Spelling is ruining the English language

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by DanaC

I can't. And neither can you. But the system we have is the system we have. We have no way to know that intorducing a new system wouldn't cause greater harm. And I can only really judge my own experience and those of a small group of people. But the hundreds of millions of English speakers are not an amorphous mass; they are made of of lots of small groups each with their own experience of the language and no more reducible to a formula for change than they are to a formula for stasis.

As to which of the spellings I find easier to read: the ones with the 'ough'. Because that's what I am comfortable with. The second set of words jar for me and were I to find them in a piece of writing they would startle me from the text.

I hope you don't use a "DRIVE THRU" very often, as you would be so startled by that spelling that you would probably rear-end the car in front.

The "tho" and "thru" spellings are both found in dictionaries, both listed as "informal". The "thru" spelling has a long pedigree; it was in widespread use before 1750 but was not preferred by Johnson when he published his Dictionary.

Originally Posted by DanaC

'Who decides what is correct now' Well, currently it appears to be a combination of 'official' dictionaries, netwide calls for updated information on spelling trends (conducted by the OED amongst others) and the rather more democratic sweep of natural change over time. All conducted on an uneven and unequal playing field arrived at after many generations of evolution, control, downright dishonesty, political and ideological movements and the arbitrary timing of the codifying of spelling through the printing press.

What you are suggesting is as artificial and 'top down' as the drive to latinize our spellings and grammar ever was. It will also irritate as many people as it will please, and appears to take no account of the profoundly political and nationalist elements of 'spelling'.

A top-down approach is used - and does work - for French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and most other major languages. There is no such standards body for the English language. It is the dictionary publishers that regulate the spelling in English, and they do a decent job but are not able to promulgate any needed changes.

There is one aspect of spelling reforms that you do not appreciate. They are not generally done in the same manner as metrication, where something new is introduced by fiat and the public are expected to change. Instead, they tend to be more democratic - new spellings are introduced by a government and the public is free to either use them or ignore them. Spellings like "program" and "catalog" were both introduced in this way in America about 100 years ago and gained sufficient acceptance to supplant the older spellings that are still current in British English. Other similar spellings introduced at the same time, like "leag", did not. However, the public were allowed to choose by usage.

Allowing spellings to change will cause some resentment, if your indignation at the mere idea of discussing the topic is anything to go by. However, current spellings also cause resentment, as many whose spelling is not as strong as they would like can tell you.

Some spellings are also indefensible - irregularity is allowed to accumulate for no good reason; spellings are not allowed to evolve to keep up with changes to the spoken language; and some words break so many rules that only a warped mind can find justification in their retention. If the spellings of some individual words that I have discussed were actually defensible, someone would have defended them by now.