This is a continuation of an Internet project I began on June 1, 2004, on the webhost Tripod: simplerspelling.tripod.com. Unfortunately, Tripod has seemed unreliable of late, so I am backing up my Tripod website on Google Blogger. I'm not at all sure how to bring all of my 10½ years of files into Blogger, but will try.
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The purpose of this blog is to promote rational spelling, to replace the enormously IRrational spelling that we in the English-speaking world suffer. English is by far the most important language in the history of the world, being spoken or written by more people even than Mandarin Chinese. Chinese, of course, is not an international language except among Chinese abroad. English is spoken or read THROUGHOUT the world, by people of every nationality and ethnicity.
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Unfortunately, English is written almost as stupidly as is Chinese. The government of (Communist) China acknowledged to the world in 1958 that the traditional writing of Chinese was unbearably stupid — even if it did not use those exact words. No government in the English-speaking world has acknowledged that the spelling of English is indefensiby stupid. That remains to us who use English and have endless problems with it.
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Attempts to reform the spelling of English have hit highs and lows. A high was when Noah Webster published, in 1828, a dictionary that sought — with great success — to Americanize spellings, as by replacing the British -ISE with the (superior) American -IZE. Theodore Roosevelt (an insufficently appreciated President of the United States) attempted to reform the spelling of English in 1906. Some of his Simplified Spelling Board's recommendations made it into general use, such as "saber" and "caliber" (in place of "sabre" and "calibre"). Others, such as "tho", "altho", and "thoro" achieved limited popular success, but not in formal use.
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Unfortunately, the growth of the "English" language has involved the admission of tens of thousands of words from foreign languages, intact in their own language's spelling. That has produced vastly more confusion than existed in Theodore Roosevalt's time.
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People today are expected to cope with absurd words like "quinoa", which is said not as it looks, kwin.óe.wa, but kéen.woq (where silent-Q marks the close of a short vowel). Every year, English admits more insanely spelled foreign words, which we are just expected to cope with. Some such borrowings are from languages that are not written in the Roman alphabet, but are brought into English in preposterously un-English forms. NO! No more foreign words spelled in foreign ways! Any foreign borrowing should be converted to a conventional English spelling.
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We also are imposed upon by native neolog — what? Neologists? Neologicians? That is, people who create new words, without regard to how they might be read. Take the word "zumba". How is that to be pronounced? Is it like "rumba", with an ordinary short-U? No, it takes either a short-OO, as in "look", or a long-OO or long-U without an initial Y-glide, as in "glue". How is a reader, in any country, to know? How, especially, is a reader in a country that does not have a zumba fitness craze, to know how to pronounce "zumba"?
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The alphabet as an invention was designed to indicate to people distant from the writer how to pronounce what the writer wrote. Bizarrely, the word "alphabet" is not phonetic — but, then, neither is the word "phonetic". Both words, to fulfil their purpose, should be written with F: alfabet and fonetic. Even more bizarrely, the words "write", "writer", and "written" have a preposterous silent-W! Why on Earth do we put up with such insanity?
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Society stigmatizes childen who cannot cope with the insane inconsistencies of traditional spelling. But maybe they are the rational ones, who reject the stupidity that the rest of us consent to.
