Given the voting on this post suggests it’s pretty controversial, I should add a note that this is mostly just for fun. I would have posted this during Good Heart Week but forgot about it, so you’re getting it late. This post is more lazy afternoon pipedream than anything else.
It’s no secret that English spelling is a mess. And we know the main reason: English spelling was standardized in the middle of a vowel shift, so it reflect an intermediate state of the language rather than the comparatively stable state the language is in today (yes, vowel positions vary across dialects, but these follow patterns that would mostly permit a standardized spelling if one was attempted today).
But not all of the problems are due to the vowel shift. Some of them are because English is written using the Latin alphabet which doesn’t quite line up with its sound system. And so we have letters that simultaneously do too much work and not enough.
Real spelling reform for English is nearly impossible at present. It would require the coordination of a billion people across dozens of nations to have a real shot of sticking. Also, there’s no mechanism by which to carry a spelling reform out since there’s no standards body everyone agrees with (English dictionaries are descriptive rather than prescriptive, Anglo school systems are decentralized, etc.). Publishers and writers could try to unilaterally change spelling, but it’s going to be hard to get enough people on board with learning a new spelling system to read their work. Maybe the next J.K. Rowling could pull off a spelling reform if it gradually showed up in a highly popular children’s book, but that’s tall order.
The most realistic option is to aim for modest spelling reforms and introduce them gradually. Get influential publishers to make small changes to their standards, let people get used to them, and then turn the crank on more reforms generation after generation until the spelling is better.
Here’s an idea for the first such modest spelling reform we could make.
Let’s fix the letter “c”.
“C” makes two sounds, /s/ and /k/. By extension this means “s” and “c” are two letters doing the same job, and in the same way “c”, “k”, and to some extent “q” and “x” are also used to represent the same sounds.
Let’s clean this up. Let’s drop 3 letters out of these 5 and keep just 2.
I’m going to suggest we keep the letters “c” and “x”. Why these two? Basically for handwriting reasons. If you’re ever had to write on a backboard, “c” and “x” are easy enough. “k” requires extra strokes, “s” looks like “5”, and and “q” has a bunch of fairly similar letters and I’m in favor of letters that are more easily distinguished. However, this is just my preference. I think the more realistic version is to use “s” and “k”, but I’ll stick with my preference for the rest of this post.
So what does this mean? “c” makes the /s/ sound, “x” makes the /k/ sound. How does spelling change?
Just replace “s” with “c” and keep using “c” in places where “c” makes the /s/ sound. “sass” becomes “cacc”, “city” remains “city”, etc.
Replace “k” with “x” and replace “c” with “x” where it makes the /k/ sound. So “cat” becomes “xat”, “kick” becomes “xix”, etc.
Replace “q” and “qu” with the digraph “xw” generally and “x” with “xc” in most places. So “queen” becomes “xween”, “extra” becomes “exctra”, etc.
For words with etymological spellings where the above won’t work, just fix them to have phonetic spellings. So fix “xylophone” to “zylophone”, etc.
As you’ll notice this this still not perfect. It’s not hard to find words that would still have weird spellings. But that’s okay. The goal here is incremental improvement, not fixing everything at once, since I don’t think that’s possible. Instead, roll out a small change like this, wait 20 years, then try the next one. That way, one day, we’ll have fixced our cpelling xonfucionc.
Modect Englich Cpelling Reformc
Given the voting on this post suggests it’s pretty controversial, I should add a note that this is mostly just for fun. I would have posted this during Good Heart Week but forgot about it, so you’re getting it late. This post is more lazy afternoon pipedream than anything else.
It’s no secret that English spelling is a mess. And we know the main reason: English spelling was standardized in the middle of a vowel shift, so it reflect an intermediate state of the language rather than the comparatively stable state the language is in today (yes, vowel positions vary across dialects, but these follow patterns that would mostly permit a standardized spelling if one was attempted today).
But not all of the problems are due to the vowel shift. Some of them are because English is written using the Latin alphabet which doesn’t quite line up with its sound system. And so we have letters that simultaneously do too much work and not enough.
Real spelling reform for English is nearly impossible at present. It would require the coordination of a billion people across dozens of nations to have a real shot of sticking. Also, there’s no mechanism by which to carry a spelling reform out since there’s no standards body everyone agrees with (English dictionaries are descriptive rather than prescriptive, Anglo school systems are decentralized, etc.). Publishers and writers could try to unilaterally change spelling, but it’s going to be hard to get enough people on board with learning a new spelling system to read their work. Maybe the next J.K. Rowling could pull off a spelling reform if it gradually showed up in a highly popular children’s book, but that’s tall order.
The most realistic option is to aim for modest spelling reforms and introduce them gradually. Get influential publishers to make small changes to their standards, let people get used to them, and then turn the crank on more reforms generation after generation until the spelling is better.
Here’s an idea for the first such modest spelling reform we could make.
Let’s fix the letter “c”.
“C” makes two sounds, /s/ and /k/. By extension this means “s” and “c” are two letters doing the same job, and in the same way “c”, “k”, and to some extent “q” and “x” are also used to represent the same sounds.
Let’s clean this up. Let’s drop 3 letters out of these 5 and keep just 2.
I’m going to suggest we keep the letters “c” and “x”. Why these two? Basically for handwriting reasons. If you’re ever had to write on a backboard, “c” and “x” are easy enough. “k” requires extra strokes, “s” looks like “5”, and and “q” has a bunch of fairly similar letters and I’m in favor of letters that are more easily distinguished. However, this is just my preference. I think the more realistic version is to use “s” and “k”, but I’ll stick with my preference for the rest of this post.
So what does this mean? “c” makes the /s/ sound, “x” makes the /k/ sound. How does spelling change?
Just replace “s” with “c” and keep using “c” in places where “c” makes the /s/ sound. “sass” becomes “cacc”, “city” remains “city”, etc.
Replace “k” with “x” and replace “c” with “x” where it makes the /k/ sound. So “cat” becomes “xat”, “kick” becomes “xix”, etc.
Replace “q” and “qu” with the digraph “xw” generally and “x” with “xc” in most places. So “queen” becomes “xween”, “extra” becomes “exctra”, etc.
For words with etymological spellings where the above won’t work, just fix them to have phonetic spellings. So fix “xylophone” to “zylophone”, etc.
As you’ll notice this this still not perfect. It’s not hard to find words that would still have weird spellings. But that’s okay. The goal here is incremental improvement, not fixing everything at once, since I don’t think that’s possible. Instead, roll out a small change like this, wait 20 years, then try the next one. That way, one day, we’ll have fixced our cpelling xonfucionc.