aposteriori

Those who gro up in a largely illiterat environment wil hav trubble lerning to reed & rite becaus of the muddled SOUNDS around them.

U can sumtimes tel, by a person's misspellings, that he has not herd the word corectly. Wy? Offen becaus the word was not SED corectly. Illitracy becums a vicius cycle. A child heers a word rong, then wen he sees it ritten he dusnt recognize it. He has trubble reading, so he dusnt try reading much.

He grows up mor or less illitrat, so only spoken words enter into his memmory & thinking; ritten words mean nothing. Meanwile, unguided by ritten words, his pronunciation becums sloppy. He drops consonants, slurs vowls. His peer-group's spoken words, aided by their body language, their smiles or jeers, offen provide his only thauts about the world & peeple outside of himself.

Result: lak of imagination, lak of simpathy, lak of empathy with those difrent from himself.

Narro "lern only wot my gang lerns, think only wot my gang thinks" experience isnt enuf in the modern world. Unscoold humans tend unfortunatly to regress to animal attitudes of the pre-civilized hunter-killer-teritorial variety.

TV helps if it's wel chosen, but wil it be wel chosen? And can the kid get & hold a job as a non-reader? Evry child realy needs to lern to read.

We need 1) Scools, with teachers who speak clearly & who teach clear pronunciation wile making lerning fun. 2) a way of spelling words that makes sense, that maches as closely as possible to as menny dyalects as possible, that bridges pronunciation difrences. That way we hold together a single language for menny peeple.

Nothing bilds mutual understanding like common language. Nothing facilitates peace like common ritten language. Nothing bilds common ritten language like regular, easy to lern, easy to read, easy to pronounce common spelling. English spelling is too dificult. We must update it.

The folloing is adapted from a leaflet I desined, wich was givven out at the June 2008 centennial conference in Coventry, England, of the Spelling Society. The Society, at http://www.spellingsociety.org/, consists of teachers and others in English-speaking cuntrys all over the world, who dedicate their efforts to develloping one or mor ways of making the english language easier to lern to read and rite. The riting I am using heer, wich I call PLEA, [Pleas Let English Adjust] is one of varius proposals that hav been put forth for this purpos. It dusnt get rid of all of the hundreds of irregular spellings in the language, but it reduces them sumwot. We want to keep the language easy to read for those who ar not used to respelling. The rest of this article reverts to traditional [TS] spelling.

Spelling Quiz

Are you a good speller? If so, you ar in the minority.
In a recent experiment most people, even good

spellers, failed to spell correctly all of a list

of 16 common words.

Spelling Demon

Most failed several.

Here is the list, which
may be misspelled. Can you spell them correctly?
acomodate disapoint disiplin exessiv gardian inocuous minitur mischevus ocasion professr sycology recomend rememberd sovren tecnicly unparaleld

Ansers ar at the end of the article. ["Ansers ar.."]? Why speld like that?]

Did you try the quiz & then check to see how you did? If you made some mistakes, let’s see why you made them.
Quite possibly you were making good sense, but the “correct” spelling was not.

Did you [u?] leave out the silent e & g in /sovereign/? If so u wer making good sense; the g in particcular is a redundant leftover from ancient latin. It is no longer sounded, so wy rite it, say spelling reformers.

Are u & I writing this way to please the etymologists? Some say we ar supposed to. Why is a puzzle, since the history of each word is all on record for the scollars to argue about if they wish.

Ar we riting [excuse my spelling] to pleas our teachers? Teechers all over ar refusing to corect spelling mistakes, on the grounds partly that the old spellings don’t make sense enny mor.

? Ar we riting the old spellings - & being considderd stupid wen we don’t – to liv up to an ideal of sum kind?

Wot ideal? Wot is ideal about the figure of 40 million people in the US who ar semi-illiterate, unable to read a newspaper or fill out an application form?
Wot is ideal about reading scores which are no higher after years of intensive efforts to raise them than they were before the effort began?

We can blame the great influx of immigrants who don’t read English. We can blame the TV watching which prevents reading of newspapers & books. But English spelling is a culprit.

Wot is all that illiteracy doing to employment?

Last week a tenant of mine, who came as a refugee from Bosnia, went to aply for a job at a home care facility. He could not read the elaborat government requirements & questions, so gave up, came sadly home. ...Today I went with him & helped him try again. This time he was welcomd, & may be hired. Wot if he didn’t hav my help?

Our language is one of the most difficult in the world to learn to read & write. The scholars of past ages speld the same word in multiple ways. No central editing job was ever done in an English speaking cuntry. We pay a price.
English cums from at leest 4 difrent language roots – latin, nordic, saxon, french.
They all got mixd up together as English was sorting itself out & emerging as one language, from 800-1400.

At that time riters wer spelling enny way they thaut best. Chaucer & Shakespeare wer both inconsistent spellers.

That period wud hav been the time to edit & regularize the spelling, to decide e.g. wether the word “pay” was going to be ritten pey [saxon], paiien [old french, the language of Wm. the Conquerer], or pacare [latin].

“Pay” was the new way, now cald The Great Shift, under wich the sound of the letter A wich had been “ah” changed for sum reeson & became “ay”, today’s name for the letter A.

Wich to use? Since nobody knew, paiien became pay wile saxon they stayd as they.
Inconsistent? Yes. Dificult to lern? Yes.
Pay & they rime. They wud be eesier to read & rite if they wer speld alike. The other languages of Europe settled on consistent spelling patterns, so they ar eesy to spel. English is nothing of the sort. It stumps menny of its own peeple, as wel as outsiders lerning it.
The erly problem was worsend wen printing was invented in the 1300’s. The first printers of inglish wer germans. They, not being familiar with inglish, did not feel up to editing the MSS that wer handed to them.

The german printers took the words & printed them as they wer ritten – mistakes, inventiv spellings & all.
Once printed, the words took on a certan holiness. Printed words wer instinctivly regarded as being corectly speld.

Samuel Johnson about 1750 created one of the first English dictionarys. He made no effort to cleer up the contradictions, but left them all as they wer.

School pupils wer expected to memorize, not to challenge his spellings.

Today this failure of the UK to do wot all the other european nations did – update their spelling - is exacting a hevvy price.
Inertia is costing.
Elitism is costing. Unquestioning devotion to the past is costing.

David Boulton, in Children of the Code, shows evidence that because the spelling is so dificult, menny boys becum dropouts becaus they ar ashamed– “I cant lern to spel, must be stupid.” This defeatist mood dusnt help, wen alreddy jobs ar hard to find & pay is low for the illitrat & semi-litrat. For menny, the underworld is the anser. It’s worse now than in the past. Unemployment, anger, crime..Sumthing needs to be dun....

Quiz ansers[CONVENTIONAL] accommodate, disappoint, discipline, excessive, guardian, innocuous, miniature, mischievous, occasion, professor, psychology, recommend, remembered, sovereign, technically.

Leaflet by Theo Halladay, 2008. The Spelling Society, London, UK. JOIN US! spellingsociety.org.
Also see American Literacy Council; americanliteracy.com.