![A dedicated cohort advocate for scrapping the English spelling system](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/07/09/TELEMMGLPICT000384991260_17205468095870_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Shood Inglish speling bee chanjed?
The English language is illogical, complex and inconsistent. Is it time to overhaul our spelling system and write phonetically instead?
![A dedicated cohort advocate for scrapping the English spelling system](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/07/09/TELEMMGLPICT000384991260_17205468095870_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Here’s a challenge for you: read the following paragraph aloud.
Fork the potatoes and work the tomatoes? Hoe the rows now, then mow, and wait to weigh the hay? Plough the rough right through? With this cough, though? The very thought. No – you know that after school I’m scheduled to shear the ewes, prune the yews, and bear beers for the four bare beardless bears here, before tearing in tears to hear a reading in Reading about seeding and shedding. Fun for two, perhaps – none for one alone, on my own.
How did you do? None of the words here is unusual or rare; none is longer than three syllables; and I doubt any would cause more than a moment’s pause if you were asked to spell it.
And yet, precisely thanks to spelling, it is a brain-twister. To say it out loud accurately, you have to know that, despite their spellings “plough”, “rough”, “through”, “though” and “thought” have five different vowel sounds, while “hay”, “weigh” and “suede”, also despite their spellings, share just one. You will also need to know that while those all rhyme with “laid”, they do not rhyme with “plaid”, which rhymes with mad. “School” and “schedule”, “rows” and “row”, “ewes”, “yews” and “beardless bears”… all blocks dropped in your path by a spelling system that can seem almost deliberately opaque. If you, as an adult, stumbled, just imagine being a child following the simple advice to “sound it out”.
To be blunt, English spelling is hell. We labour under the yoke of what linguists term a “deep orthography”. If that sounds complimentary, it is not. In a shallow orthography, the relationships between graphemes (the letter combinations we use to spell words) and phonemes (the sounds that make up words) are predictable and clear. In Spanish, Italian or Finnish, for instance, to know how a word is said and how it is spelled is more or less the same thing.
The deeper an orthography, the less clear these relationships are. English has, over the centuries, developed an orthography not only complex but inconsistent: one grapheme might represent several different phonemes, while one phoneme might be represented by several different graphemes. This is a system that no one in their right mind would ever invent, the product of one-and-a-half millennia of make-do-and-mend responses to the challenge of writing down Anglo-Saxon, a language that changed both speedily and chaotically into the English we use today.
![Benjamin Franklin called for a wholesale reconstruction of the alphabet in line with the principles of rationalism and democracy](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/07/09/TELEMMGLPICT000384975252_17205419801280_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqW0YkMBpnzsWjj2FNWQ4EEzmXLA7JRCqXPSLLubX47QU.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Using the imported Roman alphabet and its sounds to transcribe the very different phonemes of Old English before it evolved, with changed grammar and pronunciation, into Middle and then Modern English, bearing the marks left by Viking and Norman invaders, English spelling has been playing patch-up and catch-up ever since it began. Nor did it help that, just as printed books were finally helping to settle conventions more permanently, the language underwent a huge change in pronunciation: the so-called Great Vowel Shift of the 15th-to-18th centuries, in which phonemes drifted away from the logic of the spellings with which they had been associated. Losing their moorings, words set off on their journey to where we are now, often without changing how they were written, such that “me” once sounded like our modern May, “house” like loose, and “boot” like moat. Swift and unruly, English has always outpaced our spelling.
It is little wonder that the case for reform has been made so often. Already in the 1580s, Richard Mulcaster – head of St Paul’s School in London – was pointing out that “forenners and strangers do wonder at vs, both for the vncertaintie in our writing and the inconsistencie of our letters”. Two centuries on, the new American republic seemed a promising place to fix such inconsistencies: Benjamin Franklin, among others, called for a wholesale reconstruction of the alphabet in line with the principles of rationalism and democracy.
As the architect of the Capitol, William Thornton, exhorted his readers in 1793, using a phonetic alphabet: “Iu hav korektid Dב deendjrבs dokrinz ov Iuropiiבn pםuבrz, kirekt nבw Dב langudjiz iu hav importid” (”You have corrected the dangerous doctrines of European powers, correct now the languages you have imported”). For him and Franklin alike, the solution was to ensure that letters truly represented the sounds being heard – yet neither man’s schemes caught on. Fundamentally, as a correspondent of Franklin who took the trouble to write according to his scheme pointed out, the old way was still “iisiiest.”
Even in the 1890s, when the invention of the International Phonetic Alphabet made good on Franklin and Thornton’s ambitions, its reach was limited. Staunch advocate Mark Twain himself couldn’t persuade readers to abandon their ABCs for a system with over a hundred symbols, diacritics and modifiers. Easy for lexicographers and linguists it may be, but any amateur who has ever tried to read IPA has almost certainly ɡɪvᵊn ʌp ɪn dɪˈspeə.
![George Bernard Shaw was among the early advocates of spelling reform](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/07/09/TELEMMGLPICT000384975320_17205416028720_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqRkoob2OfD27kEWQQcHX40r6Xj2WECU5tGTp4vDMBGsY.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Yet a dedicated cohort still argues for reform today. In Britain, the Simplified Speling Soesiety began its campaign for what it called “rashonaly-spelt English” in 1908. With George Bernard Shaw among its early advocates, it set out on an optimistic note, counselling those who thought its efforts were “a bad joec” to “wait and se”. Undaunted by the failure of private member’s bills for spelling reform introduced by the Labour MP Mont Follick in 1949 and 1953, its members have soldiered on ever since.
Now known as the English Spelling Society, their zeal is undimmed. While their website is spelled according to the standard rules, the ESS are unequivocal that ‘English spelling is broken’, and a blight on our tongue. For a measure of their passion, look no further than the society’s answer to the persistent objection that this broken system prevented neither the production of the glories of English literature or the unstoppable rise of global English: ‘slavery, disease, war and countless other evils did not prevent these things, but we still do our best to eliminate them.’ Indeed.
Still, they know they have a mountain to climb. Stephen Linstead, current treasurer and mastermind of his own Traditional Spelling Revised system, speaks to me with a mixture of crusading passion and rueful realism. “I’m not the kind of person who wishes to straighten the curves and adopt things which are logical just for the sake of it”, he tells me, but “There is a distinct social and economic cost” to our system and its impact on literacy. He cites a 2003 study that estimated it takes English children up to 2.5 times as long as some European peers to acquire foundation literacy, as well as the simpler fact that spelling on its own “sucks the joy out of learning for so many young children”. To simplify it would, in his view, have demonstrable benefits.
And yet the old roadblocks remain. Government action is certainly not likely for the simple reason that “There are no votes to be gained through spelling reform.” Instead, the ESS continues to search for a proposal they can agree on and promote, which might become “so popular and so widespread” that it vanquishes the old ways on its own. Therein, though, lies the rub. Unfortunately, Linstead says, “there are probably as many spelling schemes as there are supporters of reform.”
![An alphabet from a 9th-century Anglo-Saxon manuscript](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/07/09/TELEMMGLPICT000384889384_17205424854740_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=350)
The ESS currently lists some 24 different proposals as worthy of consideration, dating from the 1990s onwards, with six shortlisted at their 2021 International English Spelling Congress. Competing against proposals like Lytspel and Richspel which aim to fully phoneticise the language, Linstead’s own Traditional Spelling Revised system came out as the most favoured option. A “minimal respell” system, it would nevertheless respell many words in new ways: “good” as “guud”, “father” as “faather”, and “basic” as “baessic”. It is hard to see it exerting too much “inflooence” beyond committed enthusiasts.
The logic may be unimpeachable, but the truth is that many of us love the idiosyncrasies of English spelling, and find it hard to worry about its supposed impacts. At St Barnabas’ Church of England Primary School in Pimlico, spelling is the least of the problems facing staff. Despite a high percentage of deprived families, and some 55 per cent of pupils speaking English as their second language, Sats results remain strong. With little classroom time given over to spelling specifically, around 85 per cent of the school’s pupils reach the government’s expected standard or above in English. The system is simple: phonics, taught early, gives the foundation, and light-touch reinforcement thereafter looks after continuing difficulties.
![Joined-up thinking: Children in the 1930s practise writing](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/07/09/TELEMMGLPICT000384888150_17205413593080_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq6Bbb7WQ-5AB1P4PmRsS5UjXaG_3FkRG2WH2SGzlVXbs.jpeg?imwidth=350)
When I explain the aims of the reformers to Lauren Castle, Head of School, she reacts with bemused curiosity. “You’re changing the entire system?” she asks. Though a straw poll of Year 6 children showed unanimous support for simplification, I doubt they would fancy the reality of learning a whole new set of conventions, however logical. Learning spelling once is bad enough; learning it twice seems like torture. Their form teacher Rebecca Haverty certainly did not. “Oh no,” she said, all but crossing herself at the thought.
The truth is that, illogical as may be, I am not convinced that our spelling system quite “tuff enuff to make reform nessessary.” Perhaps more importantly, it is hard to imagine English standing still long enough for any reform to catch up with its constant evolution. It is not about to stop changing any time soon, and until it does, spelling will always get left behind. When I voice my scepticism to Stephen Linstead he accepts it with the good-natured weariness of a man who has heard it many times before. “The case for spelling reform”, he sighs, “is not an easy one.”
But even if English spelling were to be reformed, would it make things any easier? You decide:
Fork the potatoes and work the tomaatoes? Ho the roes now, then mo, and wait to weigh the hay? Plough the ruff right throo? With this coff, tho? The very thought. No – you know that after school I’m scheduled to shear the ewes, prune the yews, and bair beers for the four bare beardless bairs here, before tairing in tears to hear a reading in Redding about seeding and shedding. Fun for two, perhaps – none for one alone, on my oan.