Spelling Reforms

The English Language originates from a Germanic language of the Indo-European family from several local languages brought by 6th century invaders.It has since spread throughout the British Isles and into various regions where Britain held overseas colonies. Today, as the second most spoken language in the world, it has been subjected to multiple prejudices concerning its acquisition, reception and learnability as a second language. As the language of business, science and technology, English should be easy to learn and comfortable to deal with. However, many people complain that English spelling is very hard to learn for foreigners as well as for native speakers. Hence, spelling reform is seen as a need to introduce a logical structure connecting the spelling and pronunciation of words. In this essay, I will discuss the former spelling reforms led by Webster and the others in the past, the reasons behind the numerous attempts in the past to reform English and why these reforms never really succeeded.

Before we look at the different spelling reforms proposed in the past, let us first examine how Modern English spelling system developed and why there are irregularities.

During the Old English period, the Anglo-Saxon were the first writers of English and their basis for their spelling was the Roman alphabet, to which some of the older runes were attached. The spelling system of the West Saxon had very strict rules of parallelism between Old English phonological values and Latin symbols or symbol construction. Having more than one system of spelling, it depends on where texts were written. Although local dialect features were reflected in the orthography of words, there was a certain consistency approach within each dialect area. During King Alfred's reign, only a few contemporary Old English texts existed to allow a clear analysis of spelling. Spelling was fairly standardized and books were produced from a small area where there was little dialect variation. "Thus, Old English has a more accurate representation of current pronunciation than modern orthography does" (English: history, diversity and change, p. 72).

Although the Modern English spelling system is largely phonemic, some letters do not represent any phonological segment. One letter may represent a cluster of two phonological segments. The same letter represents different phonological segment and the same phoneme can be represented by different letters. As a result, it contains many inconsistencies between the spelling and its pronunciation.

Throughout the history of English, these inconsistencies have gradually increased in number. There are a number of contributing factors.

The first being the fact that the consistent orthography of Old English was swept away by the Norman Conquest and English itself was dominated by French for three centuries, thus resulting its spelling being much influenced by French, whereby large numbers of words were loaned from French.

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Secondly, there was a group of linguistic changes during the period of Conquest, including the Great Vowel Shift. Thirdly, there are far more distinctive sounds in spoken English than the 24 letters in the Roman alphabet, resulting, a one to one correspondence between character and sound not possible. Hence, diagraphs are used to represent a single sound. However, there is no systematic correspondence between letters and sounds in English. For example, the c in 'medicine and 'medical' are pronounced in different ways.

Noah Webster, a famous lexicographer, was one such man who believed that the orthography of the English Language was not regularized before it was standardized. And that a spelling reform is therefore very much necessary.

In 1789, Webster endorsed Franklin's plan in his Dissertations on the English Language. In his opinion, the same letters often represent different sounds, and the same sounds are often expressed by different letters. He believed that there are two main reasons behind this irregularity. The first, being, the fact that during the Middle English period, English was widely written and printed. While English spelling was relatively systematic during the Middle English period, the shift to modern English involved undergoing a Great Vowel Shift and many gradual changes in pronunciation. The older, etymological spellings have been retained despite major shifts in phonology. The second, being, the fact that with the mixture of different languages, many English words are loan words from other languages and they generally carry their original spellings, which are often not phonetic in English.

In Webster's attempt to render orthography sufficiently regular and easy, Webster proposed to rid the writing system of superfluous and silent letters, such as a in bread, making it spelt as bred while other words such as head, give, breast, built, meant, realm, friend, would be spelt, bred, hed, giv, brest, bilt, ment, relm, frend. He felt that this would actually lessen the trouble of writing and reduce the true pronunciation to a certainty, assisting foreigners in acquiring the language while ensuring a uniform pronunciation in different parts of the country. He also proposed to use letters that represent the sound and are not vague, such as the substitution of doubled vowels for decayed diphthongs in such words as mean, zeal and near, making them meen, zeel and neer. He also proposed the substitution of sh for ch in such French loan-words as machine and chevalier, making them masheen and shevaleer. Webster also proposed introduced a trifling alteration in a character, or the addition of a point to distinguish different sounds. For example, a small stroke across the "th" would indicate its two sounds.

Webster felt that having these orthographical reforms make the language easier for anyone to learn. A learner would be able to learn how to spell in a shorter time and with the regularity of the orthography, he would ever afterwards find it difficult to make a mistake. Besides this, the altered orthography rendered the pronunciation as uniform as the spelling books, thus, removing prejudice, and promoting mutual affection and respect. Webster also felt that this reform could help to reduce the amount of letters in the alphabet and it also provides a good opportunity for the Americans to distinguish the American English from British English and provide an identity for their language. (English: history, diversity and change, p. 92-94).

According to David Abercrombie in his essay "Extending the Roman Alphabet: Some Orthographic Experiments of the