do you also discard those that don't spell that word exactly as "résumé" with the proper acute accents over both es? Or are you more tolerant?

CIE: ancient, efficient, deficient, glacier
CEI: ceiling, receive

The ratio is about 2:1. The CIE words aren't covered by this (misquoted) rule, but some people do not pay enough attention in class. :D

Really? Worked just fine for me, I think. Mind you, I was taught under the public school system's "we're going to repeat this endlessly until you get it" method, but... hey, they use a different method now, right? Please tell me they do.

Nah. All languages change, especially spelling, over time. It will happen and it is happening. "Nite" (hasn't this one come full circle?), "lite", "til", and "thru" will be the standard in some years. Even word use changes, as "data" is now accepted as both the singular and plural. It's inevitable, I guess.

More tolerant? Getting the accent marks gets you extra points!

Those are trophies, baby. English speakers rule...we came, we conquered, we took your words, bwahahaha.:vikingsmi

Yes sir, ship loads of tea, silk, spices, silver and gold, but in the Captains strongbox was the real treasure. Captured words, still wild and uncouth, but they would be broken.... even if they had to be corrupted to do it.
What ever the cost, they would be forced into yeoman service for the masses. That way the masses would be distracted by these trophies and not notice who got the rest of the cargo.

"What's that?" said the explorer, pointing at an interesting variety of tree.
The bemused Native utters something.
The explorer writes it down.
The explorer asks for the names of other native plant and animal life.
Only later does it transpire that said Native has pulled a fast one. Now it's too late to remove the new words that translate to "A Big Tree", "Big Tweety Bird", "Your Finger", "You Stupid Gringo", "Who Farted", "Vagina of Goddess" and "I go home now".
We already know that "Yucatan" means "What do you want" in the native language.

Note that the CIE examples all have a pair of vowel sounds, rather than the single vowel sounds quoted in the CEI examples. This seems to be the important difference, as one merely puts down the two vowels sounded in the first set.

About the only exceptions to I before E (one sound) are seize and weird. It may be argued that because of the influence of the R that weird comes out with two distinct vowel sounds. Perhaps it depends on how fast you say it.

Here I quite disagree. The way I was taught did exactly that, and with near-perfect reliability -- at the very least insofar as the word is of regular spelling, which is the great bulk of all the hundred fifty thousand or so English words in regular modern use -- a fraction of the total in the Oxford English Dictionary. It usually delivers on the weirdies as well. The method is Phonics, and it made a superb speller of me by the third grade; I could visualize a word's spelling as I spoke it.

What's Phonics, essentially? It's a course of study that rehearses all the ways English comes up with to spell a given noise, and which English words use which way. When all's said and done, spelling becomes simple for the Phonics student, who can confidently "sound words out," and reading and garnering meaning from reading become very pleasurable, and he can readily navigate and be entertained by such Seussian constructions as "The tough coughs as he ploughs through the dough."

It's not that English has no system of orthography; it's that it has two: one for the Germanic-group words and one for the Latinate. Add those loan-words kept in their original languages' spellings to stir the pot, and you have the current farrago.

Only slightly off topic, the difficulty of English besides strange spelling....
There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that word is "UP."
It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP ?

At a meeting, why does a topic come UP ? Why do we speak UP ,and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report?
We call UP our friends and we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old cars.

At other times the little word has a real special meaning. People stir up trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses.
To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special.
And this up is confusing: A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP

We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night. We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP !
To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP , look the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4 of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions

If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.
When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP . When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP . When it rains, it wets UP the earth.
When it doesn't rain for awhile, things dry UP

One could go on & on, but I'll wrap it UP , for now my time is UP , so .... time to shut UP .....!

Oh...one more thing:! What is the first thing you do in the morning & the last thing you do at night?

U P
:D

If it's so freaking hard, how come my 5yo just read a new book straight through without errors which contained the words through, straight, thought, sight and night? believe me, his "sight words" are 2, 3 and 4 letters.

Patterns? Do I hear something about pattern recognition? No surely not!

Of course he's a genius, but if a 5yo can deal with all these silent letters, inconsistencies and rule breakers then it's a bit wussie to claim that indirect spelling is holding intelligent people back.

/proud of our 5yo
//worried about what else he might have read when we were lulled into thinking that he wasn't interested in reading....

5 year olds can latch on to anything in a snap. So can 15 year olds, but only if it doesn't have anything to do with school. 50 year olds pick their battles and challanges.:haha:

The bold text in the above quote is interesting because it supports my original point even as the surrounding text tries to argue against it.

How much better would Phonics be if all English words had a regular spelling? For the irregular words, no teaching method can help with the spelling of such words as "colonel", "ptarmigan", "forecastle", "lieutenant" (British pronunciation as "leftenant") and other oddities when such words are encountered for the first time in spoken English.

Sight recognition of words is not the same as spelling them correctly. Get your 5yo to spell these words. Does he get them all right or does he misspell any of them?

The support for that point is not very strong, however; that is why I said at the very least -- it'll do that well, but that isn't the limit of its usefulness.

To make English spelling phonetically consistent a outrance will call for an alphabet of about forty characters -- something like, say, Unifon or Omniglot.

I'm a living example of the effectiveness of a course of phonics, Kingswood, even if you've never heard of it. My elementary school class got phonics, while my younger brothers' class a few years behind did not and it took their spelling a looong time to catch up with mine; basically we could spell, they couldn't. Not like us. Phonics is why I'm a good writer and copyeditor and tw, to cite an obvious example, is not.

This is true. It is also true that adding this many new letters to the alphabet (and omitting redundant letters like q and x) would have acceptance issues with the general public. Another difficulty with a 40-character alphabet would be the complexity of the keyboard that would be required.

Yet there are grounds for considering the addition of new letters. English has six short vowels that can take stress but only five vowel letters, so adding one vowel letter would make it possible for all short stressed vowels to be written distinctly with single letters. (The short vowel without a convenient monographic representation is the vowel in "good".) It should not be necessary to add more than one letter, and this letter could be as simple as a u with an umlaut or something: ü. Some people would object to the addition of a new letter to the alphabet (and fair enough, they would not be used to it) but other people may embrace it. ("Woohoo! We're getting umlauts!")

This does not mean that any new letters would be required. Instead, English is more likely to make do with digraphs even after any reform that may take place.

My formal education did not involve phonics, I just had a good memory for spelling. (I remember spelling Latinate words of 10 letters or so correctly in first grade.)

That's about what I figured.

I believe my memory for spelling is primarily visual, as it relies heavily on a process of visualization -- the word has to look right. Which is a regrettably circular sentence, but it seems the only one that answers to a simple and long established habit.

What's wrong with "forecastle"?
It's not four castles.
It's not for the castle.
It's foreward or forecastle.
The spelling helps explain the intent or meaning. Change the spelling and you've changed the meaning. :rtfm:

Its pronunciation is not what you may expect from the spelling. It's pronunciation sounds like "foxel". (It may be pronounced as spelt as well, but such a pronunciation would probably mark you as a landlubber.) There is a variant spelling "fo'c'sle" that is close to the nautical pronunciation.