Spelling is ruining the English language

[Urbane Guerrilla]

I always did well in English and in spelling -- any topic, really, where the primary means of instruction was reading written material. I have excellent spellchecking wetware.

I owe it all to phonics courses in second and third grade. Yes, there's memory involved, but it's better directed than trying aimlessly to memorize wordlists. What a phonics course does is rehearse the various ways English writes its forty-odd sounds with but twenty-six letters, some of them used redundantly. C and QU come immediately to mind, don't they? Where memory comes in is phonics sets out to teach you which words use which ways. This really unlocks the mysteries of English spelling and makes sense of the whole unofficially arranged (if that's the word) schemozzle. English has no equivalent of the Académie Française, which has regularized French spelling and vocabulary into something fairly systematic. We Englishers allow no such authority.

What Kingswood is crying out for is to have been trained in phonics -- clearly he never got it and he knows this is a misfortune. He's right to think so.

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Until early modern English, we did have singular and plural forms of "you," with all its cases. AFAIK we didn't have a separate form for familiar-plural-you such as the Castilian Spanish vosotros forms, but:

Sing.: thou, (to/with/from/obj of verb or preposition) thee. Thy, thine (used after the fashion of a, an; also with thine as a terminal use)

Plu.: you (all cases), sometimes ye (remained plural long after the thou forms fell out of use)

To expand on Dr. Seuss a little: The tough coughs as he ploughs through the dough.

I before E is better gotten if you have the whole rule. I before E except after C, and when sounded like A, as in "neighbor" and "weigh." Of course, you still have to seize onto the weird to grapple with those exceptions.

A coda, and the sort of thing you find in Strunk & White but too commonly misunderstood, is "Possessive nouns, common and proper, always take an apostrophe before their S; possessive pronouns never do." Thus the somewhat curious formation of "its." In most contexts, this is possessive. This rule eliminates ambiguity in written English between the possessive pronouns and their soundalike contractions, condensing conjugations of "to be" into suffixes of pronouns.

Wiki on Strunk & White

[Perry Winkle]

I don't think spelling belongs in English class. Similarly, most of what is taught in math class doesn't belong there either.

[Shawnee123]

I am looking at two scholarship applications. Both are well written as to content, the students are worthy candidates due to GPA, service, and well-roundedness. One student, however, has a couple misspellings. Who is going to get the scholarship? The one who took the time to check their i's and t's. Spellcheck? Probably, but it shows an effort that is important to academia.

Having to learn to spell correctly is just as important, to me, as learning to not say "I seen you yesterday." Boohoo if it gives some people pause. They will still probably be OK in the world, but it smacks of laziness and bad attitude to me: I don't like it so I won't learn it.

Also, what is the "memorizing word lists" thing? I don't remember thinking I was memorizing anything. Each word has a context somewhere, and once I know it in that context the spelling is as clear to me as if it were in neon lights in front of me. Being an avid reader helps.

[Jill]

Holy shit, man, you should try Danish sometime. The letter 'd' can sound like a "hard" 'd', a "soft" 'th' or be silent. Different vowels even sound the same as each other with no apparent rhyme (there's a good word!) or reason.

Jeg elsker dig.

Does the first word rhyme with the last? If you said no, you were wrong.

Pronunciation: Yie (as in pie) elsker die.

(FTR, that means, 'I love you', though clearly I am not referring to you, personally.)

My Danish husband says, "He has no idea how good he has it. Tell him that from the guy who was forced to learn German."

Originally Posted by Kingswood

. . . hacienda. . .

Dude, that's not even an English word. :p

[classicman]

Originally Posted by Jill

Dude, that's not even an English word. :p

not yet...

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

What Kingswood is crying out for is to have been trained in phonics -- clearly he never got it and he knows this is a misfortune. He's right to think so.

What is it with Cellarites and personal remarks, especially false ones? Can't you make your point without making personal remarks?

I learnt to read before I started school. Phonics was the method that was taught when I went to school, and I agree it is a good method. But it has its limits because it doesn't help when words have redundant silent letters.

[Kingswood]

Here is a word for you to consider.

violist
It can mean two things. When pronounced vee-OL-ist, it means someone who plays a viola. When pronounced VIE-ol-ist, it means someone who plays a viol.

In spoken conversation, it is possible to know what instrument the person plays just by hearing the word. In a written transcript of that conversation, this isn't possible unless the instrument is mentioned explicitly. If the instrument s not mentioned, one must either add some clarifying text or be compelled to lose something in the transcription.

English has 500 or so words with different pronunciations and meanings represented by the same spelling. While the majority of these words can generally be disambiguated by context, such words that are in the same part of speech (usually nouns) cannot be disambiguated easily.

[Jill]

Seriously? I mean really. When was the last time you read a book or an article where a violist was mentioned and a) there was no context, or b) the story was compromised by the omission of same?

What do you propose calling one who plays the viola that would be different from the word used to describe one who plays the viol? A change that involves spelling one differently from the other, not a whole separate, new word.

Just going along with your complaint here, let's try the words 'read' and 'read'. Let's distinguish them by spelling the first one 'reed' and the second one 'red'. Oops, those are already other words with completely different meanings. Ok, how about 'rede' and 'rehd'. Hmmm, now there are unnecessary silent letters that I'm pretty sure you'd be complaining about. And again, one of them is already a word with a different meaning.

Seems like you're going to have to create a whole new language if you want it to be spelled the way you think it should, based on how it sounds.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Shawnee123

Having to learn to spell correctly is just as important . . . Also, what is the "memorizing word lists" thing? I don't remember thinking I was memorizing anything. . . Being an avid reader helps.

I was trying to point out that spelling can be and often is as poorly taught as American history. I got phonics, my three-years-younger brothers didn't, and they had an awful time trying to get spelling right, where I can if necessary just visualize my word as if on a projection screen on the inside of my forehead -- memory is definitely visual here -- and am something close to a spellchecker on legs in consequence. My brothers are also nowhere near the readers that I am.

Yes, it does, though nowadays you have to make some effort to read material that has been competently edited, and the general standard of editing in American writing has visibly declined. A shame.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Kingswood

What is it with Cellarites and personal remarks, especially false ones? Can't you make your point without making personal remarks?

I learnt to read before I started school. Phonics was the method that was taught when I went to school, and I agree it is a good method. But it has its limits because it doesn't help when words have redundant silent letters.

Hmm -- that never limited me, though introduction to silent letters, begging any question of their redundancy, was all through my early reading learning. A silent E modifying a preceding vowel sound was easy enough to master, even such variations as the long-vowel/single phoneme/silent-E as in ache. In my experience, it had no limits at all.

I'm sorry to have offended, but not getting phonics courses is so very much the usual root of spelling troubles as to be the way to bet, and that was the way I did. What do you see around you, should you inquire into this?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

The two most phonetically written languages I have any experience of are Turkish, whose Roman alphabet was designed a mere century ago with regularity in mind -- and was a lot easier to learn and use for Turkish than Arabic script had been -- and Russian, which is almost purely phonetic. Spanish is right up there with them, even unto diacriticals to cue the reader if the stress on a word is for some reason in a funny place -- as well as keeping "the" separate from "he." French's system is looser, with so many silent letters around you have to really stay alert. Welsh spelling, rather like French, is described as less phonetic than phonemic -- you get a small number of variations in writing a sound down, viz., /f/ gets written Ff or Ph, depending.

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by Jill

Seriously? I mean really. When was the last time you read a book or an article where a violist was mentioned and a) there was no context, or b) the story was compromised by the omission of same?

What do you propose calling one who plays the viola that would be different from the word used to describe one who plays the viol? A change that involves spelling one differently from the other, not a whole separate, new word.

The word "viola" (the musical instrument) has two consecutive vowels, ee and oh (long E and long O). In some other words the same sequence of sounds is spelt with eo: Leo, geode, geopolitics, etc. If we spelt to this pattern, the musical instrument would be spelt "veola". There is nothing wrong with this spelling except for tradition dictating that it must be spelt as "viola" exactly as it was spelt in Italian, even though this spelling causes confusion with another English word "viola" (the plant) with different roots (pardon the unintended pun).

If viola (the instrument) was respelt as veola, a player of this instrument could then be a veolist. Of course that would probably be unsatisfactory to those who favor traditional spelling.

Originally Posted by Jill

Just going along with your complaint here, let's try the words 'read' and 'read'. Let's distinguish them by spelling the first one 'reed' and the second one 'red'. Oops, those are already other words with completely different meanings. Ok, how about 'rede' and 'rehd'. Hmmm, now there are unnecessary silent letters that I'm pretty sure you'd be complaining about. And again, one of them is already a word with a different meaning.

The read-read example you cited above is an interesting example that is discussed from time to time among those who favour spelling reform. Despite your assertion to the contrary that this word must be spelt differently from the colour red, spelling the past tense as "red" will not cause issues. The words occupy different part of speech, so context is quite sufficient to convey meaning.

This is nothing new in English. The dictionary has many words with identical spellings and pronunciations but different meanings, derivations and etymologies. These words do not cause problems because they are classified in different parts of speech and cannot be confused. Examples of such words: cuff, list, might, pink, pound, soil, stalk. We also have such words that do occupy the same part of speech but again we can work out the meaning. Examples: graze, light, hard, sole. These words do not cause problems either. Thus, a respelling of the past tense and past participle of the verb "to read" as "red" should not cause comprehension problems and a separate spelling is not necessary to convey meaning.

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by Jill

Dude, [hacienda]'s not even an English word. :p

My copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, tenth edition, includes that word. Is it in your dictionary?

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Hmm -- that never limited me, though introduction to silent letters, begging any question of their redundancy, was all through my early reading learning. A silent E modifying a preceding vowel sound was easy enough to master, even such variations as the long-vowel/single phoneme/silent-E as in ache. In my experience, it had no limits at all.

I'm sorry to have offended, but not getting phonics courses is so very much the usual root of spelling troubles as to be the way to bet, and that was the way I did. What do you see around you, should you inquire into this?

On phonics, the Australian Government recently announced that phonics would be re-introduced into Australian schools. I think this is a good thing, as phonics does work for many of the words that children will encounter in the first year or two of education.

The magic-E spellings (eg: bale, cane) are sound. The only problem I see with these spellings is in those occasional words that have a magic-E spelling but not a magic-E pronunciation. Examples: are* (the verb), give, have, live (as a verb). In these words the silent e is redundant.

Indeed, the e is redundant in many of the words that end in -ve (words like active, passive, captive, native where the vowel before the v is short, but not in cave, behave, concave where the e is a regular marker of a preceding long vowel). This spelling convention is an old one, dating from before the introduction of u and v as separate letters. Before this split, u (the miniscule of V) did double duty as vowel and consonant. If it preceded a vowel, it was a consonant, and vice versa. So in those words that ended in a /v/ sound, the letter had to be written as -ue to mark it as a consonant. The convention is still with us today, but now the only apparent use the final -e has in these words ending in a short vowel followed by -ve is to stop the v from falling over.

* The are (pronounced like "air") is also a metric unit of measurement equal to 100 square metres.

[DanaC]

We didn't have phonics in my early schooling. We had charts with the alphabet on and letter cards and letter combination cards...and books.

The trouble is that for some children, the non-phonics method is confusing and prevents them learning; likewise, for some children the phonics system is confusing and prevents them learning. All we're doing is swapping about between the two.