34. Spelling (part-6)

Even so, there is still, on the face of it, a strong case for spelling reform. Anyone

who has tried to explain to an eight-year-old, or even a teenager, the difference

between wring and ring or between meet, meat, and mete, or why we spell

hinder with an e but hindrance without, or why proceed has a double e but

procedure doesn't, or why we spell enough, biscuit, and pneumonia in the very

peculiar ways that we do will very probably appreciate that.

But calls for spelling reform inevitably overlook certain intractable problems.

One is that the old spellings are well established—so well established that most

of us don't notice that words like bread, thought, and once are decidedly

unphonetic. Attempts to simplify and regularize English spelling almost always

hav a sumwut strinj and ineskapubly arbitrary hak abowt them, and ov cors they

kawz most reederz to stumbl. There is a great deal to be said for the familiarity

of our spellings, even if they are not always sensible.

What simplified spelling systems gain in terms of consistency they often throw

away in terms of clarity. Eight may be a peculiar way of spelling the number that

follows seven, but it certainly helps to distinguish it from the past tense of eat.

Similarly, the syllable seed can be spelled a variety of ways in English— seed,

secede, proceed, supersede—but if in our quest for consistency we were to fix on

the single spelling of, say, seed, we wouldn't be able to distinguish between

reseed and recede. Fissure would become fisher; sew and sow would be so.

There would be no way to distinguish between seas and seize, flees and fleas,

aloud and allowed, chance and chants, air and heir, wrest and rest, flu, flue, and

flew, weather, whether, and wether, and countless others. Perplexity and

ambiguity would reign (or rain or rein).

And who would decide which pronunciations would be supreme?

Would we write eether or eyther? As we have already seen, pronunciations often

bear even less relation to spellings than we appreciate. In spoken American

English, many millions of people—

perhaps the majority—say medal for metal, hambag for handbag, frunnal for

frontal, tally for totally, forn for foreign, and nookular for nuclear. Shall our

spellings reflect these? The fact is, especially when looked at globally, most of

our spellings cater to a wide variation of pronunciations. If we insisted on strictly

phonetic renderings, girl would be gull in most of America (though perhaps goilin New York), gel in London and Sydney, gull in Ireland, gill in South Africa,

gairull in Scotland. Written communications between nations, and even parts of

nations, would become practically impossible. And that, as we shall see in the

next chapter, is a problem enough already.

Further, and possibly conclusive, evidence of this was shown in 1874 when

Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, an Englishman, invented an outdoor game that

he called sphairistike. It only caught on when his friend Arthur Balfour, the

future prime minister, suggested he call it lawn tennis.