Low hanging fruit
I was studying some spelling problems recently, and it occurred to me to consider what the real low-hanging fruit of spelling reform is. I think it would be thru, tho, and altho, obviously, as well as certain words that are either on the fence now or are orphans that have no fellow words spelled like them.
- through, though, although, throughout, thorough, thoroughly -> thru, tho, altho, thruout, thoro, thoroly
We’re not going to fix the whole “aught, caught vs brought, thought” problem, let alone the rest of the UGH and IGH words.
Words that are on the fence or that changing would align them better to European counterparts. PH-as-F words: These would change to F or FF, based on the traditional rules for consonant doubling. And GUE words.
- telefone, graffics, fotograff, fotograffy, fony, filosofy, fosforus, fysical
- monologue, dialogue, analogue -> monolog, dialog, analog — This is happening already. My spell-check rejects catalogue and accepts monolog and analog.
The easiest part of the EA problem: spell short E as E if E is one of the vowels already.
- bred, led (metal), red (past tense of read), thretten, deth, steddy, insted, alreddy, fether, welth, ern, lern, serch, frend, plesure, tresure, trechery, erth, helth, tred, dred, trechery, herd
- Special cases: ocian, ocianic, sargent
It would be nice to drop unneeded silent E in obvious cases, like are, have, give, live, were -> ar, hav, giv, liv, wer, but these are very common words and would still leave numerous words like active, motive, and sedative.
Orphans and rarities could change, but these are so rare it would hardly matter.
- timbre -> tamber (or change the pronunciation to /timber/)
- meringue -> merang — How often do you come across that word, anyway?
- sew -> sow — This is the only word where EW makes the long O sound. Derivatives: sowing, sowed, sown. This raises questions with sow (female hog) but sow (planting) already does that.
- ancient -> anchient — This is the only word where CI makes the /ch/ instead of /sh/ sound.
- xylophone, xenon, xenophobia, xenophilia -> zylofone, zenon, zenofobia, zenofilia — These are the only words where X makes a Z sound (anxiety is pronounced /angziety/ and so keeps the X just as exam does) and a few names (Xerox, Xander, Xaviera).
More “only words where…”, altho these would likely be tougher sells:
- bury, burial -> berry, berrial [hat tip to commenter]
- busy, business -> bizzy, bizness
Of all these, busy, business, photo, phone, and though and through are among the most common words in English. But they aren’t so common that they are likely to be rejected as too fundamental a change. If we tried to change one, once, two, do, to, and of, on the other hand, we’d likely face an exponentially higher degree of resistance despite these being even more obvious problems. And where are and were might be made to drop their needless silent Es, reforming was, does, and says would be a bigger fight.
Decide that you are thru with “through”
Start simplifying English spelling today by declaring that you are thru with “through”.
Start writing: thru, tho, and altho
See the arguments against simplifying spelling rebutted.
See the pronunciation rules for the way sounds are described on this site.
The Absurdity of Defending English Spelling
Here is an old article, but one I just came across, called “The absurdity of English spelling and why we’re stuck with it“, by Baden Eunson. It asserts, as so many do, that reforming English can never be perfect and therefore is foolish to attempt in any way.
It makes many of the same straw man arguments favored so much by people with little understanding of linguistics and spelling reform.
It starts by trotting out the old ghoti joke and once again attributes it (“according to urban legend”) to author and spelling reform advocate George Bernard Shaw. (It was actually a joke made by the son of author Charles Ollier. There’s a whole Wikipedia article on it.)
The author then goes into eggcorns, mondegreens, malapropisms, simple misunderstandings, none of which have anything to do with spelling. Then he does talk about spelling problems briefly by listing some homophones; his recommendation is “be careful”.
He then cites the “i before e” rule–in full, which is rare–and even gives exceptions to the exceptions. Here, staring him in the face, is the very best argument in favor of spelling reform, and yet he merely recommends to “keep them in mind”.
Then, he finishes with one of the worst arguments against spelling reform: accents.
If we insisted on strictly phonetic renderings, girl would be gurl in most of America (though perhaps goil in New York), gel in London, gull in Ireland, gill in South Africa, garull in Scotland.
Right… so we shouldn’t insist on strictly phonetic renderings. This isn’t hard. We want to focus on phonemic renderings; then speakers of each accent can write the phonemes with same way even tho they don’t pronounce them quite the same way. English people recognize that those medial Rs do something even when they don’t make the “doggy sound”. So there’s no need to remove it; just let that understanding be the consistent rule in English English.
(By the way, does anyone in New York say “goil” anymore? Does this language lecturer “currently completing a PhD in the field of Plain English and jargon” get his understanding of the accent from 1940s Popeye cartoons?)
Worse, no adult misspells girl. So that’s obviously not where the problem lies. He seems to realize this when he says:
Thus, we are probably stuck with the inanities of four/fourteen/forty and debt and island….
No! No, we’re not! Those are exactly the spellings we can fix very easily! We could just say we’ll spell them for/forteen/forty and det and iland. In one letter-sized page of reforms, we could wipe away dozens of common misspellings and obstacles to English acquisition.
As is so often the case, when it comes to English spelling reform, the perfect is the enemy of the good. A spelling reform doesn’t have to be an overhaul of the language; it only needs to be an improvement.
And, as I’ve mentioned before, it doesn’t need to be a heavy-handed overhaul or a beat-the-elderly-into-compliance reform. We can just say the new spellings are also acceptable. The elderly can die spelling it neighbor, and young people can grow into adults who chuckle over such archaisms when they see them.
“Foreign” Spellings
Below are some rare but not unique spelling cases among common English words, most of which are direct borrowings from French or Italian. Notice how much head space is taken up by these words. You probably thought there were a dozen or more of each one, but there are actually just a handful.
busy and business (US as /iz/)
These are the only common words where U makes the plain I sound.
pizza, pizzeria, mezzo, piazza, paparazzi, pizzicato (ZZ as /ts/)
These are the only common words where ZZ makes the /ts/ sound. They are all Italian borrowings.
lasagna, vignette, poignant, cognac (GN as /ny/)
These are the only common words where GN makes the /ny/ sound. They come from Italian and French.
chauvinist, chauffeur, faux, taupe, mauve, gauche (AU as /oh/)
These are the only common words where AU makes the name O sound. They are all French borrowings.
beau, bureau, chateau, plateau, tableau (EAU as /oh/)
These are the only common words where EAU makes the /oh/ sound. They are all French borrowings.
noir, boudoir, bourgeois, croissant, memoir, coiffure, moi, repertoire, soirée, voila (OI as /wah/)
These are the only common words where OI makes the /wah/ sound. Once again, they are all French borrowings. You could add choir here, but it’s not exactly the same, because it’s really two syllables: /KWAI-er/, so it’s its own brand of wackiness.
rendezvous, encore, entourage, entrepreneur, ennui, entente, détente (E as /on/)
These are the only common words where E makes the O sound. Some people include enclāve, envelōpe and envōy. Note that these are once again all French.
anxiety, xylophone, xenon, xenophobia, xenophile, xerox (X as /z/)
These are the only common words where X makes the /z/ sound. Notice that it is always at the beginning of the word and only for words that come from Greek (except “xerox”, which is the invented name of a photocopier company). This is even true of names (like “Xander” and “Xanthe”), except for “Xavier”, which is typically pronounced /exavier/.
hallelujah, fjord, and also junta (J as /y/ and also /h/)
These are the only words where J makes the y sound. This is common in northern European (Germanic and Scandianvian) languages (altho junta comes from Spanish), so you may also see it in names like Johan and Jaeger.
Czech (chec)
This is a foreign name, of course, but the names of foreign countries are still English words. (Don’t think so? We call it “Germany” but the Germans call it “Deutschland”).
Fixing Foreign Spellings?
Could these be fixed? Certainly busy and business could become bizzy and bizness. But the others would lose their exotic mystique if they were respelled, because in part they were adopted because they were foreign-looking. Would “rondeivoo” be accepted in English? Not likely. Or “boodwaar”? Or “shoffuur”? It might be best to just mark them as “foreign” somehow. Except they’re not really foreign. The word connoisseur isn’t spelled that way in French anymore. They long ago changed it to connaisseur. So we own it now. But we’re not about to change it to “connosuur”.
My most hated spellings
It might surprise you to learn that through, though, and although are not the spellings I hate the most. They’re just the worst spellings that can be easily fixed.
The spellings I hate the most are the ones that trip me up in reading and writing or which just make no damn sense.
One, once
These little weasels are everywhere, and they’re the only words where the O spelling makes a /wuh/ sound. They don’t trip me up, really, but I really hate them.
Two
It’s just an awful, nonsensical spelling of a very common word with a silent W in the middle and an O that has no business making the /oo/ sound. The W used to be pronounced, of course, and is related to twain and twice.
Of
This is the only word where F makes a /v/ sound. I very frequently see people write “of” when they mean “off”, so it’s certainly a problem.
Busy, business
These are the only words where U makes the /i/ sound, and it’s further complicated by S making the /z/ sound.
Capitalization
I’ve been a professional writer for close to 20 years. The one thing I find in the business world that irritates me more than anything else isn’t poor spelling (spellcheck has fixed that) or grammar (college-educated Americans are pretty competent). It’s capitalization.
American business people have a strong tendency to capitalize anything that sounds important. For them, this primarily means business terms (purchase order, project, testing strategy, etc.). Our education system seems to have failed to clarify the difference between a common noun (car) and a proper noun (Chevy Nova).
Three things make this tricky, I think. One is the way that business people tend to name things with highly descriptive names. The tool that they use to record their time and expenses might be called the Time & Expense Administration tool rather than, say, Athena. Indeed, even if they wanted to name it Athena, they would feel highly obligated to make that an acronym for Administration Tool for Hours and Expenses, North America or some-such.
Another is acronyms in general. It’s very useful to abbreviate all sorts of terms into simple acronyms, whether proper pronounceable acronyms or just initials. But making something into an acronym and using that frequently starts to make it seem like a proper name, and the fact that acronyms are written in capital letters suggests that the spelled-out version should also be capitalized. Some people believe this so firmly that they state it as some sort of half-assed policy.
So the process for approving internal projects gets called “the internal project approval process” enough that it gets abbreviated IPA, and eventually gets delivered as the Internal Project Approval process or Internal Project Approvals, as if that’s really an official name.
It would be fine that really were an official name, but the fact that people still feel free to call say “the Internal/External Project Approvals process” when they want to talk about both sorts of projects together tells you immediately that it’s not a real name. You can’t do that with your children’s names.
The third thing that tempts business people to overcapitalize is self-importance. People want to feel important, and that tempts them to capitalize job titles as if they were government offices. For the reasons stated above, CSR seems like it should be expanded to Customer Service Representative because “that’s what we call them; that’s their official name”, hence Supervising Manager, Vice-President, and Accounts Receivable Associate.
Some people recognize the absurdity of this if you point out that “president” and “queen” and “medical doctor” aren’t capitalized unless they are used as a title with a name. And even then, they are capitalized precisely because they are titles, not just jobs.
But others insist that this is simply “company policy” when it is in fact just company habit.
My advice is not to fight them too hard. There are bigger fish to fry when doing professional business writing. Just assure them you will make the material conform to standard English rules, and leave their most sacred capitalization alone (usually anything that you can pretend is a name, like processes).
Bigger fish: one utility I did work for had a habit of referring to a residence or business they serviced as a “premise” because they thought “premises” was plural. Spellcheck won’t correct that, of course, because “premise” has a legitimate meaning of its own, so it was tricky water to navigate.
Worse, I kind of agree that “premises” should be plural. Damn that Latin.
The Week has offered 7 bogus grammar errors you don’t need to worry about. Many of these are supposedly breaking rules that are themselves only recent inventions of schoolmarms and prescriptivist grammarians.
Finally, a sensible grammar lesson I can agree with… except for “I could care less.” That’s lazy nonsense that makes the idiom meaningless, and we already have too many meaningless idioms like “the whole nine yards” and “take a leak”.
And it clashes with the recommendations of a later article by the same author, Ben Yagoda, on 7 grammar rules you really should pay attention to. There, he points out the correct form of several idioms like “begs the question”. That’s mostly a good article, atho I can’t agree with the “begs the question” example.
Grammarians like to say that “begs the question” refers to a formal point of debate in which an argument assumes that the question debated is true while purporting to help prove that it is true. (“I know God exists because the Bible says God exists, and the Bible is the word of God.”) However, I’ve literally never heard “begs the question” used that way or in fact any way other than to mean “raises the question.” It’s usually called “a circular argument”, which is clearer anyway. Moreover “that begs the question…” is perfectly grammatical English: “the point we’re discussing is simply begging for the following question to be answered.”
All right vs alright
One of the interesting changes in English is the use of “alright” to mean “okay” or “good”. The traditional form is “all right” but that’s becoming differentiated to mean only the more literal “correct in its entirety”. If you say “I’m alright” you’re saying that you feel fine, not that everything you do and say is correct. And if you say “Your test answers were all right” you mean that all of them were correct, not that they were pretty cool.
Some object to this on traditional terms, but “alright” has clear traditional siblings formed in the same way and for similar reasons.
- “always” means “in all cases and for all time” and not “in every way”
- “already” means “unexpectedly soon” and not “fully prepared”
- “altogether” means “in entirety” rather than “consolidated”
- “also” means “too” and not “entirely such”
- “although” means “in spite of everything” rather than some nonsensical variant (one might say that “altho” is really no different from “tho”, but they are used slightly differently, which is why the word remains)
“Alright” has been with us for nearly as long as “all right”, and it’s unclear why prescriptivist grammarians dislike it despite its several respectable siblings. (Not that I care much for historical arguments; plenty of antique parts of the language need to be changed.)
The silent alphabet
A is for certain and aisle and learn
B is for doubt and bomb and subtle
C is for yacht and indict and victuals
D is for handsome and handkerchief and Wednesday
E is have and juggle and are
F is for halfpenny
G is for gnome and foreign and align
H is for honor and white and rhyme
I is for business and friend and pimiento
J is for marijuana
K is for blackguard and knife
L is for calf and caulk and salmon
M is for mnemonic
N is for hymn and column and autumn
O is for opossum and sophomore and colonel
P is for psychic and receipt and pneumonia
Q is for lacquer and racquet
R is for dossier and (UK, Oz, and S & NE US) far
S is for isle and corps and debris
T is for depot and listen and asthma
U is for build and guard and harangue
V —
W is for write and answer and two and who
X is for faux and roux
Y is for prayer and key
Z is for rendezvous
Esthetics of our spelling
I can’t believe there’s been no mention of the aesthetic aspect of this debate. The fact is, phonetic spellings are ugly, for the most part. ‘Enuf’ is crude and inelegant, ‘enough’ is not. ‘Colour’ and ‘honour’ are more pleasing than their American alternatives.
That’s a comment from user EdmundBurkeLivesOn on a spelling article in The Guardian. I’ve seen this argument before, and it always sort of stuns me with its lack of self-awareness.
What is esthetically pleasing to this person can be neatly summed up with the phrase “I prefer what I’m familiar with.” He’s a Briton, so he likes British spelling. He thinks that his opinions are based on objective esthetics. But if he thinks that older, quirkier, more typically British spellings are classier, would he want to change words that don’t display those quirks?
I’m sure he would balk at the idea of changing, say, stuff to stough and dandruff to dandrough to class them up a bit. Or perhaps add a U to author and motor because surely authour (once legit) and motour are more pleasing to his keen artistic eye.
He doesn’t mention it, but another part of American spellings that differ from the spellings of his British childhood are the “-er/-re” endings. We have to imagine that EdmundBurkeLivesOn should approve of spelling father, mother, sister, brother as fathre, mothre, sistre, brothre and cadaver, cover, waiver as cadavre, covre, waivre, in the pleasing British style. Would he boldly move on to out-British British English by changing major, minor, beggar, hangar to majro, minro, beggra, hangra? The heart trembles at the beauty….
The absurdity of this underscores a point I’ve made before: we are automatically biased in favor of spellings (and many other things) that we are familiar with and tend to reject both new and archaic versions, as if we live in a magical time when our spellings (and many other things) just happen to be perfect.
Simplifying English grammar?
English is a pretty simple language when it comes to grammar. It’s spelling, pronunciation, and idioms that are most challenging. Yet there are aspects of English that are tricky enough that native speakers stumble over them and, indeed, are causing widespread change.
Probably the most obvious are pronouns. English pronouns are a hodgepodge of its root languages, with some simplification having happened already in the past 400 years. Despite Shakespeare and the King James Bible, thee, thou, thy, thine, and ye are no longer in daily use. Indeed, even the KJV was using them as archaic forms re-purposed as high-falutin’ speech. (For example: thee was previously considered the intimate form of address, whereas the Bible makes it seem respectful.)
We have a chance to simplify this further with I and me. It’s not only very common for poorly educated people to say “Me and Annie want to go to the movies” instead of “Annie and I want to go to the movies” but highly educated people will also often incorrectly say “They gave an award to her and I” rather than “They gave an award to her and me”. After all, no one would say “They gave an award to I”.
But why not?
We have already nearly given up on whom, the object equivalent of who. Twitter’s interface boldly suggests a list of “Who to Follow”. We could actually eliminate me from the language entirely and hardly miss it. It already happened with you: we use you as both subject and object (as well as the more confusing singular and plural), and it does double duty without a second thought.
- Annie and I want to go to the movies.
- They gave an award to her and I.
- They gave an award to I.
- Why are you asking I?
These sound ungrammatical now, of course, but we would get used to them quickly. And me doesn’t really add any information. Neither does them, for that matter, or us. We could use they and we for both subject and object across the board.
- We want to go to the movies with they.
- They gave an award to we.
- Why are they asking we?
It seems much less likely that we would modify the possessive case to match.
- He took Is book. It’s Is, not his.
- Wes class went to the movies together. Wes teacher said we behaved very well.
This isn’t a proposal, of course, just an observation of the direction English could go in the next 400 years.
The non-problem of homographs
One of the sillier arguments against a more phonemic spelling system is that it turns many words that today sound the same (homophones) but are spelled differently (heterographs) into homographs, or words that are spelled the same way but have different meanings. When people encounter new homographs in examples of reformed spelling, they often balk, pausing in a moment of confusion when they try to decipher the meaning.
Their problem is that the spelling currently (and therefore in their heads) has a particular meaning and that that’s not the one that is meant by the respelled version. For example:
- I wundered if anywun new ware I cud fiynd tu new dresses tu ware.
A reader encountering this sort of thing for the first time could very well stumble on “new” for knew and “ware” for where and wear and perhaps “tu” for two and to. The problem with claiming that this is really a problem is that English is full of homographs already. But we don’t notice them because that spelling currently (and therefore in our heads) already encompasses both (or all) the different meanings. So really it’s just another example of something the reader needs to get used to.
For example, the boot in “boot the computer” and “boot the football” are very different. One means “start” and the other means “kick”. But since boot already encompasses those two different meanings in our heads, we don’t really even notice that they are two different words. In fact, some people might even try to claim that they are the same word, and that rebooting a computer is metaphorically giving it a kick. (It actually comes from the concept of a simple initial computer program acting as a bootstrap to help put a boot on, the boot being a metaphor for the main program to be loaded; it’s a shortening of the original 1950s’ term bootstrapping.)
This “same word” idea becomes ridiculous if you apply it to “bear fruit” and “bear den” and other such words that have no relation in meaning (these aren’t even the same part of speech). A casual look thru a dictionary will find that most words have multiple meanings, many of which aren’t even remotely related by strained metaphors. It simply doesn’t occur to us that “1 word with 2 meanings” is basically the same as “2 words with 1 spelling” until we start respelling words and stumbling over new homographs.
Even in cases where the word origins or meanings are closely related, like “bow and arrow” and “hair bow“, the two things are often so different that we don’t register the similarity (both come from a word meaning “to bend around”). It wouldn’t seem odd at all if those two bows had two completely different names. They don’t particularly seem related in any way that would make us think they should have the same name. Another example is “light in weight” and “light in color”, two very different concepts that could easily confuse a reader in the phrase “she’s wearing a light coat”. In such cases, a listener might ask for clarity, but this is true in any case of words with multiple meanings. (“Wait. Like a fishing reel or a film reel?” “You mean a physical tool like a hammer or some sort of software tool?”)
Worse is when people claim that different spellings for the same sounds helps us because it clarifies the meaning on the page. A moment’s thought will tell you that you don’t have a hard time differentiating those words when they are used in speech despite the fact that they sound the same, so why could it be so important to have them differentiated in their spellings? It’s simply a defense of habit. You don’t become confused when someone uses two, to, and too in their speech because the context easily separates them. So obviously you would quickly get used to seeing them all spelled “tu” or some such. Likewise air/heir, fare/fair, close/clothes, boos/booze, sink/sync, etc. Do the different spellings help the reader by providing clarity? Yes, but often not as much as they hurt the speller in learning the words.
Indeed, confusion can be purposeful and humorous, as with puns, which don’t work on the page when their spellings differ, or it can be mitigated by additional descriptors, or you can simply get used to the fact that these new spellings are the same, just like many, many other cases you don’t even notice. In any case, new homographs are a poor excuse for opposing spelling reform.
What are detrimental to reading comprehension are heteronyms: words that look the same (and so are homographs) but which are pronounced differently. How often are we tripped up in reading bow, lead, read, bass, and such, which can be pronounced different ways depending on the meaning?
And worse still are homophones that are heterographs. How often do we see people tripped up in writing there/their/they’re, to/too/two, and such because they sound the same but look different? Far from ruining the language with new homographs, a decent spelling reform would fix many problems with these much more problematic words.
Thru With “Through” 