The spelling system of English is the most unpredictable of all spelling systems and is rife with irregularities
An extract from the poem called The Chaos by Dutch writer Gerard Nolst Trenité, containing 800 irregularities in the English language, demonstrates the just how absurd spelling in English can be:
Have you ever yet endeavoured
To pronounce revered and severed,
Demon, lemon, ghoul, foul, soul,
Peter, petrol and patrol?Billet does not end like ballet;
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
If it were up to the English Spelling Society - founded in 1908 as the Simplified Spelling Society and supported by George Bernard Shaw - the English language would 'observe its own rules' and apply them consistently so that the spelling of some everyday words would change. Stephen Linstead, a member of the English Spelling Society and author of Traditional Spelling Revised, and Des Ryan, a PhD student in linguistics at the School of Linguistics, Speech and Communication Sciences at TCD, joined RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne to talk about why this matters. (This piece includes excerpts from the conversation which have been edited for length and clarity - you can hear the discussion in full above).
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne, why do some people pick up accents so quickly?
Is the English language broken?
"I don't believe the English language is broken, I do believe English spelling has got severe deficiencies," says Linstead. "The spelling system of English is the most irregular and unpredictable of all spelling systems, based on the alphabetic principle. With most languages, most spelling systems, at least you know how to pronounce a word from the spelling. You don't with English. Not merely can you not predict the spelling from hearing the word, you can't always know how to pronounce it from seeing it written. This double whammy is probably unique to English."
"This does have practical effects, this is not just quaintness. For example it's been found that English speaking school children take more than two years longer, on average, to master basic spelling compared with those in other languages. We contend this has social and economic costs."
How to make spelling more predictable
The English Spelling Society wants to make spelling more predictable. "The particular scheme [Traditional Spelling Revised], which has been voted on by the International English Spelling Congress, and which I authored, is a conservative scheme. It only makes changes where these are necessary to reduce ambiguity, or to get rid of some of the failures of English spelling. It respells about 8 to 18% of existing words, depending on the context," says Linstead.
What about silent letters? A word like 'gnash' would lose the g. "Yes, under TSR, and under other spelling reform systems, one drops the redundant letters," he says. "You can if you want, under TSR, put an apostrophe in, particularly if that might help to distinguish letters that sound the same."
Read more: Ireland's language shift: when Irish speakers switched to English
Text speak has already introduced the idea of spelling the way things sound. But when it comes to formal spelling and dictionaries, "there's very little chance things will change," says Ryan. "The effect of text messaging, of say 15 or 20 twenty years ago, has really been put to bed by predictive text. Nowadays it's not as 'cool' to misspell words as it once was."
"I think it would be very helpful if more people knew the reasons behind the irregularities of the spelling," he says. "Some of the irregularities really could do with being gotten rid of, I agree with Stephen a lot there, and for some of them it's very right to be there. It would be helpful if everybody - teachers and parents and the general public - had a better idea of the patterns of English spelling. Because it would make it easier to teach."
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From RTÉ Archives, is text messaging language infecting or liberating the English language? (First broadcast 4 March 2003)
Should we all just relax a little bit about spelling?
"I don't think that we need a free for all in spelling, that would make for chaos. But I do think about English spelling, particularly when it comes to tests and exams, that examiners need to be a little bit liberal and understanding. If you're very good at spelling, basically, you have a good memory for memorising irregular spellings and you'll be good at spelling bees. But not everybody has that memory," says Linstead.
"If you're in an exam or a test when you can't access a dictionary or a spell-checker, then you may well make mistakes that people with other memories would not make. I think in those circumstances a little bit of toleration is required. I'm suggesting that people should spell as they want, I think every language needs a correct spelling system and until the English language evolves to something more regular people should spell correctly," he says.
"We're not proposing any government-imposed reform. We're really seeking a bottom-up approach. Hoping to approach people who are students, young people, people more open to change, to practice the new system in communicating with each other. In the hope that eventually it may spread, bottom upwards, to a position where at least it is tolerated, academically."
