KEY POINTS:
ENUF is enuf, but enough is too much.
Riding a penny farthing bicycle can be a lot of fun - for about five minutes, if you are reasonably agile and have not tried one before. But to actually go somewhere, a modern bike is safer, lighter, easier to
use and will get you there a lot faster.
Just as the bicycle is a tool for moving from A to B, so our written language is a tool for communicating. Unfortunately, because the complexity of English spelling makes it difficult to master and unnecessarily cumbersome to use, we are still stuck back in the penny farthing era, or even earlier.
True, as John Sutherland said last week, if we change the spelling we will lose some links to the past. But, for such an important tool, usability surely needs to outweigh preserving historical connections.
After all, we don't still light our homes with gas lamps or pay our bills in pounds, shillings and pence.
The root of the problem is that some time after the first dictionaries appeared in the early 1600s, English spelling started to get stuck. Countless school teachers drummed into their students the importance of spelling correctly. If you couldn't spell that way, you were considered uneducated.
As a consequence, the many foreign words that our language is constantly absorbing became slow to lose their original spellings, even when these were no longer appropriate; and other spellings also ceased to adapt when pronunciation changed.
There is a serious penalty for all this. Compared to children whose languages have reasonably phonetic writing systems, English-speaking children take years longer to achieve the same level of reading.
They also tend to suffer a higher occurrence of dyslexia and other reading-related problems.
Studies have shown that even most well-educated people can't consistently spell English correctly. Common words like supersede and accommodate tend to trip them up, not to mention the real nasties like diarrhoea.
Finnish people, whose writing system is almost perfectly phonetic, find it hard to relate to questions like, can you spell such and such a word? It's a bit like asking a person serving in a bar whether they know how to pour a glass of whisky when the whisky bottle is sitting clearly labelled in the drink rack just behind them.
But the problem is that when it comes to English spelling, what comes out of the whisky bottle may or may not be whisky, depending on the context. Or you may have to get the whisky out of the schnapps bottle, or from a combination of bottles, drawing from each in the right order.
For example, we all understand that the letter E makes a short "e" sound in words like men, and a long "e" sound in words like tree. But it also makes other sounds as in grey. And the long "e" sound can be made as well by the letter i, as in magazine, and in a whole variety of other ways, from common ones like meat and delete, through to the more esoteric like encyclopaedia and phoenix.
But the prize for unnecessary length and complexity should perhaps go to the "ough" group whose various pronunciations are captured in the anonymous ditty:
Though the rough cough
And hiccough plough me through,
Through life's dark slough
My way I will pursue.
Well, I guess we have made some progress since this was penned, perhaps a hundred years ago, because we generally now use the spelling hiccup.
If you are reading this, you have probably invested years of time into learning to spell, and may therefore feel a vested interest in leaving things as they are. But out of consideration for our children, for those amongst us who never achieve proper written literacy and for people learning English as a second language, I believe we need to take the shackles off and give our language a chance to change.
Collectively, we have this control because in the end the only arbiter of what is correct is common usage. I suggest we start by accepting, and even embracing, spellings that are simple and obvious, such as luv, thru, and lite, along with other simplifications where the meaning is totally clear.
Basically, current English spelling is a minefield. If we want our language to remain the lingua franca of the world then we need to address this. In short, enuf is enuf, but enough is too much.
* Peter Whitmore is an Auckland publisher and member of the Simplified Spelling Society.
