How top down spelling revision didn't work

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, language, writing, spelling, spelling reform, history

The cover is too good not to show: enough is enuf: our failed attempts to make English eezier to spell by Gabe Henry takes us on a rollicking journey through the stories of numerous persons, societies and clubs that have tried and tried to revise the spelling of English. Just since the founding of the USA, national figures including Benjamin Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt have involved themselves in the pursuit of "logical" spelling. "Simplified spelling" organizations persist to this day.

English is the only language for which spelling bees are held. Nearly all other languages with alphabetic writing are more consistently phonetic. However, I would exempt French from that proviso. I discovered during three years of French classes that the grammar of French verbs is, to quote a Romanian linguist friend, "endless." Putting together all possibilities of conjugation, tense and mood, French has four times as many varieties of verb usage and inflected endings as English does, and then each variety is multiplied by inflections that denote number, person and gender. However, inflections ranging from -ais and -ait to -aient all have the same pronunciation, "-ay" as in "way". Other multi-sonic instances abound. Perhaps French has stalled on its way to being like Chinese, for which the written language is never spoken and the spoken languages aren't written.

But we're talking about English here. The author states several times that there are eight ways of pronouncing "-ough" in English. Long ago a friend loaned me a book, published in 1987, a collection of items from the 1920's and 1930's by Theodor S. Geisel, before he became Dr. Seuss: The Tough Coughs as he Ploughs the Dough. Geisel's essays on English spelling seen from a Romanian perspective (tongue-in-cheek, as usual; he was from Massachusetts, of German origin) dwell on the funnier aspects of our unique written language. The peculiarities of -ough occupy one of the chapters.

Being intrigued by the "8 ways" claim, I compiled this list using words extracted from an online dictionary:

1. "-ow" in Bough (an old word for branch) and Plough (usually spelled "plow" in the US)
2. "-off" in Cough and Trough
3. "-uff" in Enough and Tough and Rough
4. "-oo" in Through and Slough (but see below)
5. "-oh" in Though and Furlough
6. "-aw" in Bought and Sought
7. "-ə" (the schwa) in Thoroughly ("thu-rə-ly")

And…I could not find an eighth pronunciation for it. Maybe someone will know and leave a comment.

"Slough" is actually a pair of words. Firstly, a slough is a watery swamp. Secondly, slough refers to a large amount of something, and in modern American English it is usually spelled "slew", as, "I bought a whole slew of bedsheets at the linens sale." However, "slew" is also the past tense of the verb "slay": "The knight slew the dragon," which is the only way most folks use that word.

Numerous schemes have been proposed over time. Sum peepl hav sujestid leeving out sum letrz and dubling long vowls (e.g., "cute"→"kuut"). A dozen or more attempts at this are mentioned in the book. Others have invented new alphabets, or added letters to the 26 "usual" ones, so that the 44 phonemes could each have a unique representation. An appendix in many dictionaries introduces IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet (which includes the schwa for the unaccented "uh" sound). Public apathy and pushback have doomed every scheme.

The only top-down change to American spelling that came into general use was carried out by Noah Webster in his Dictionary. He took what we now call the English U out of many words such as color and favor; the Brits still use colour and favour. And he removed the final K from a number of words, including music and public (I think the Brits have mostly followed suit); pulled the second L from traveler and the second G from wagon; and introduced "plow" and other words that didn't quite make it to present-day usage. His later attempts at further simplification didn't "take".

I could go on and on. It's an entertaining pastime to review so many attempts. However, something has happened in the past generation, really two things. Firstly, advertising pushed the inventers of trademark names to simplify them, particularly in the face of regulations that forbade the use of many common words in product brands. Thus, we have "Top Flite" golf balls, "Shop Rite" and "Rite Aid" retailers, and new uses for numbers, such as "Food4Less" for a midwestern market chain and "2-Qt" for a stuffed toy brand. Secondly, the advent of ubiquitous cell phones motivated kids everywhere to develop "txtspk". Single-letter "words" such as R and U plus substituting W for the long O leads to "R U HWM?" Number-words abound: 2 for "to" and "too", 4 for "for", 8 in "GR8", and even 9 in "SN9" ("asinine", for kids who have that word in their working vocabulary). Acronyms multiply: LOL, ROFL (rolling on floor laughing), TTYS (talk to you soon)…a still-growing list. Even though most of us now have smart phones with a full keyboard (but it's tiny), txtspk saves time and now even X-Gen and Boomers (such as me) use it.

Social change works from the bottom up. Top-down just won't hack it. Unless, of course, you are dictator and can force it through, as Mao did when he simplified Chinese writing the year after taking power in 1949. Many of my Chinese friends cannot read traditional Chinese script. Fortunately, Google Lens can handle both, so Chinese-to-Chinese translation is possible!

We have yet to see any major literature moving to txtspk, let alone technical and scientific journals. If that were to happen, the next generation would need Google Lens or an equivalent to read what I am writing now, and all English publications prior.

It will be a while. Meantime, let this book remind us of the many times our forbears dodged the bullet and declined to shed our traditional written language. The legacy firstly of several long-term invasions (Saxon and Norman in particular), and then the rise of the British Empire, and finally in "melting-pot" America, our language is a mash-up of three giant linguistic traditions and a couple of smaller ones, plus borrowings, complete with original spelling if it existed, from dozens or hundreds of languages. Thus, one more thing found primarily in English: the idea of etymology, the knowledge of a word's origin. I haven't checked; do dictionaries for other languages include the etymologies of the words? My wife has several Japanese dictionaries of various sizes; none mentions the source of words except for noting which are non-Japanese because they have to be spelled with a special syllabary called Katakana.

English is unique. Harder to learn than some languages, but not all, it is still the most-spoken language on Earth. It is probably also the most-written, in spite of all the craziness.