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English spelling is a wretched mess that reflects centuries of neglect. Instead of a consistent system it is a hodge podge of foreign words in foreign spellings, letters that haven't been pronounced since Chaucer, and general lunacy. Efforts to reform it go back centuries too, but they have always been defeated by conservative editors and schoolmarms, and by the expense of printing a book using handset type. But now there are computers and BTRSPL (pronounced "Betterspell"), a program that converts electronic documents from standard spelling to one of the reformed systems, or vice versa. A report converts in seconds. A free novel from Project Gutenberg, downloaded in minutes from one of the great on-line libraries, converts at 90 pages a minute.
Try it at http://americanliteracy.com/betterspell/ .
2. The American Literacy Council
There are dozens of other great sites as well, and here are two pages that list them beautifully!
1. Link to Yahoo - Humanities - Literature - Electronic Literature
There is an old DOS program, now obsolete, but technical people may find dictionaries for three different reforms to be useful.
There are several packages, some large and others quite small. Please make your choice below. (Click anywhere in the highlighted area.)
About Spelling Reforms
Current spelling is a horrible inconsistent system that just happened by accident. In the classic nonsense sentence " Though the rough cough and hiccough plough me through, I ought to cross the lough. ", the letters "ough" are pronounced eight different ways! Phonetically, the sentence reads "Tho the ruff coff and hicup plow me thru, I aut to croos the lock. ". No one could guess this from the forms of the words. No learner can tell if "cough" should be spelled as it is or as "coff" or as "cof". Italian has a fairly consistent spelling, and learning to read and write take an Italian child a few weeks -- after which she can read practically anything, and write correctly (or nearly so) almost any word you can pronounce for her. In contrast, English children take years of gradual progress to learn to read and spell all the words commonly used in adult writing. Some marginal children never learn to read. All waste a year, overall in several grades, learning spelling that takes just weeks in a rational system. A wasted year that could be spent on useful things! And another one learning to read.
This need not be. Germany and Norway have reformed their spelling during this century, and so could we.
There are many kinds of reform proposed, each having pros and cons.
Some reforms would make it easier for children to learn to read because they could look at a word and know exactly how it was pronounced. There would need to be about fifteen more letters for a perfect system of this kind. But these systems would not be self-reading; that is, people not trained in them could not make out the text well because of all the new letters.
Reforms with single letters for common combinations of letters (e.g. one for "th") would cut the numbers of letters in a word by an average of 16%, letting us write faster and making books a sixth shorter and lighter, cheaper to make and using fewer trees for the paper. Also, we might be able to read a little faster. But again, introducing many new letters will confuse traditional readers.
Spelling would be made easier if there were just one letter per sound. In our present system, the "k" sound can be written as k (king), qu (queen, could just as well be kween), or c (cat). Eliminating c and qu would improve things, but too many such changes would again make self reading harder, since we don't immediately recognize "Sirkus" as "Circus".
The Cut Spelling system is a compromise that allows self reading, introduces no new letters, and is easy to learn. Yet it makes learning reading much easier, spelling much easier, and reduces word length by about 10%. It appears to many scholars who have studied the issue to be the most promising first step for spelling reform. It is enough of a change to have powerful advantages, yet not so radical as to require extensive relearning from the millions of people who spell conventionally. The Simplified Spelling Society believes that Cut Spelling, developed over many years of dedicated work, is our best hope to fix the current mess.
AMERICAN, from the American Literacy Council (descended from American spelling reform societies) (American is now called Soundspel) is a slightly different reform. It introduces no new letters, but instead uses pairs of letters in a consistent way to distinguish sounds; for example, the long vowels from the short. It is very consistent and easier for a child to learn to read and write in than CS, but it is slightly harder to read if you are already used to conventional English. It reduces average word length 7%.
("AMERICAN" indicates it is phonetic for American pronunciations; it is meant that BRITISH would use the same system for a British accent, AUSTRALIAN would be used for that accent and so on. Almost all words would be the same in all these systems. The name AMERICAN is emphatically NOT some chauvinistic boast that one side of the ocean is better than the other.)
As to which system is best, I take a neutral stance, except to note that ALL reform methods would be improvements on the current "system".
It would require a Labor of Hercules to come up with anything worse.
More Radical Reforms
The two most common letter combinations are "th" and "ch". Substituting one special letter for each reduces word length by 3% and .6% respectively. And computer keyboards have two little-used keys, the bracket keys - [{ and ]} - that can be programmed to produce two new characters easily. (Whereas for fifteen new characters there just aren't keys enough, unless people are willing to do a great deal of shifting and sacrifice @#^&* etc.) So I have added the TH and CH option, just to give you a feel for the possibilities in that direction.
One good place is the Carrie electronic library of the University of Kansas:
http://raven.cc.ku.edu/carrie/ (click on "stacks" and look for favorite authors.)
Or you can go to YAHOO (www.yahoo.com). Below the big search window are listed the tree-structure search options. Find "Humanities: architecture photography literature" at the upper left of this list, and click carefully on "literature". A menu of choices appears. Choose "Electronic Literature". On the next screen, "Publishers" are people who sell (often cheaply) or give away current literature, much of it self published. "On Line Libraries" are like Carrie. There are 16 listed as I write this, and more all the time. In a few years, if copyright issues can be resolved, every book available anywhere will be quickly available everywhere, and no one will have to travel to a distant library again.
END
Time and time again intelligent and distinguished people have recognized the advantage of reforming spelling, yet the idea has never succeeded. Mark Twain, Teddy Roosevelt and George Bernard Shaw all campaigned for it, and yet it has always failed.
We genuinely want to know what you think. Please fill in as much or as little as you like of the form below, and mail it back to me. (Alan Mole, 1441 Mariposa Ave, Boulder, CO 80302, USA.) If you prefer, just send your thoughts by e-mail. (Ramole@aol.com) If reform is ever to happen, we need feedback and we need ideas!
Please don't think you have to be an "expert" - English spelling is a plague upon us all!
Name
Age
Occupation
Education (Current grade or maximum attained)
Have you a special interest in spelling reform, and if so, what?
Address
E-mail address
CS: Were you able to read CS easily after a few minutes?
AMERICAN : Were you able to read
American easily after a few minutes?
Other (which one?): Were you able
to read it easily after a few minutes?
What did you like or dislike, and
why?
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. BTRSPL:
Which version did you try, DOS or Windows?
How did you learn about it?
Was it easy to use?
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. Comments: Improvements, results, wish lists, etc.
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. Ways to bring about spelling reform
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. Main obstacles to reform
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Suppose people wrote to correspondents, professors etc., who were open minded enough to accept it, papers in reformed spelling beginning with a message such as "I support spelling reform and hope you won't mind that the following is written in Cut Spelling, which drops unpronounced letters (no not know and unstressed vowels (talkng not talking). Do you think this might "spread the word"?
Would you be willing to do this? And, if so, please let us know the reactions!
If you are a teacher or executive, would you accept such reports from those you supervise?
Can you think of other ways to spread the word?
Any other comments:
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HREF="mailto:ramole@aol.com">"Ramole@aol.com"