Hav you wundered how the werld wood look if scools chainged how peepl rote and spelled English?
A cabal of academics, teachers and linguists are arguing that if children learned to spell like the previous sentence Britain would be a fairer, more prosperous, less crime-ridden place.
The Spelling Society will hold its AGM next Saturday at Birbeck College, London. Its 70 members believe that English is shackled by an “illogical” spelling system, forcing people to write a version of the language that has not been spoken since the time of Chaucer, more than 600 years ago.
“I want to change a spelling system that leaves people more dumb than needs be,” said Masha Bell, a literacy advisor to the Spelling Society and deviser of one alternative system.
The society estimates that over the last century the illiteracy level has remained at around 23% of the population because of 3,695 common words – such as ‘engine’, ‘soldiers’, ‘stomach’ – which contain quirks that baffle learners. The combination of the same sounds having different spelling (the long ‘o’ sound of ‘shoe’, ‘blue’, ‘too’) and identical letters making different sounds (such as the ‘o’ in ‘on’, ‘other’, ‘who’) makes English the most difficult European language to learn.
In a survey last year more than half the adult population in the UK had trouble spelling at least one word on a list of 10 commonly used. ‘Embarrassed’ was the most frequently misspelt, with 54% of Britons getting it wrong and 62% of Americans.
“The number of problems that stem from this basic root problem are innumerable,” said Bell. “And people don’t understand that. If we genuinely want higher literacy levels, if we want more youngsters leaving school with the potential for training, going on to further education, not ending up on the scrapheap, let’s do something about the spelling.”
The Spelling Society sees its role as raising awareness of the pitfalls of silent letters and their ilk. The obvious classroom-based problems, such as dyslexia, and larger social issues, such as the size of the prison populations, all stem from an unreformed spelling system, the society believes.
“There are a group of children who will not be able to master it and they fall through the system,” said Jack Bovill, chairman of the society. “And it is no surprise that illiteracy is about 50% or 60% in our prisons, because if you can’t gain a living in a world that requires literacy you have to turn to other imaginative ways to make one.”
He added: “In countries where you have a phonetic language they are curious as to what you mean by dyslexia. People have a reading disability which is compounded if you have an illogical spelling system.”
Academics say that in other European countries children achieve competency in their languages within one year. In Finland, home to the continent’s most phonetic language, it takes children six months. In the UK it takes three years. The society sees this as a huge waste of teaching money, depriving children time to be taught other subjects.
English spelling has remained relatively unreformed since the 1600s, when decorative extra ‘e’s on words such as ‘worlde’ and ‘olde’ were dropped as printing standardised the language. Other countries, such as Russia, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries, have consistently changed their languages through the centuries.
Last year all Portuguese speaking countries signed an agreement to reform the language’s spelling to come into line with the more phonetic Brazilian system.
THE NEW ENGLISH DICTIONARY?
Another – anuther
monkey – munky
ghost – goast
both – boath
once – wunce
son – sun
tongue – tung
whom – hoom
above – abuv
colour – culler
discover – discuvver
From: Herald Scotland