MODERNIZING ENGLISH SPELLING

It is the best of languages; it is the worst of languages. Is English the Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde of all languages? Consider this! No other language holds the dubious distinction of being used by an estimated 1.8 billion speakers (about 1/3 of the world's population), of having official status in 53 countries, spread across six inhabited continents, and of being the language that has the WORST letter-to-sound and sound-to-letter ratios or phonemicity of all Western languages, as the following table highlights.

Why does all this matter? While learning to spell right is not so important with all the tech gizmos people have nowadays, reading or literacy is crucial in today's world. English-speaking countries are beset with abnormally high rates of illiteracy, abnormally high rates of reading and writing disabilities, and/or abnormally high budgets which are used to hire high numbers of learning support teachers used to teach in small groups students who cannot decode as well as their peers, who take much longer to learn to read than peers from other countries! There are all kinds of other problems, such as this one! Everyone should conform, but where is the real reform? Could it be that most kids are not abnormally disabled, but that the language is? In fact, the evidence would lead us to believe so! There are 400 ways to represent 42 sounds with 26 letters! That's insane! For instance, there are 24 ways to spell the "oo" sound as it is found in the word moon. But, there is more insane! Of all those words that are pronounced "oo", say, using the "ou" spelling (as in through), the "ou" spelling is irregular: it is "", "through", ... but it is "through" (schwa), through (trɔf), "your" (/o/ phoneme), but "flour" (/awer or flaʊ^ər) or "harbour" (Schwa), and "pout" (/paʊt/). There are thousands of examples like these for other letter combinations. Many people know that you can pronounce "ough" 7 different ways, for instance! So, how are learners going to know when a word spelled with "ou" vowels is READ or DECODED? In fact, English has 88 spelling rules. 88! AND, MANY contain more exceptions that elements that follow the rule! That is more insane than "more insane"! The evidence is incontrovertible. The English spelling system is disabled. No wonder learners have problems reading! (In fact, good readers just memorize all of those words like Chinese learn all of those ideograms). That is not the problem, because that
happens with most languages! No! The part that makes English hard to learn is when a learner is at the initial phase when s/he has to decode the code and with English the code,... well, there is virtually no code! It is so messed up! So, is it them or is it the language? But, no, let's keep this perfectly logical, efficient spelling system and ask everyone else to learn it! Hey! I learned it! So,...! Hey, I fetched the water to the river! So,... English spelling is very inefficient, in that if it were a car, it would not sell; if it were a paper, it would get a fail; if it were an invention, it would never get off the ground! If this was an Apple phone, do you think people would buy it? So, everything else needs to improve to get ... market-share, to be more efficient, to be better,... to survive, to grow, but why is it that English is allowed to be the exception to that rule or law? One thing is certain: the law of capitalism don't seem to apply to English! It has not changed in 400 years! 400 years! Do you know anything that has not changed in 400 years? Even other languages have changed! Everything has, but English!

[...] a Statistics Canada study estimates that a country which is able to improve its mean literacy score by 1% relative to other countries will enhance its relative per capita GDP by 1.5% in the long term (Coulombe, Tremblay and Marchand, 2004)

English should be the laughing stock of languages and deservedly so! Could it be that the language that underpins every single aspect of learning be the cause of some of the headaches (and the heartaches) that besets the Commonwealth systems and, more importantly, besets most learners of English?

"Could it be that kids are not disabled, but
that English orthography is?"

In contrast, there is Finnish! It has one and only one rule: a letter has one and only one sound attached to it! Finnish students do not have to learn 88 spelling rules which have more exceptions than items that conform to the rule! And, predictably, Finnish students (and even Estonian students) beat many English-speaking students of many Commonwealth countries (see DATA page). Is this really surprising? Of course, it is hard to ascertain that "the" language "did it" because there are so many variables that can influence language acquisition (start of schooling, socio-economic factors, teaching methods, nutrition, budgets, support, time spent on language acquisition,...) and these tests are conducted on students who are late in their language acquisition development (age 15), so a country school system can over time or with added support, compensate for the difficulty. However, if logic and intuition do not work for you, as luck would have it, one comparative study in early language acquisition (Seymour et al., 2003) shows that after one year of instruction, English children show the lowest percentage of correct word reading on a scale in comparison to other European countries, with only 30-40% correct words compared to German, Greek and Finnish, with close to 100%.

There is another example indicating that there is a problem with Dr. ... English! The difference is glaring and so is the reason behind it. It happens that all of these countries have a more regular spelling system than English, if you refer back to the first example provided. I wish we could "hide" this little piece of information under a rug somewhere, but this one indicates that there are issues. There are others. To compete (to hide the problem), many Commonwealth countries must spent inordinate amount of money and time to make teachers teach and student learn about 90 spelling rules and to acquire fluency in reading where Finnish kids can focus on matters like critical and creative thinking earlier and therefore, at the end of schooling, learn more important skills that will help them compete as individuals (and as a nation). Finnish kids learn to read much quicker and much more often than English students learn to read English! Literacy issues are nowhere what they are in the US, for instance. Worse, English-speaking kids are sometimes even labelled as reading disabled, when, I think, if they had been born in Finland, not so many would be. Not only does it damages many kids' ego (and possibly his or her life), but demands a whole host of special services, teachers, and material to remedy the problem. Is the kid disabled or the language disabling? There is data that shows that the rate of "dyslexia" (which is sometimes used to speak about reading/writing disabilities) in English speaking countries is much higher than in countries that have a language that is easier to learn! Please follow the link to the page DATA. In any case, I wonder how certain interest groups (publishers, remedial reading services, English learning schools,...) are feeling about a reform! Do you think they would love it? Actually, there is an event in the history of the language were some of these groups derailed a reform. Suffice it to say, learning English is big business (and the more complex reading and spelling are, the better it is for them)! Innovation? No! Status quo? Yes! We have the quintessential VHS-Versus-Beta issue or, as I would like to put it, a Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde problem! Read below!

"Could it be that the language that underpins every single aspect of learning --English-- be one of the important causes of some of the ailments that besets educational systems in all Commonwealth countries?"

Are we finished yet? Not quite! There is yet one more piece to this puzzle --or nail to that coffin, take your pick-- that should convince anyone --and I mean anyone-- that the complexity of language does affect the rate by which a learner can learn and a teacher can teach effectively and efficiently! Remember those PISA (international assessments) tests? As luck would have it, a Finnish university student delve into the matter that would have been difficult for foreigners to know anything about. As luck would have it, his analysis reveals that language does matter and he could prove it! He could prove it because Finland has 2 different linguistic communities (Swedish-speaking and Finnish-speaking kids) receiving the same kind of education! Mmm! Not a perfect controlled experiment, but close! As it turns out, all things being equal, the Finnish-speaking kids do better on PISA tests than the Swedish-speaking kids. Check on the first table where Swedish stands in terms of phonemicity compare to Finnish! Are you connecting the dots? (And, in this experiment that the PISA test reveals, the Swedish-speaking Finns belong to a higher socio-economic group)! But, they should do better than their Finnish-speaking counterparts. What do you think the education budget of Finland is (per capita) compare to, say, the one of the US, or England? Would it surprise you if I were to tell you that Finland spends less on education than English-speaking countries, would you be surprised? Are you connecting the dots? Go to Finglish to read a more thorough analysis on this topic. Finglish? What's that? Don't be afraid! The new code is not going to look like Finnish! Don't worry! We are not radicals! You would be surprised how reasonable and how klos thu nioo kod iz going too be and more importantly how logical or lodjikul.) It is worth noting that many reformers (because I am not the only one behind this unless Dr. Yule and Dr. Betts, both distinguished linguists are inept) don't advocate for radical changes. There are many others! Masha Bell has written many books on the subject, detailing all of the irregularities of English. Check also all of the videos below and the Children of the Code website. It is also worth noting that many people from many nations (Chinese, Dutch, German, French, Estonian, Irish, Japanese, Romanian, Portuguese, ...) have undertaken some reforms to make their language simpler to read and learn in the last 300 years. That has not happened with English in 400 years! Is English perfect? Even Chomsky, the famous linguist, says that a reform would be beneficial, according to a private conversation I had with Dr. Yule.

Is improvement not in the cards? Why is it that everything is improving, but not English? Ever? Should we go back to using the printing press? Silexes? Why is this completely stubborn obsession of keeping a system that is fraught with more exceptions that regularities? New learners must think that adults are completely nuts! In 400 years, only the USA and (to some degree) Australia were able to push for minor reforms, in spite of many proposals for more substantive reforms. While a reform of the sort might seem frivolous to the un-informed, it is not. It is --first and foremost-- an economic act designed to increase literacy and eventually a nation's competitiveness. Reformists recognize that a language is a tool and, like all tools, it should be efficient for what it is designed: communication. Texting is not seen as a viable code for a reform because it hinges on literate people to make up letters that are omitted. It taps on knowledge that a new learner would not have. Anyway, what will it take for the leaders of the Commonwealth to realize this? A crisis? An economic crisis?

Actually, I think there is a crisis now in Commonwealth countries, but it is well ... "hidden". I think literacy issues in Commonwealth countries are more severe that are being reported (even though there is lots of data to suggest that there are crises).

http://www.thecourt.ca/2012/03/10/at-the-court-moldowan-revisited-and-learning-disability-human-rights-claim-considered-at-the-scc/comment-page-1/#comment-452095

Again, these crises are mitigated --as best as one can afford or want-- by all kinds of measures that are very costly (higher budgets: more support and more hours devoted to language acquisition, for instance). All things being equal, English-speaking students would be appalling low in international assessments! I guess we owe it to the amount of money being poured into the system and the brave teachers who day in and day out makes English make sense to the kids, if indeed that is possible! For many, the reality is that they will have to learn English almost like Chinese kids has to learn Chinese! I will explain that little bit of information in my Finglish page!

I would be remiss if I did not address the one important objection that reformers must answer, namely that most children learn to spell and read well. First, they do, but how long does it take them? There is the rub! Some quickly, but many some not so quickly, especially if we compare them to the proverbial paragon of student: the Finnish-speaking Finn. The study above show that many English-speaking kids learn English, but not very fast (and some not at all). Why do some learn to read and spell and some don't, anyway? ANSWER: VISUAL memory VS logic! I think it is probably safe to say that a parrot could learn English! I am being facetious, of course! But, people who have a great visual memory (or who are reading often and early in life, with literate parents urging them) will do okay! Sadly, the ones who have no books at home, illiterate parents, and a visually-impaired memory, will have a tough time. The ones who tend to rely on logic (trying to find the logic behind the system) will come out more confused and frustrated, as we known English to often having rules and within a rule, more exceptions than elements that fit the rule! In some ways, English is like languages like Chinese or Korean, where one has to memorize many characters or ideograms to learn to read and write! The distinction about not including speaking is important and will be explained later. Also, if you know Germanic or Latin languages, reading and spelling in English might not be so hard because you can rely on the one of the 2 main languages from which English was based on. Both of those languages being more phonetic would make spelling and reading much easier! So, depending on your abilities, English will be relatively easy to learn or impossible to learn. One thing is very sure, it takes for most people more time to learn to master reading and spelling English than many languages! If it is not completely intuitive, there is lots of data to suggest that this is so!

Finally (and this will be addressed more thoroughly later on this page), there is the idea that, even though there is a problem, the way to fix this would be overwhelming: a reform is impossible. There are many reasons that would make a reform difficult, but can we afford to be playing the ostrich? Oddly, though, the digital age has opened up that window a little bit wider. Teachers should not feel threatened by this. Government shouldn't either. And, the public at large, the literate people, will not have to learn a new code. I offer a compelling and elegant way to solve this crisis and reform English below. Clearly, 400 years of neglect does not make it easy to cure the depth and spread of the disease, but what is the relative pain of a preventive medicine delivered to new
patients administered by a doctor who will no longer be hiding from its past! However, it is quite possible that the dark side of capitalism will raise its ugly head and prevent a better product from being created, but are governments and the rest of the industry not belonging to those vested interest groups going to lie down and take it? Here is just one example that indicates how difficult this is gong to be!

Will they eventually not see the merit of progress and the lure of better efficiencies or productivity? Does money corrupt the most loyal of enterprises? The gains will take a generation to ... register (pun intended), but a generation is unfortunately not a word that parties like to look at, unless you have someone with a vision who comes in: a true leader! There are many vested interest groups wanting to keep the status quo!

-----

They say a picture is worth a thousand words and, considering English reading is not that compelling, I thought the following video couldn't highlight some of the issues better!

But, let's explore how this Mr. Hyde of a language was created?

INFUSION, FUSION, DIFFUSION, and CONFUSION

There are five pivotal events in the history of the English language.

The first and most important event is the conquest of England of William the Conqueror of France. He (and his soldiers) conquered England in the 11th century and, for about 300 years, the French conquerors "imposed" indirectly or directly Latin and Norman French as the language of the court, while commoners spoke English and those who wanted to climb the social ladder spoke both, which meant that eventually elements of both languages got fused, often duplicating the lexicon. In other words, this act of slow infusion created a slow fusion which proved to create confusion, as a result! Confused? Read on! Things will become clearer! :)

Second, when eventually Henry the fifth came to claim back England and English as the national language, it looks like clerks, who had written in French and Latin before, had to invent ways to write English words now, often "latinizing" words, with no central authority to guide them in that regard. The word "some" used to be spelled "sum" before the French came and the word "quick" was spelled "cwik"! The old system wasn't perfect. As you can see the "c" has the same sound of the "k"! But, the French influenced messed things up!

Third, when the printing press came to the fore, a set of characters/letters designed for Latin was used to represent English sounds and words, forcing again to "latinize" English because there weren't enough symbols or characters to represent the sounds of English AND Norman French words (which meant that sometimes 2 or 3 letters were needed to represent a sound). English's inconsistent spelling became fossilized.

Adding insult to injury was the peculiar change of the pronunciation of the English vowels for the next 300 years after the French had left. This great vowel shift compounded the issue of the fossilisation of writing because irregularities as they occurred in time became fossilized. I cite from pg. 167 of the "Origins and Development of the English Language" by Thomas Pyles and John Algeo (1982):

The 15th c., following the death of Chaucer, marks a turning point in the history of English, for during this period the language underwent greater, more important phonological changes than in any other century before or since. Despite these radical changes in pronunciation, the old spelling was maintained and, as it were, stereotyped. William Caxton, who died in 1491, and the printers who followed him based their spelling norm not on the pronunciation current in their days, but on the usage of the medieval manuscripts. Hence, though the quality of every single one of the long vowels has changed, the graphic representation of the newer values remained the same as it had been for the Middle English ones. (The Modern English Period to 1800: sound and spelling)

And, finally, in the 16th century, England's leaders started their colonial expansion, starting the diffusion of English, "imposing" on the inhabitants of 52 or so "countries" that they ruled --during the 300 years that it occurred-- this rather ill-designed language, with its different versions, each evolving differently. What a mess! It is now quite apparent that the result of this fusion, this fossilization, this shift, and this dispersion made it almost impossible to clean up a language, which overtime, because its orthography was so irregular and its pronunciation, ever changing created gaps between how words were pronounced and how they were spelled, across all of those Commonwealth countries, which might explain the difficulty to reform its spelling. Granted, differences between accents are waning, thanks to the infiltration of the television and the globalization of entertainment! Speaking of which, did you notice that Mr. Hyde is spelled with a final "e" that is not pronounced, but "might" doesn't have a final e? Also, the "i" sound is written with a "y" or with an "i". And, finally, "gh" doesn't sound like "g" or "h" or "gh"! Isn't that weird? Or, should I write weerd as in beer? Or, weard as in fear? Or wierd as in achieve? Are you getting the picture? No? Well, then, let me continue with the maddening spelling code that English is!

Dr. JEKYLL and Mr. HYDE. BUT, WHY "Y"?

English is a very weird language or a blind date from hell, take your pick! It is like finding out you are dating a doctor, but learning that s/he has a few hidden problems! Sounds familiar? Speaking of which, why is the "y" in Jekyll pronounced like the final "o" in "doctor" or the "e" in "mister" and the "y" in Hyde pronounced like a "y" as in "why"? Imagine the kid trying to learn English! Imagine a Chinese kid learning that language! Could they really take us seriously ... (notice the final "y" in seriously is pronounced like the "i" in "it")! Confused! Everyone is, but no one wants to do anything about it. Just put your nose to the grindstone and quit complaining! What? The thing is that English is relatively easy to learn at first. There is the appeal! It has about one thousand commonly used words (usually original Anglo-Saxon/Germanic street words) that are monosyllabic (80% of the most common 1000 words). It uses monosyllabic prepositions with monosyllabic verbs to create different meaning (get up, get in, get off,...). It has a relatively simple and easy grammar too. And, finally, it does not have noun genders like French. It is an easy language to learn, at first. For instance, let's take this greeting: "Hi, my name is John. What's your name?" Other languages have longer and more complicated greetings (French: "Bonjour! Je m'appelle Jean. Comment vous appelez-vous?" / Italian: "Buon giorno! Il mio nome e John. Come ti chiami?" / Spanish: "Buenos dias. Mi nombre es Juan. ¿Cuál es su nombre?" Many monosyllabic words are not that hard to learn, still "over 2000 common English words contain some letters which are not pronounced in their usual way" (Masha Bell) However, more problems arise when one tries to read and spell more complex English words: those words that have more than one syllable: those polysyllabic words. They represent about one half million words in the English language (and maybe even more). These words are vastly harder to spell and read. Many reports cite that there are over 400 different ways to spell 42 sounds all this with just 26 letters in English. Moreover, stress on syllables is irregular. And, often the unstressed syllable is transformed into a schwa sound (a neutral sound), but there is no way to know what letter is going to be representing it. There are rules in English! 88 out of them! Unfortunately, out of 6800 words that a speaker must know to be fluent and literate, 3700 do not follow a pattern! Some rules have more exceptions than words that do follow the rules! Why bother having a rule then? As a result, children must memorize 3700 words to be competent readers and spellers! What a mess! In 2000, Laura Helmuth subjected the brains of British, French, and Italian dyslexic * students of countries to positron emission tomography scans and concluded that "the difference in the prevalence of the disorder among different countries could be attributed to language". In other words, the complexity of languages is a cause for dyslexia and, as you might have guessed it, English students are more at risk than students learning Italian, which is a vastly simpler phonetic language. There is incontrovertible evidence that shows English to be an excruciatingly difficult language to learn after the initial stage. On merit alone, it was ill-suited to become the lingua franca of the word: the international language par excellence that is has become. But, it has. It is. No use mulling over this! How can one live with this cancer?

* Dyslexia is used in a general way here. There are many different use of the word. Usually it refers to the inability of a person to pronounce sounds that letters make or the inability to write the appropriate letter for a given sound (or an approximation). Here, the term is used as the condition that makes learning language difficult.

Fixing Healthy Cells?
Saving Cancer Cells?

Absurd, isn't it? No more so than us trying to fix all the people who are finding English hard to learn (the Hydes of the world) when we know that, in fact, it is really English, the system (Dr. Jekyll) that (who) really needs to be fixed, despite the appearance! At the moment, the way the issue is being tackled, it is like irradiating healthy cells in our body and leaving those cancerous cells alone! Most doctors would get arrested for doing this! But, this is how English-speaking kids are treated! A careful analysis of the issue reveals that creating new programs and infusing more money into teaching English is the wrong way to solve this issue. Phonics? Whole language? All of those cure-all did not cure anything! Kids were really the guinea pigs of the publishing industry, who apparently tempered with the efforts of Carnegie and Roosevelt when they tried to reform English! First of, these new programs were very expensive. Is training teachers free? These programs were also completely inefficient as time has shown! Even with all the money and the programs that were thrown at the problem, "in 2003, a sample of adults in the U.S. were given a reading proficiency test and only 13% were rated proficient (87% not proficient). Surprisingly, only 30% of adult college graduates scored as proficient in literacy on the test." (5) Learning English, though, is good business and maybe that is part of the problem too. Just imagine how many remedial English programs and institutions are there to lose if we were to make them irrelevant! Listen to this interview from this reading specialist. Wouldn't it be simpler to change the code? Remember those illiteracy rates quoted above? How could all those Commonwealth countries all get it wrong? ALL 53 of them? It is absurd? The experiments have lasted long ago. The results have been un-mitigatingly similar! Eerily similar! Blaming the tube or the Youtube, bad teachers or bad educational systems, the special education teachers or programs that many countries do not have or need, texting or video games, divorces or a lack of vitamin D, bad nutrition or lazy kids, has been missing the boat by that proverbial mile (which is getting longer and longer and not just in the tooth). We might as well blame the boogieman! Come on! Do they think we are dumb? ! Our boogie kids need to put their nose to the grind and get it, but we can always modify their programs! Right? Speaking of avoiding the problem! Let the facts speak for themselves. There is something rotten in the state of English! English is a rotten language and teachers, kids, administrators are no worse or no better than in any other countries. Considering how hard the language, I would venture that they are the most patient! It is illogical to think that all of the Commonwealth countries could all be messing up their literacy programs to the point that the aforementioned rate could be across the board be as horrific as it is. So, where lies the problem? The truth of the matter is this that the English language is what is the problem, not kids, not teachers, not schools, and certainly not the boogie man. Experts in linguistics all know that English happens to have one of the worst sound-to-letter relationship of all modern languages. This is well known. For instance, there is one sound in English that can be spelled 19 different ways and there are over 400 different ways* to spell 42 sounds (phonemes) which use only 26 letters! No wonder a large number of people find decoding more like cracking a code and spelling a guessing game, for the most part. Many people don't find it a game actually! Spelling is not a major issue as spell-checking programs are ubiquitous and efficient. The big issue is reading. If you cannot read (decode) it, how can you comprehend what you are reading! Most kids' literacy scores increase dramatically once the text is being read to them, which proves that they are not dumb, but the language is. Literacy programs are all well and good (and are good business), but can you fix a leaking ship using tape? English has a complex, messy, horrendous spelling system which makes reading an extremely complex, messy, horrendous process. Many famous people have attempted to reform English. So, in case, you think this is an extreme movement from mad people, it is not. Was T. Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Websters, Carnegie, and G. B. Shaw, stupid people? They all recognized that English spelling needed to be reformed. Darwin and Lord Tennyson also gave support to the English spelling reform. Clearly, many intelligent people have supported this reform. Of course, there are many more people who are supporting it today. Furthermore, the idea of reforming a language is not odd at all. More than 15 languages have had some sort of reform in the last two centuries. English? English has not had any reform for at least 400 years. Imagine making something and not improving it for 400 years! By all accounts, English spelling could use some serious "updating", but it looks like it needs some official organization that would have the authority to reform the language ! Would conservative Americans, suspicious (distrustful) of intellectuals, approve? (Yule, 2010) But, we know things have improved in the last 400 years. Everything has. Everything, but English and its horrendous spelling system! If it does not make sense, it doesn't, in so many ways. It really boggles one's mind. It would seem that no one cares! Let's fix kids, not the language! We know the language is a mess, but let's mess our kids instead! The only way I can understand this appalling paradox is that the language is so horrific to learn than the people might just be adverse to any change. And, if I have it my way, this will be so. I mean it won't! :) One day, Dr. Jekyll will be treated and there will be no more Mr. Hyde and victims.

* Depending on the corpus of words (5) being used. Some researchers have brought the number to a staggering 1120 ways!

This Change is not for you. We Agree!

There is no denying that spelling makes reading and writing excruciatingly difficult in English. The facts are incontrovertible. Nonetheless, there are people opposed to this reform. But, I wonder! Are they also opposed to the invention of the shoe, the bicycle, the car, the plane, the jet engine, all of which made travelling EASIER, if I am not mistaken? Do those people long for the times when human beings had to spend hours to create tools and arms out of stone, when their ancestors chased for days mastodons, when their grand-parents went to the river to wash their clothes? Wasn't it more difficult? The same can be said about reforming English. English has to evolve. There is no need for anyone to be upset or be concerned, however. People who can write and read current English will never be required to learn, read, or write the new code. They will not be impacted. True, their children or grand-children will be impacted, if nothing is done about improving English! Do they like them to suffer? Do they like them to fail or to be labelled learning disabled? Do they want countries to spend billions in literacy programs? Do they want more people in jail? Do they want to pay more taxes? I mean. There are some good arguments (13 to be exact) that can be made against reform. To make things short here, I did not want to address them all, but this reformist tackles each and everyone of them and, you guessed it, dismisses each and everyone of them too. If after reading all of this you are still opposed to it, please leave a message! I would be interested to know your arguments. But, remember, YOU will not be impacted,... if you can read and write now, that is!

Seeing 20 ... 20!

I believe that instead of trying to force everyone to change the way they write (and read), we should regularize English at the school level first and phase the change over two decades --at least-- modifying English spelling ever so sightly, as indicated in the sections "Eezi/Eezy Inglish". That's my first proposal. English has a logical system, but there are just as many exceptions as there are rules. So, the idea is to use the existing rules and regularize all the exceptions. By introducing this kind of change at the school level on a gradual basis starting with K or Grade 1 classes, we would solve many issues that other systems have not been able to solve. Teachers would likely be the one group that would need to teach a new system. As a teacher, I do not see many teachers embracing this kind of change because it would be so onerous on them. Their own materials would be useless, would need to be revamped, and they would need to learn the new system. I am pretty sure teachers unions would be fighting this for ... decades. But, if we were to slowly introduce this change, it would take about two decades to be phased in. Older teachers who are towards the end of their career could teach different grades that are still teaching using the old system or we could have a system where parents could have a say as to which system their kids could learn. In the MEANtime, we could have younger teachers who could be trained to learn the new system and be phased into the system by, say, 2020 for seeing 2020. This approach would comfort the general public in that they would not be required to learn the new system. We would thus have two parallel languages (the old and the new form) being phased in and phased out, respectively. I am not suggesting this reform would be easy, but if announced 10 years in advance, most teachers (new and old) could get prepared for the change. Often, as a teacher, I have experienced changes created by a new minister or new director too eager to make his or her mark to impress or get promotion. Again, it is the system that would be failing us here. It will take a formidable change in the minds of the population where the whole of the population is considered and individual needs are taking a back seat! That would be --in my view-- a huge cultural shift in some cultures where the individual matters more than the group, where elections are won for short-term plans, where capitalist gains from institutions that have invested in education programs using the old system might need to evolve... We might need more than 10 years to change things! Let's see how smart humans really are at changing systems. A reform in other systems might be needed for other reforms to take place! After all, other reforms like the ones about climate changes and ecological issues take time and hard work to be implemented, if they get implemented at all. And, the sad reality is that, until these issues are dealt with, a spelling reform might not be worth much politically as children are not going to get you any votes! (More information can be found on Eezy Inglish on this site, but I do endorse Saaspel, a system that shares a similar structure with EI, but which has garnered much more exposure over the many more years it was created.)

The second proposal is more drastic. It would still introduce the system to children and not require adults to change anything, but traditional spelling system would be revamped significantly, simplifying it even more, getting rid of rules that are unnecessary to have a functional reading system that most can learn quickly.

No matter which system is used, there is no one who could disagree that the advantage to society would be immense. There would be minor costs, but huge gains for everyone, down to foreign language learners trying to crack the code. And, even though reforms have been attempted and have failed in the past, I think that now is the time to give it a chance. Times are different. We have computers and programs that can easily translate (or transcode) words spelled in the traditional way into the new form. It would be a matter of just pushing a button. It is quite feasible now.

Millions of kids and adults suffer from low self-esteem because they cannot read or spell. While spelling is a minor issue, being illiterate is not. It costs billions. Is it any coincidence that English-speaking kids have 10 to 20 % of students who need special learning assistance programs in reading? It costs lives too. Is it a total coincidence that 80 % of prisoners are illiterate? This needs to change, but you will not be impacted negatively on a personal level. You will not be required to do anything. This reform would be a silent reform. It will take decades. You and I will never need to learn the new system! For that and that reason only, you should support this movement. We owe this to the next generations of kids. It simply does not make any sense to keep the old system. Read this article for more info and or watch this video:

I am sure there are thousands like these and many trying to devise a way to master all of those irregularities. How many will it take for people to get that to fix this problem all you need to do is fix the spelling system?

So! The cure to all of those literacy issues is a new spelling system! It is that simple! Except that won't make those ESL schools or publishers too happy, but have their programs worked in the past? Except that there are other issues that might be more important, but our kids (you as a kid maybe) were cheated! And, except that there are many debates has to how this new spelling system should look like. No matter what, a reform is long ~~overdio~~! ~~Overdioo?~~ ~~Overdew~~? Overdue, ... no matter how it is spelled or spelt! :)

References

(1) http://www.spellingsociety.org/kids/index.html. To cite another article from the Tyee, a website that writes about issues in British Columbia, a province situated on the West coast of Canada, "According to page 19 of the B.C. budget for education, from 2008/09 to 2010/11, adult British Columbians (aged 16 to 65) who could read at "level 3" in 2005 was just 60 per cent. With luck, that number may have risen to 69 per cent this year. (Level 3 is defined as "the desired threshold for coping with the increasing skill demands of a knowledge economy and society.") In other words, a minimum of 31 per cent of adult British Columbians can't read well enough to understand this article. That's about 880,000 of us. It does not speak well for a government that made literacy the first of its Five Great Goals." Also, "In 2003 a sample of adults in the U.S. were given a reading proficiency test and only 13% were rated proficient (87% not proficient). Surprisingly, only 30% of adult collage graduates scored as proficient in literacy on the test." (the American Literacy Council)

(2) The American Literacy Council

(3) The American Literacy Council

(4) Ibid

(5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Number_of_words_in_English
(6) (Public Investment in Skills: Are Canadian Governments Doing Enough? Serge Coulombe and Jean-François Tremblay, C.D. Howe Institute, 2005)

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The following videos outline the reasons why spelling is the way it is. It is quite clear that the spelling system needs a major overhaul. They are hinting it. Many are on the Children of the Code website, even though there are the usual literacy gurus that will sell a more complex solution! Navigate at your own peril, but the following videos are very informative. Enjoy!

Before the Normans' Conquest

Courtesy of Children of the Code

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During the Normans' Conquest

Courtesy of Children of the Code

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After the Normans' Conquest: Henry 5

Courtesy of Children of the Code

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16 and 17th Centuries:

Latin scribing in English: 26 Latin letters and 40+ English Phonemes.

We have a Problem!