Second Thoughts

There is a society based in the UK which aims to reform the spelling of words in the English language, removing what they term as corruption of the “alphabetic principle.” Over time, the idea that letters out to directly correspond to sounds, that a language ought to be consistently phonetic, has been lost in the English language. Unlike, say, Spanish, a language in which a student can learn the sounds which correspond to a letter and then, once having that reputable base, go on to depend on those letters producing those sounds, in English the student is rather lost in a jungle of combinations of letters which, at times, seem disingenuously and unfairly misleading and suspicious.

The society was started in 1908 and presided over by subsequent professors from Cambridge, Oxford, and University College London, and it remains faithful to a vision of the English language in which all words are be updated into logical and undeviating spellings, in the interest of promoting ease of learning and economy in writing, and in general, increasing literacy. They maintain a spirit of this high-minded and idealistic goal of increasing literacy, of helping people (mostly young children) learn. In other words, they are not separatists and intentionally avoid snobbery: they want more people to read more words with more ease.

Nevertheless, part of this nobility comes from early in the society, when those at the head wanted to make it simpler for colonies of the British Empire to acquire a knowledge of English, and, perhaps to attract the entire world to a universal language:

“All who love our language and realize the responsibilities of our Empire will agree that every British citizen should be able to speak English. That is far from being the case at present. To take India alone, there are millions who do not know English. [...] It is our duty to educate these millions; the key to their education is the English language. We place great difficulties in their way by our irregular spelling. If it were reasonable they could almost teach themselves. [...] What a splendid prospect, that of a world in which all men can speak our tongue! What a vast audience for the writers and the speakers who use our splendid language! What a great step towards the brotherhood of man!”

The whole movement lost steam around the middle of the century, when various attempts to integrate a simplified spelling system into the educational system in Britain did not take hold, and were mainly rejected. Today the society has 146 members, 29 of which have not paid their subscription for this year, yet. The society also now realizes the rather obvious futility of changing the spelling of English by an institutional process (alterations in language occur naturally over time through an evolutionary process, and are almost never intentionally fashioned). Giving up the original aspiriations for “New Spelling” (is anyone eerily reminded of Orwellian “Newspeak”?), their best idea now is a concept called “CS”, an acronym for Cut Spelling, which assumes the process by which the brain reads is almost wholly dependent on the first and last letter of a word, while the letters in between can vary greatly without a loss of comprehension. Removing unnecessary letters which are redundant in the language, Cut Spelling is born: Most words ar unchanjed , and we hav th impression not of a totaly new riting systm, but of norml script with letrs misng here and ther. Th basic shape of most words, by wich we recognize them, is not fundmently altrd, and nearly al those that ar mor substantialy chanjed ar quikly decoded; very few ar truly puzlng.

Cut spelling is really a combination of removing letters as well as replacing phonetic letters for sounds--the phonetic “j”, for example, replaces the soft “g” in “changes.” It’s a trimming down of the makeup of words, a leaning up of things that supposedly makes this easier. I tried to find out more about it, but the rest of the paper was written in this gibberish, so I gave up.

The problem is, we’re robbing the language of its ancestry. Certainly there’s a good idea somewhere underneath all of this intention, but hacking away at words hardly seems like the right idea. The entire field of etymology would basically be hung out to dry, reduced to working like archaeologists piecing together bits and shards of a skeleton that was once a living, breathing thing. And language really is.

Nobody in the society has said anything (at least not publicly) about the tool that is right in front of them, a powerful venue by which language’s public and gradual process of change can be immensely sped up. Never before in history has there been such a rapid exchange of information on such a large scale: the Internet is a forum for how we write and think, reason and decide. There are places like the Urban Dictionary, whose sole purpose is to record in one place these new words which pop up. Things like blogs have allowed anybody to write whatever they’d like to, however they’d like to. In one sense, that whole notion of an institution as authority can be subverted: they don’t need to change the educational system, they don’t need to convince principals and educational boards that changing spelling is a good idea: they can just start writing in this new way, and watch it ripple out in to the ether the digital world, which, via the mass exchange of information, will certainly make its way into our everyday language.

Not that I think it’s a good idea, by the way. I like how weird English is. It means you’re surprised almost as much as you’re certain.