Why is English so Hard to Spell?

I was reading an 18th century novel the other day (the kind that has every chapter ending with the author’s commentary on plot developments as he strives to meet the word count for the latest newspaper instalment) and became increasingly confused about the meaning of a word ‘divers’ that kept occurring in various contexts. At first I took ‘divers’ to be a synonym for ‘charlatan’, as that was the prevailing theme of the novel. Only by the last chapter did it occur to me that it was simply an 18th century spelling of ‘diverse’.

Anyone who learns English as a second language will tell you with great frustration just how difficult it is to read. The verbs, after all, are simpler than in most languages with the subjugation changing only in the 3rd person (‘he sees, she sees’) and the past tense is pretty easy when most of the time you need only add an ‘-ed’, but the spelling is a learner’s nightmare. Try explaining why ‘cough’ and ‘through’ sound so different to a student of English.

Many of the problems come from the roots of English as a language, employing Latin spelling and words of German origin which were once pronounced quite differently. ‘Night’, for instance, comes from the German ‘nacht’ and was said as it looks: nicht.

Whereas there have been movements for simplified spelling for over a century with supporters such as Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain and Bernard Shaw, English and American governments have rejected changes, reckoning that only the dictionaries may be trusted. The reasoning presumably being that Samuel Johnson, Daniel Webster and co took their tomes directly from Mount Sinai.

In the old days, people spelt words as they saw fit. No one runs down Johnathon Swift for spelling ‘good’ as ‘goode’ in Gulliver’s Travels and as for Shakespeare, let’s not even go there.

A senior member of the Society for Simplified Spelling, Alan Mole, declared that some of the problems facing society today can be blamed on the unfair, arbitrary spelling in English today. At a recent protest outside a spelling bee, he complained that some of the more illogical constructions in the English language are more serious than we imagine.

‘This increases illiteracy and crime. Fix it and you fix a host of problems. We want to fix it.’

The picket must have been an amusing spectacle with high school students from across the US competing to spell words like ‘conscientious’, whilst angry protesters held up signs like ‘enuf is enuf. Enough is too much’ and ‘we’re thru with through’.

I can hear them already.

Wot do wee wont? Simplifyd spelling! Wen do wee wont it? Nahw.

In the old days, people spelt words as they saw fit. Ultimately, language belongs to the people who use it, not to school teachers, compilers of dictionaries or even Microsoft Word spell check. Declaring that someone’s interpretation of how to write down a word they use every day is wrong, is on the same plain as illegalising certain kinds of hairstyles or tastes in music. It’s not up to anyone to decide matters of taste or interpretation for others.

Few academics would agree, of course but then I imagine few of them use SMS on a regular basis. Sheer laziness has produced some of the more recent innovations in language ahead of academic reforms as ‘pls’, ‘ur’ and ‘gr8’ enter standard communication between anyone who owns a cell phone. And that’s not even going into ‘lol’, ‘btw’ and Smiley emoticons.

Of course, the whole issue might eventually become moot once computers get the hang of voice recognition in any meaningful way. Berkeley professor and futurist, William Crossman sees this as a positive thing and predicts the end of a reading and writing society by 2050. The result? Better access to the world’s storehouses of information, the end of cultural domination based on language and the freedom from a technologically defunct method of transmitting knowledge.

Of course if the computers crash then we’re really fucked.