From 1972 to 1975, the Australian government informally had a Ministry of Helth. H-E-L-T-H.
Why? Spelling reform.
Every so often, someone has a brilliant idea to reform English spelling. There's an old
joke from an unknown reformer about how fish can be spelled ghoti and still be consistent
with English. Obviously, it can't, because any fluent English speaker would pronounce
it ghoti, but that doesn't help anyone learning the language.
And you're probably thinking that I'm about to go off on a rant about how spelling reform
never works, and that prescriptivists are doomed to failure. The trouble is... sometimes,
just sometimes, it does work.
Spelling in English used to be a mess. Well, it still is a mess, but it was a mess that
no-one could agree on Shakespeare signed his name several different ways, and we just happened
to settle on the current one in the last century.
In 1920, Andrew Carnegie's Simplified Spelling Board -- an organisation with a surprising
amount of money behind it -- released the Handbook of Simplified Spelling. It's been
scanned and is available online, and it's worth having a quick look through. It's written
in simplified spelling, which does tend to get a bit confusing. But it does make a really
good point. If we were designing a language from the ground up -- and heaven knows, people
have tried -- you would design it with a simple method of spelling. There *are* natural languages
out there which are more or less consistent.
While most of the Spelling Board's suggestions withered on the vine, some did survive. They're
the reason that American English spells mould without a U. Indeed, a lot of American versus
British differences are the remnants of attempted spelling reforms throughout the years. Color
and center are spelled differently in the US because Mr. Noah Webster just decided they
should be... and he was writing the dictionary.
There's even the more extreme suggestion of throwing out the current alphabet altogether:
playwright George Bernard Shaw invented a new alphabet, which was eventually refined
into something called Quikscript. It's actually a rather elegant alphabet, but... well, good
luck converting people to that. When we're trained since birth to understand one set
of squiggles, and reinforce that training constantly, it's strangely difficult to shift
to another set of squiggles.
What we do tend to see is the slow adoption of new spellings. Miniscule, with two Is,
used to be an incorrect spelling. Now it's a "variant". To-day used to be hyphenated,
as did wire-less and e-mail. And the Associated Press Style Guide only switched from Web site
to website in 2010.
But just imposing spelling reform from on high doesn't generally work. Particularly
not now, and particularly given how many accents of English there are. Would you say resistance
is futile, with an E? Or futil, without? In regular speech, a lot of Americans would say
fudil - voicing the T to turn it into a D. How do you spell that? And more to the point:
how do you get everyone to agree to it? For crying out loud, America can't even shift
to the metric system, and Britain still... has a monarchy. That got away from me.
So next time that someone says they don't know whether judgment has an E in the middle
of it? Tell them it doesn't matter. Because in those cases? It really doesn't.
Next time: a language reform that's steadily creeping in without anyone really trying.
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