Spelling English

[Mr Shifty]

Interesting article today in the Atlantic about how learning to spell in English may be one factor that make schooling more difficult for children in English speaking countries. There are claims in there that spelling in English is some of the most idiosyncratic of any language worldwide.

Adults who have already mastered written English tend to forget about its many quirks. But consider this: English has 205 ways to spell 44 sounds. And not only can the same sounds be represented in different ways, but the same letter or letter combinations can also correspond to different sounds. For example, "cat," "kangaroo," "chrome," and "queue" all start with the same sound, and "eight" and "ate" sound identical. Meanwhile, "it" doesn’t sound like the first syllable of "item," for instance, and "cough" doesn’t rhyme with either "enough," "through," "furlough" or "bough." Even some identically spelled words, such as "tear," can be pronounced differently and mean different things.

As a result, there’s no systematic way to learn to read or write modern Englishâ€â€people have to memorize the spelling of thousands of individual words, file them away in their mental databases, and retrieve them when needed. A small percentage of people excel at this skill, but for most children in English-speaking countries, learning to read and write their native language is a laborious and time-consuming exercise.

I wonder about the possibility of using immersion programs in regular phonetic languages for English speaking kids. My 8 y/o daughter is in a Spanish immersion program; she can't spell (in English) worth a darn, but she reads (in English) quickly and fluently -- devours 300 page novels for breakfast. She's never had to be burdened with trying to memorize the rules for English spelling because her classroom is 100% reading, writing, speaking, hearing in Spanish. I wonder if giving kids the experience of reading -- of matching symbols to sounds and fitting them together to form words, which fit together to form understandable ideas -- is more important than learning the mechanics of it. So kids benefit from learning in a language that makes it relatively easy, even if the language is not their native one. Then they can apply that conceptual understanding of the task of literacy to the more difficult problem of English or other languages with deep orthographies (e.g. French, Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew). This seems to be what my daughter did, and I think she's a better reader because of it. I suspect that her English spelling will improve with time as she's exposed to more and more words in English through reading them. (I think right now she sort of views English spelling as dumb, not worth her time to bother with if she can get her point across, particularly since most of the writing she has to do is for the classroom and is in Spanish.)

[Bill Phil]

I say we should do what they did in Ender's Game: Mop up the English language. Make "j" a useful letter, forcing all "g"s to be hard.

Not to mention that "whom" stuff...

And how c is a combo of k and s...

It's a hodgepodge of languages.

[Scotius]

Because it was created in melting pot of mixing cultures - from Celts and Picts to Normans and Frenchmen But other languages have their own quirks too of course. Polish can be just as confusing even to native users.

[Frida Space]

But other languages have their own quirks too of course.

^^ so true. Italian is full of quirks and it's almost impossible to speak 100% correctly, even for teachers eccetera.

[Mr Shifty]

There's some research that suggests English is more difficult to learn than those other languages, which suggests that it's more irregular. (The technical term for irregular spelling seems to be deep orthography.) That paper doesn't mention Polish, but this source seems to suggest that Polish has a shallower orthography than English does. French, of European languages, seems to be closest to English in difficulty.

Regardless, my point was that I wonder if learning to read in a language with a shallow or completely consistent orthography (Finnish and Korean seem to be popular examples, but it makes more sense for English speakers to use a language with both a Latin alphabet and many English cognates) would make the task of learning to read more conceptually easy. It's actually conceptually difficult to associate phonemes with letters and string them together to form words (it's not always obvious where word-breaks occur in speech). Phonemes in isolation almost never sound exactly like they do when sounded next to other phonemes, which makes both gluing them together when reading and taking them apart when spelling more difficult. And the idea of representing objects (or even worse, abstract ideas) with symbols that have no resemblance to the object is a difficult conceptual step. Much easier to get that conceptual stuff when you only have to memorize one letter for each phoneme and when diction is clear and consistent.

[PlonioFludrasco]

^^ so true. Italian is full of quirks and it's almost impossible to speak 100% correctly, even for teachers eccetera.

True story, not so much Italians can speak Italian 100% correctly.

But at least spelling is easy.

[linkxsc]

I dunno. I know most of my reading and spelling skill can be blames on gaming (pokemon was a big 1, coming out in second grade. Then a few years later was Everquest) But I know I only learned from those because I was constantly exposing myself to the chat.

Even now where my company bought me a copy of Japanese Rosetta Stone (nice outfit, bought like half the people a 300 dollar language software)

As added practice the boss sent me a set of like 30 volumes of some kids comic series (even though its written in full Japanese, they have the phonetic sounding written above the associated character. You know, for kids, who know the phonetics but may not know the complex characters yet.)

Thing I find though. When I was a kid I read for fun. It may have been a side effect of my gaming, but it was still a constant part of my life. A lot of the time when I talk to kids (middleschoolers, related to friends often) who complain about they cant read. I wonder, how often do they actually practice? A lot of kids who I talk to (even gaming 1s now) they never practice reading (what with voice in all your fpses now anyways) its not something that regularly comes up in their lives outside of school. Cant learn to do stuff well without practice.

[AngelLestat]

Is scientific prove it than learn 2 or more languages increase our undestanding in other areas.

But I dont know if learn to pronounce any quirks is really important. About english being one of the most hardest idioms to learn, I dont think so.

My english is bad because I never really try it to learn it, what I know is only due some school, movies and chat.

For example spanish has like 15 different tenses meanwhile english may have 5? I dont know the right numbers but is something like that.

Mandarin is even harder, that is why all oriental are so good with idioms.

[Stargate525]

English is the way it is because it's a Germanic language which was beaten over the head repeatedly by the French, then taught through the lens of Latin.

It also doesn't help that 70some percent of our lexicon are words taken from Romantic languages. They conjugate differently, pronounce differently... It's a miracle English makes as much sense as it DOES.

[cantab]

To be honest, considering that the world's current superpower (the USA) and one of its previous ones (the British Empire) both speak English, I don't think it can be that bad. Singapore's education system teaches in English and it's frequently held up as among the world's best.

English writers may have to remember that a queue is a line of people and a cue is what you hit a pool ball with, but French speakers have to remember that un ordinateur (a computer) is "male" while une table (a table) is "female". Japanese and Chinese readers have to remember thousands of characters and it doesn't seem to be holding either of those countries back.

Any attempt to make English spelling more closely reflect pronunciation will immediately run into problems with accents, especially in Britain. To take the best known example, is the 'a' in 'bath' like the 'a' in 'cat' or like the 'a' in 'father'?

[Bill Phil]

Cantab,

your "a" problem can be solved if the International Phonetic Alphabet is used....

[cantab]

That doesn't really help, not if we retain the view that every word has only one right spelling. (British and American differences notwithstanding). And if we are willing to give up that view, do we need any formal spelling reform anyway? Just let peepol riyt howeva thay liyk.

[Bill Phil]

That doesn't really help, not if we retain the view that every word has only one right spelling. (British and American differences notwithstanding). And if we are willing to give up that view, do we need any formal spelling reform anyway? Just let peepol riyt howeva thay liyk.

Considering we generally don't remember the spelling (literally put two i's in spelling,but I caught myself )...

We actually make a connection based on the first letter and the last letter... For the most part.

[Kibble]

That doesn't really help, not if we retain the view that every word has only one right spelling. (British and American differences notwithstanding). And if we are willing to give up that view, do we need any formal spelling reform anyway? Just let peepol riyt howeva thay liyk.

̹i̹f iɯ̹ kip θ̬ə ɛlfəp̬ɛt stɛti̹k p̬ət θ̬ə spɛliŋ̬ flɯ̬i̹t̬ hɑɯ ɯɛ̹t̬s̬ ɑɛ̬ spɛlt̬ ɯəɯn̬t p̬ikəm̬ ɑɛ̹p̬i̹tɛ̹ɛɛ̹i ɯɛn̬ spəɯkn̬ ɯi̹θ ɛn̬ ɛksɛn̬t ɤ̹ɛ̹ p̬ɑi θ̬əɯs̬ ɯi̹θ spitʃ t̬i̹səp̬i̹lətis̬

[Tommygun]

̹i̹f iɯ̹ kip θ̬ə ɛlfəp̬ɛt stɛti̹k p̬ət θ̬ə spɛliŋ̬ flɯ̬i̹t̬ hɑɯ ɯɛ̹t̬s̬ ɑɛ̬ spɛlt̬ ɯəɯn̬t p̬ikəm̬ ɑɛ̹p̬i̹tɛ̹ɛɛ̹i ɯɛn̬ spəɯkn̬ ɯi̹θ ɛn̬ ɛksɛn̬t ɤ̹ɛ̹ p̬ɑi θ̬əɯs̬ ɯi̹θ spitʃ t̬i̹səp̬i̹lətis̬

......and people complain about Comic Sans.

[linkxsc]

̹i̹f iɯ̹ kip θ̬ə ɛlfəp̬ɛt stɛti̹k p̬ət θ̬ə spɛliŋ̬ flɯ̬i̹t̬ hɑɯ ɯɛ̹t̬s̬ ɑɛ̬ spɛlt̬ ɯəɯn̬t p̬ikəm̬ ɑɛ̹p̬i̹tɛ̹ɛɛ̹i ɯɛn̬ spəɯkn̬ ɯi̹θ ɛn̬ ɛksɛn̬t ɤ̹ɛ̹ p̬ɑi θ̬əɯs̬ ɯi̹θ spitʃ t̬i̹səp̬i̹lətis̬

... well, Ive already got 26 latin characters for english, ~3 more associated with spainish. 46 hirigana, 46 katakana, maybe 300 kanji (of the 2000 "common" ones) and once I was become competent with Japanese I was thinking of doing Russian.

I think this whole phonetic thing... yeah screw it. The hell does that even say??

I thought ,shi so tsu no and n in katakana were bad on reusing similar characters (all 5 of the characters are a curved / with some " to the left of them)

[Newt]

Well, all natural languages have their idiosyncrasies (so do constructed ones), and these usually are somewhat buried with enough time (a favorite example of mine would be 'Camera'. In English, this means a thing with which to take pictures, coming from camera obscura, a Latin term for that which evolved into 'camera'. In some languages, Hindi and Romanian, camera still means what it originally meant in Latin -- room). This is largely what happened to English, which is certainly a hodgepodge mix of languages, using many rules and words from varied sources. Not all mix languages are so, messy, though, creole languages are often popular for looking at more standard ways of how languages form before the mess begins with later evolution.

As for whether we should improve English (or our other languages), the question to me is more whether we can. Attempts have been made, some with success (ever wonder why the Americans spell color without a u?). But making significant directed changes is not a very simple task, our particular script, spelling system, it cetera, is so embedded in our world and our culture, that breaking off would be long and slow, and difficult, even if it is ultimately successful, and it would probably not be, as a consensus as to what to do will be difficult to reach, even before all of the practical hurdles are met.

I will also make note of some constructed languages; some of us do indeed, still speak Esperanto (parolas iu alipersono tie cxi gxin?), but none of the 'auxlang's', as the simple, regular languages such as Esperanto are referred to as, have really any visible hope of achieving widespread public use in the near future. Some of these languages are on par with natural languages in possible expressions, and undoubtedly far simpler to learn than English, but they lack a large unified user base: not to many people learn such languages, and those who do, are met with a large selection of languages to choose between; there is no consensus as to which is best.

[cpast]

We need to switch to C++. At least it well defined and can be spell-checked easily.

That is among the very worst choices for a well-defined language. C++'s grammar is among the most complicated programming language grammars: there's a C++ program that is syntactically valid if and only if the number in some template is prime.

[RainDreamer]

Well, I would say that English is certainly easier than Chinese or Japanese where there are characters that people just have to memorize. I wish there is a language where it is more logical and systematic to free up memory space.

[Tommygun]

Well, I would say that English is certainly easier than Chinese or Japanese where there are characters that people just have to memorize. I wish there is a language where it is more logical and systematic to free up memory space.

Newspeak is double plus good.

[Yukon0009]

To be honest, learning English is a piece of cake compared to learning Chinese......

[RainDreamer]

To be honest, learning English is a piece of cake compared to learning Chinese......

Aren't there like, tens of thousands of characters? Though maybe there are only a fraction of that for daily uses, but still, that seems like a daunting task for a new learner.

[Jouni]

As a native Finnish speaker, I've always found that English spelling is easy enough, while the pronunciation is hard. I'm also starting to believe that no matter how you pronounce a word, there are native English speakers somewhere in the world who pronounce it in the same way.

[Yukon0009]

Aren't there like, tens of thousands of characters? Though maybe there are only a fraction of that for daily uses, but still, that seems like a daunting task for a new learner.

Ya only roughly less than two hundred are used regularly, last I checked.

[cicatrix]

As a non-native English speaker I should say that English is probably the easiest language to master. If you think English is hard, try Korean, for example, or Estonian.

And this problem is not new. Mark Twain suggested a spelling reform back in his time (not seriously though). This was too good not to quote it here:

A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling

by Mark Twain

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, afte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

Edited February 11, 2015 by cicatrix