The Simpul Spelling Moovment

• xayzer
  December 17th, 2007 at 7:02 am

  Nais pis uv informayshon.
  Good thing they decided against it.

• Melissa
  December 17th, 2007 at 7:39 am

  2 bad he didnt stk arnd long enuf 2 c txtng.

• Skipweasel
  December 17th, 2007 at 9:46 am

  Trouble with “standardised” spelling is it take no account of accent. My son says tooth with a long oo, kids in his school mostly say tuth with a short u like put. He says clothes, they say clowers. He says shoes, they say shoowers. How could you standardise that?

• Sid Morrison
  December 17th, 2007 at 12:29 pm

  This was a rage at that time, not only in the US, but also Britain. A bunch of period titles on it are availble free at book.google.com… Enter in (no quotes) [simplified spelling] and you’ll find a bunch.

  Here’s a good one:
  http://books.google.com/books?id=yxlMAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=s implified+spelling

• Patricio
  December 17th, 2007 at 3:09 pm

  This is like old-timey ebonics.

• Corrine
  December 17th, 2007 at 5:21 pm

  {gasp} *MELVIL* Dewey, not “Melvin”. (Librarians everywhere are sobbing). He did to his own name what he was trying to do with words.

• alm
  December 18th, 2007 at 1:10 am

  There is a simplified “spelling” system, and you can see it represented on the IPA chart (http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/chapter1.html). Instead of using letters, each individual sound has its own symbol (some of which happen to be just like the letters we usually assign them to). Instead of having to worry about how to pronounce the different “a” sounds in words like “hat” vs. “cape” vs. “mall”, each of those sounds has its own symbol. It’s also universal, so you could read a word in, say, Chinese, “spelled” using IPA transcription, and you would be able to pronounce it (as opposed to reading something in a language using their symbols and having no clue how to say it out loud). You won’t be able to figure out what it means (it is still a foreign language!), but you can see how it is meant to be pronounced.

• Paavo Ojala
  December 18th, 2007 at 2:20 pm

  I think it would have been a great idea. At least I’m very happy with the phonetic writing system finnish has. It makes learning to read much easier and is one of the reasons why finnish school kids do well in international level.

  carnegie was wrong thinking that it would be especially useful to foreigners because: “The foreigner has the greatest difficulty in acquiring it because of its spelling.”
  spelling is easy for foreigners. we learn words from dictionaries and textbooks. pronouncing the words is difficult tho.

  phonetic alfabets would probably lessen the differences between accents (or dialects) only problem is that which accent would we choose for the phonetical basis of this great simplified spelling.

• Skipweasel
  December 18th, 2007 at 5:50 pm

  Welsh allegedly has phontic spelling, but since the accent differs from North Wales to South Wales - the spelling differs too! Hardly an ideal situation.

• Alex
  December 18th, 2007 at 6:19 pm

  Thanks for the fix, Corrine!

  The idea of simple spellings may have died off, but that doesn’t mean the English language won’t change. The next big change will come from texting and web-speak.

• Rohin
  December 19th, 2007 at 3:44 pm

  I was about to shout at you silly Americans and say “only in the States”, but damn you Sid Morrison, you spoiled my fun.

• sunil kumar
  December 24th, 2007 at 12:31 pm

  as a non english language person, i find english very illogical. i would welcome a more phonetic and logical spellings and pronounciation, hindi language of india is much more, totally logical with no exceptions.

  sunil

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