What Is Your View On The Way We Spell Our Language?

Ian Hunter – 13/07/01

Can complicated English Spelling be simplified and still understood by users of the dozens of different accents used around the world? A small keen group of Kiwis and others around the English speaking world think it can, by using phonemes, rather than phonetics.

I have long held the view that Traditional English spelling is erratic and much harder to learn than most of its European counterparts. It was Allan Campbell, the passionate New Zealand representative of the Simplified Spelling Society, who persuaded me that spelling by phonemes was the way to go. A phoneme is the set of differnt sounds which perform the same function in a word in different accents. e.g the phoneme ‘a’ in cat has quite different sounds in Christchurch, Glasgow and Memphis but it is happily spelt the same way in each city.

When I first looked at the SSS web-site, and examples of reformed spelling, I was surprised at how easily I could read different systems with virtually no training. Two or three minutes, and I was away.

From here on, Y ryt in NueSpel90, wun ov meni sistems which ar much mor konsistnt than Tradishnl Speling. Paradoksikali, bekoz thaer ar meni such sistems, it iz difikult to reech agreement on which wood be the moest sootabl standrd.

For a literat adult, the ferst reakshn to simplifyd speling iz that itz spelt rong, and thaer iz an oevrwhelming erj to get a red pen and korekt it.

New Zealand’s indijenus Maori langwj woz spelt faerli konsistentli by Cambridge professor Samuel Lee in 1820, and wood best be treetd az a difrent langwj, such az Spanish or Japanese, and not transkrybd uezing English rools.

If yoo wood lyk to noe mor, kontakt Allan Campbell at a-h-campbell@clear.net.nz or http://www.les.aston.ac.uk/sss/

Ian Hunter Telephone 03 332 2521 ihunter@cyberXpress.co.nz