Spelling made easier

Little speller Harry Altman concentrates on his task in the documentary Spellbound.

If Allan Campbell is serious about simplifying English spelling he's going to have to do something about his name.

Far too many Ls for a start. And what's the point of the P? Or the E? And since C can be pronounced in two ways, how about a K instead?

Which leaves us with Alan Kambl, a Christchurch man so passionate about reforming our messy spelling system that he flew to Washington DC this week to make his point outside the pinnacle of spelling - the US Scripps National Spelling Bee.

On stage, Hamilton's Charlotte Roose, 12, understandably mis-spelled erythrophobia as arithrophobia and Florida-based New Zealander Sam Lawson, 14, lucked out on pompadour, spelling it pompador.

On the footpath outside, Campbell, 75, and about a dozen international spelling enthusiasts held a restrained protest, not against the spelling bee, which was made famous by the documentary Spellbound, but against the inconsistencies in the English language.

Such as why we insist on using a silent B at the end of dumb.

"Any spelling system that has a B on the end of dumb has to be dumb itself," says Campbell, who has been interested in spelling since 1947 as a proof-reader on the Otago Daily Times.

"I'm a good speller and I found that I often had to go to the dictionary to find words that I should know - was it [spelt] EA or was it EE? - I couldn't remember."

Fifty years later he joined the UK-based Simplified Spelling Society and later became convener of the New Zealand branch, Spell 4 Literacy.

"It was then that I found out that changing spelling, far from being just a fanciful wish that didn't really have any significance in the real world, did have significance in the real world, because [conventional spelling] held back children and foreigners learning to read and write in English.

"Our spelling needs to be updated to suit our rules. One of the beauties of the English language is the richness that it gets from all the words that it takes from all different languages. This is one of the glories of it.

"But the trouble is when they come into our language they tend to stay as they were in their original language, which has different rules to ours. We don't anglicise them.

"We need to make our words fit our own rules so that a child can learn the rules and then, if they come across a strange word, they just think of the rule and they know what it is."

Campbell has lobbied New Zealand governments for an inquiry into the place of spelling in the teaching of reading and writing.