Nu wae uv speling? I dunno

There is a movement to revamp the way we spell. It has been ongoing for a hundred years, endorsed by such people as Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt, who used simplified spelling in all his White House correspondence. I am not sure just how I feel about it.

I have always been pretty good about spelling. I made it all the way to my third grade spelling bee. But I got knocked out by 'sailor' which I spelled 'sailer' (which is an actual word, by the way, meaning something that sails). But after losing a demanded recount, I have recovered and become a sort of walking dictionary. My oldest daughter is, too. (I'll make sure she gets a fair shake at her spelling bee.)

But some people have a hard time with it. And that is why God (spelled G-o-r-e by some) invented the internet. Now, we can say 'wazzup' and 'lol' and spell innrnet a hunnert difrent wayz.

I guess there are several ways people learn. For me, suffixes and prefixes build upon the base of the word. It makes sense. I can better make out the meaning of a word by finding its root, and then deducing from the additions to it what its concept it. Phoenetic spellings would change all that. The argument is that children would learn to read faster. I am not so sure, in light of what I just mentioned. Children would have a harder time learning meanings. They would have to read out loud just to hear what the sentence is saying.

There is a comparison to Germanic languages, in which spelling more closely resembles the sound of a word. Having learned Norwegian, I understand where the argument is coming from. The problem with the argument is that Norwegian words can be 15-20 characters long, and consist of 4 or 5 words all lmushed together. And they evolved differently than English. They still use base words, which are kept whole in the word, and other words are added as suffixes and prefixes, or compounds. We could model after this, but to do so would require that we standardize the spellings of base words only. But we would still require a standardized way of adding to them.

We would still require some standardization of the language, otherwise we are left playing MadGab every time we sit down to read the paper or a fairy tale. "Wuns upon a tiem ther wuz a lidul gurl hoo woer a red hud. Shee wuz cald Lidul Red Rieding Hud." or "Subwae riedr sliesd in paer sa atak." Which brings up the other problem of local dialect. For example, is it "pak th ka at Havad skwae" or "pok th ko at Hovod skwe" or "park th kar at Harvrd skwer"? And when you build a shishkabob, do you skewr or skeur? Duz Santa's raendeer leev huf marks on th ruf, or huuf marks on the ruuf?

And then there is the graphic designer who should also be heard. There are some letter combinations that just will not go together, like "LJ" or "kd". So maybe we can design our new written vocabulary to accomadate the designer, as well.

Interestingly, to read some of the founders' writings, it becomes apparent that spelling was not really as important as the message. Apparently, it wasn't until the late nineteenth century that standardization was enforced, probably by some liberal who felt that government had to control everything.

It wouldn't really bother me to see some of our sounds reduced to fewer letters. 'C' is an almost useless letter, as is 'Q'. Except you would still use 'c' for the 'ch' sound.

Perhaps th bigst advantej iz thet it wud keep reedrz frum faling asleep in th midul uv a blog. It wud be liek plaeyeeng a gaem.

Hav urself a gud dae, y'all!