English Spelling Reform

English spelling is seriously outdated. We have so many archaic forms that no longer represent the pronunciation of those words.

Written language is merely a tool to help us communicate our spoken language. While the spoken language is constantly changing, unfortunately the written language doesn't have to at all, which is why the written form of the English language is in the sorry state it's in today. Spelling bees are unnecessarily difficult, foreigners as well as our own children struggle to learn all of the non-rules in the orthography that must be laboriously memorized.

Spellings with "gh", "kn", "wh", "wr", etc. just exist to cause confusion. Those concerned with linguistic heritage and etymology (I count myself in this group to an extent) argue that these forms should continue in order to represent the heritage of the language, and also to distinguish homophones. I would say, that these need not be completely abandoned, but represented in different ways. "gh" could be written with just an 'h' to make somewhat more sense. Also, "kn" could be changed to "hn" (resembling the modern Icelandic convention), if youre going to have a silent letter, better an 'h' than a 'k', and should this be the case, "wh" could easily be "hw", which would be more historically accurate to Old English anyway.

"knee" could become "hnee"
"aught" could become "auht"
"when" could become "hwen"

Some sounds that we think of as being the same sound, may not be the same at all. In the Mid-Atlantic American accent, with which I speak, there are two sounds that are considered long 'i'. The long 'i' in "time" is a different sound altogether to the long 'i' in "kite", this is due to a variation in pronunciation that occurs depending on the consonant which follows the vowel. Also, in general, Americans have two pronunciations for short 'a'. For an example, compare "cat" and "man". "man" sounds more like "ĕă", while "cat" is the quintessential example of the short 'a' taught in school. Alternatively, the British pronounce short 'a' in the same manner in both words.

If English were to undergo a reform of spelling, different populations should probably customize their own. Americans and Brits pronounce the language differently enough that variation in spelling between the two makes more sense than pretending that they are pronounced identically. An American says "bath" differently, and even in Britain there is more than one pronunciation of this word based upon the speaker's latitude. So a further division could be made between even Northern and Southern pronunciations in both Britain and America.

The biggest problem one runs into when trying to create a new usable spelling system for English is the foreign loan vocabulary. The monosyllabic native words of the Anglo-Saxons, and even the closely related Norse vocabulary that the English picked up are all easily reformed to better represent their pronunciation, but the polysyllabic vocabulary from Latin, Romance and Greek just does not work consistantly with the native Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. This is due to the fact that so many vowels are pronounced as schwas (ə) in polysyllabic words, and the many forms in Latin words would necessitate a different spelling for words with the same root.

For example:

"domicile" this 'o' is short
"domestic" this 'o' is pronounced as a schwa
"domain" this 'o' is long

"nation"; long 'a'
"national"; short 'a'

Words with "-tion" would be difficult to handle well. The Norwegians represent this suffix with "-sjon", the equivalent of which in English would be "-shon" or "-shun". This would make many words look ridiculous, and we would still need another variation for the suffix "-sion". "-zhun"?

These words look ugly and awkward:
"naishun" for "nation"
"nashunul" for "national"
"ukaizhun" for "occasion"

An option to solve the foreign loan problem is to wipe away all of these borrowed words, exhume and dust off our lost Old English vocabulary, updating these words to work properly with modern pronunciation. This solution is not only seen as Xenophobic, but also it is too much to get large populations of people to forget the words they already know, and to essentially relearn their own language. This solution is practically impossible, if it were forced upon people in the written language, they would still use those outlawed words in their speech, and so the words would most likely reintroduce themselves into the written language, as well as the fact that we have never stopped borrowing new words, as well as coining new ones from older terms that may have been borrowed themselves.

Another option would be to reform the Germanic vocabulary of English, and to hold foreign loans to a different spelling standard altogether, spelling them as they were in their source language. This would necessitate a conscious ackowledgement of a division of vocabulary in English, one would have to know the precise source of each word in order to spell them correctly. This would not even solve the problem of the difficulty of the orthography in English. One would essentially have to learn several spelling systems rather than just one hideously outmoded one as in English today.

A problem with the English language itself is that the so called "long" vowels are not actually longer counterparts of the short vowels at all, but are in fact diphthongs. Diphthongs are a combination of sounds, rather than a pure sound alone. In English, it is often the case that diphthongs will be represented by only one vowel character, thus creating a problem for a new written standard. In addition, these vowels developed from different sources originally, making things slightly more complicated.

'ă' became 'ā'
'ā' became 'ō'
'æ' became 'ă'
'ǽ' became 'ē'
'ĕ' remained 'ĕ' in most cases, yet became long in others. ex. OE "mete" developed into "meat"
'ē' remained 'ē'
'ea' became 'ă'
'ēa' became 'ē' in some cases, yet in others shifted to 'ĕ'
'eo' became 'ĕ'
'ēo' became 'ē'
'ĭ' remained 'i'
'ī' remained 'ī'
'ie' became 'ĕ'
'īe' became 'ē'
'ŏ' remained 'ŏ' or became 'ŭ'
'ō' became several sounds all represented by the same 'oo'. ex. "blood", "good", "food"
'ŭ' remained 'ŭ'
'ū' shifted to what we represent as "ou" or "ow" in English. ex. "house", "cow"

And these vowels may have developed or act differently depending on the consonants that preceed or follow them.

We could continue to lie to ourselves and our children and pretend as though these diphthongs are actually long vowels, or we have other options. A way to deal with the vowel problem could be to choose multiple vowel combinations that appropriately represent these sounds, "ea", "ie", "oa" etc. Though do we use the modern English standard to which we have become accustomed, or do we scrap that and use the greater Western European standards of these vowels? Should we spell "time" as "taim", or are we straying too far from our Anglo-Saxon roots? Praps borrowing characters from other European languages that use the Latin alphabet is the solution. We could borrow umlauts, "ä, ë, ï, ö, ü, ÿ" or accents "á, é, í, ó, ú, ý" or characters that are much more unfamiliar to us "æ, å, ø, ð, þ" (although "æ, ð, þ" were current in Old English, they are very strange to us today). The problem is that English speakers have a tendency to regard all of these characters as strange and really quite silly. English for a long time has used an alphabet of unmodified characters, and breaking that habit would cause difficulty with its speakers.

The final and greatest hurdle is that there is no official language council or office in any english speaking country potent enough to institute and enforce new spellings for words. This is contrary to many other European nations, in which governmental departments make revisions to the national language regularly, These revisions become official and must be used then on in all official capacities.

English may just be doomed to remain unwieldy and unnecessarily difficult to foreigners and natives alike.