Is it too late to revolutionise English spelling?

The absurd complexity of English spelling doesn’t cause anywhere near as much stress these days as it would have decades ago. It’s easy to avoid an awkward gaffe with spell-check at your fingertips.

Yet I know plenty of really smart people who struggle with spelling, and it’s no wonder. With silent letters, multiple spellings for the same sound, and multiple sounds for the same spelling, isn’t it a triumph of the human mind that any of us can read or write at all?

Have you ever wondered how English got this way? Have you ever wondered why we can’t just overhaul the rules and start again with a system that’s more sensible? You wouldn’t be the first to suggest it. But alas, I think it’s far too late for that.

Why is English spelling so higgledy-piggledy?

The history of the English language follows the history of Britain, which was occupied and invaded by a string of linguistically diverse groups over the centuries. With every invasion, new parts of language were introduced, merged and muddled up with what was there before. It started with the Celts, then the Anglo-Saxons (who brought German influence), the Romans (Latin), the Vikings (Scandinavian), and the Normans (French). All this was centuries before the modern era of intercultural influences from further afield, not to mention English’s arrival in America and the influence that country has had on the global stage.

English’s habit for co-opting words and rules from seemingly every language it comes across has made it a vocabulary-dense, contradictory mess. But it’s precisely that flexibility and openness (compared to, say, the rigidity of French), which has helped it thrive. At least that’s the argument put forward by Bill Bryson in his book, Mother Tongue: The English Language, which details English's history and complexity.

One reason to explain “the seeming randomness of English spelling,” Bryson writes, “is that we not only freely adopt words from other cultures, but also tend to preserve their spellings”. This isn’t the same in many other languages.

Why are so many words spelled differently in American English?

If you like the idea of phonetic spelling, you’ll appreciate the efforts of a few early Americans. Around the late 1700s and early 1800s, Benjamin Franklin advocated for a more standardised system of spelling, suggesting the addition of six new letters to the alphabet, and the complete removal of c, j, w and y. As we know, it didn’t catch on.

Noah Webster, whose first American Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1828, was also a fan of standardisation. We can thank Webster for a few of those pesky Americanisms that speakers of British English, like us here in Australia, refuse to take on; the missing ‘u’ in words like colour and flavour, and the flipped ‘er’ at the end of words like centre and theatre.

Then, in 1906, Andrew Carnegie’s Simplified Spelling Board took it further, writing a list of 300 revised words, which US President Theodore Roosevelt approved for use in government documents. Although a few didn’t make it (‘thru’ for through; ‘altho’ for although; ‘fantom’ for phantom; ‘possesst’ for possessed), much of this list explains the discrepancies between American and British English spellings used today (including the dreaded ‘ize’ suffix).

What would a spelling revolution actually look like?

Although American author Mark Twain felt he had a 'natural gift' for spelling, he mused on the difficulty of it for many people. This hilarious passage he wrote demonstrates just how impossible a task standardising spelling would really be:

Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling, by Mark Twain

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

OK, so now that that’s debunked, what if we standardised speech instead? What if we pronounced each letter combination the same for every word? Just watch this YouTube video, What if English Were Phonetically Consistent? and decide for yourself:

If all this isn’t enough to have you throw up your arms and vow allegiance to emoji, I say, embrace the charm of our funny language. It’s either laugh or cry, right? I recently saw a great meme that summed this all up very nicely:

Yes, English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought, though.