A realistic spelling reform for English
Given how often the topic of English spelling reform shows up on this subreddit and similar spaces online, many people clearly know that English spelling is flawed and want to see it change. The problem is, nobody agrees on how it should change, so no proposal ever gets enough support for widespread attention.
A few weeks ago I made a post about Mark’d Inglish, my proposal for reforming English spelling with diacritics. While many on this subreddit seem to like it, I’m well-aware that it has little chance of actually being accepted by the general public and replacing our existing spelling system. Aside from the hassle of typing diacritics, the average English speaker doesn’t care enough about linguistics to learn an entirely new set of symbols and write in a way that’s totally different from what they’re used to.
That’s why if English is to ever get a proper spelling reform, it must be visually and logically similar to our existing spelling system, so that it’ll be easy for the billions of existing English speakers to switch to it. But it must also avoid introducing new flaws of its own, so that there will be fewer reasons to oppose it. More specifically, it must:
- Be easily readable by any English speaker without prior knowledge.
- Be compatible with all major dialects of English, permitting multiple spellings only when necessary.
- Avoid using any unfamiliar symbols or combinations of letters.
- Avoid merging homophones unless necessary for phonetic accuracy and consistency.
A spelling reform like this should start with our existing spelling system and compare words with each other to find obvious flaws and fix them in obvious ways, as shown in this post’s thumbnail. These fixes should be common sense, and everyone who wants to see English spelling improved should support them.
For this, I propose Common Sense Respelling. There are more details and sample texts in this doc, but here is a short sample:
For centuries, thare has been a moovment to reform the spelling of the Inglish langwage. It seeks to chainge Inglish orthography so that it is more consistent, matches pronunciation better, and folloes the alphabetic principle. Common motivs for spelling reform include quicker lerning, cheaper lerning, and making Inglish more useful as an international auxiliary langwage.
Reform propozals vary in terms of the depth of the lingwistic chainges and by their implementations. In terms of writing systems, moast spelling reform propozals ar moderat; they uze the traditional Inglish alphabet, try to maintain the familiar shapes of wurds, and try to maintain common convensions (such as silent e). More radical propozals involv adding or remooving letters or symbols, or even creating new alphabets. Sum reformers prefer a gradual chainge implemented in stages, while uthers favor an immediat and total reform for aul.
As you can see, it looks almost identical to how it would be spelt the ‘correct’ way. While this by no means makes English spelling perfect, it is still a huge step in the right direction. A realistic spelling reform doesn’t need to be the exact same as what I’ve proposed, but it needs to be moderate, and it needs enough supporters to have any chance of getting implemented.
And while there isn’t yet a popular movement for spelling reform, we can still push for small changes like spelling ‘gauge’ as ‘gage’, which some people are already doing. English spelling has always slowly changed over time, especially over the last two decades alone thanks to the internet, and so we should aim to make alternate spellings more and more socially acceptable over the years to come.
^(Yes, this is an update post following suggestions to change rules with the letter V on my) ^(original post)^(.)