According to the National Literacy Trust, 16.4% of adults in England, that’s over seven million people, have very poor literacy skills. And another study in 2010 concluded that English-speaking children may take twice as long to learn to read and write as speakers of more ‘regular’ languages, because English spellings are so variable. One such variability, cited in a BBC-online article, is "through" and "trough", written similarly but consonants and vowels pronounced differently.
This has prompted something called the English Spelling Society to join forces with the ominous-sounding American Literacy Council to shortlist six alternative spelling systems. They are now asking people to vote for their favourite, which will be promoted as an alternative to traditional English spelling. The objective is to “help people to master English spelling more quickly and without the teacher's red pen".
Wen ay red abowt this projekt, may furst thort woz that kids hoo lurnt tu reed and rayt this new sistum wud strugel to riid enithing ritten tradishunali.
Sorry can’t keep that up.
To overcome the above conflict between learning one system and being surrounded by another, thus making life easier for those who currently struggle to spell correctly, every piece of text ever published would have to be rewritten in the new system and republished. I can think of better uses of time, energy and money, that’s for sure.
To further simplify our complicated language, to become more consistent and therefore easier to learn and use, word derivatives would have to be reconstructed, i.e. all tenses would have to follow the same structure. Using past participles as an example, let’s choose the easiest structure as the template for all others, i.e. cook / cooked or laugh / laughed. That would lead to run / runed, write / writed, drink / drinked, eat / eated. Or shud ay sey: run / rund, rayt/raytd, drink / drinkd, iit/iitd.
Methinks the useful idiots who dreamt all this up have fallen foul of the law of unintended consequences. Wouldn’t it be easier and more commonsensical to stay with the current English language that has evolved over hundreds of years and just teach it more effectively?
To help answer that question, we need to know why English is so darned irregular in the first place. One reason (put simplistically) is that English has many routes and influences: Ancient Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, German and French. Another is that early printers, who were paid by the letter, sometimes added extra letters to boost their earnings.
So if spelling is simplified, streamlined and, yes, dumbed-down, the links to our history, heritage and culture would be diluted, if not lost. Better to keep these links by teaching English irregularities in the context of, well, the origin of the irregularities. Can’t you imagine kids lapping up the story of the greedy printers adding an extra gh here and an es there to fleece their customers? And highlighting the French or Germanic roots of an English word would make the learning of French or German that little bit less daunting.
The latter I know from experience. Several years ago I started
to learn German from scratch. My memory isn’t as good as it used to be so
learning vocabulary is tough. But by linking German words to English ‘equivalents’,
I can remember more than I might. For example, spielen means to play,
and the English slang use of spiel effectively means a playful story. Hafen
means harbour or port and is close enough to the English ‘haven’.
There’s more. To cope with the complexities and speed of change of the modern world, kids need to get used to inconsistencies and rule-breaking from an early age to train their brains and attitudes appropriately.
To conclude, rather than dumb down to try and accommodate the slowest learners, we should improve our teaching. Because what’s wrong with the red pen? ‘Practise makes perfect’ is not just an abstract slogan; it’s a proven technique in many facets of our lives – playing an instrument, participating in sport and, yes, learning to read and write English.
Our language’s complexity is its beauty and its strength.
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