Reforming the spelling of English has been of a dream for 200 years.
After all, it would be nice to do away with the vagaries of vowels and consonants that give us words like though, through, tough, thought, cough and cuff.
The problem is there is no one who can make changes stick. There’s no American academy, the way the French and Spanish have academics who purge their languages of unwanted words, larger of English origin.
But we now one unchallenged authority for making the language more sensible, and that is Microsoft with the spellchecking function of Microsoft Word, the ubiquitous word processing software.
Since people will generally believe what the spell checker tells them, changes can be gradually introduced more frequent upgrades to Word, so that the population does not have to absorb the reforms at once.
In Reformed Word 1.00, we can take care of all those “gh” words that are remnants of what used to be something like the German “ch” in loch. Think of the English daughter with the gh pronounced that way. We can move to tho, throo, tuff, thot and goff, and it would certainly make life easier for all the teens who are busily texting to have spelling that is closer to pronunciation.
Version 1.01 will take care of such elements as the “tion” problem. What sense does it have words like nation, population and sensation, spelled this way when they should be nayshen, populayshen and sensaytion. Naturally, Microsoft had to had the y to the a or most would pronounce them nah-shen, populah-shen and sensah-sen, and that would defeat the intent of reform. This version will also rationalize pronunciation of plurals, making it much easier for non-English speakers to learn the language.
It will be much simpler to have all the “z” sounding plurals spelled with zees. “That would give use pluralz, speekerz, upgraydz and kards. Note that in the last word, this version also eliminates the letter c its pronunciations are taken care of by s and k. Of the q also falls by the wayside for kwik, kwit and kwak.
This frees up two letters to take care of sounds that needs separate symbols. C becomes “ch” as it is in many language, so the place of worship is now spelled curc.
Q can be enlisted in distinguishing between the voiced and unvoiced sounds that both represented by the letters th. For those not trained in the jargon of linguistics, that means the “th” sound in that, these, those and breeth (voiced) and the unvoiced sound in think, thin and thik. Notice how we have reformed the spelling of breathe and thick. Since the voiced sound far less common, q is a good letter. We’ll probably have to invent a new symbol.
In version 1.02, the goal will be to take care of then w letters. This will probably be tricky as large parts of the country pronounce the words as hwear, hwen, hwat and hwayl, while much of the North east says wear, wen, wat and wail.
From Microsoft’s point of view, this can open up new markets since it can reshape the dictionary publishing world as we “no” it. (See how great it will be not to have this nasty “kn” words.
2 comments:
I thoroughly, no, wait, I qorowlee enjoyed this posting, thinking of all the time I wasted using Microsoft’s useless spell checker, which needs another spell checker to check it (how much spell would a spell checker check if a spell checker could check spelling – try that a few times). And I took great umbrage at what it suggested to replace my last name with (I retorted, “oh yeah? and so’s your old man!).
Again, thank you for the good laugh (no, wait, “laff”)!
Grate, thanks
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