In Defense of Spelling

Confession: I never quite know how to react when complimented, and I always walk away afraid that I come off as arrogant instead of embarrassed.

Reading:

• "Riding the Doghouse" by Randy DeVita
  
• The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
  

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Catches a Cold"
  

Revising:

• "The Revenant"

Future Projects:

• Dairhenien's Library - Development
  
• Floorcraft - First rewrite of 1-5, first draft of 6-8
• Ferian Fetlock - "Ferian Fetlock Takes a Wife."
  
• "Motley" - Expansion
• "Fireworks and Earthworks" - 5% into first draft
  
• Untitled School Mistress Story

Unpublished Stories/Status (in chronological order of completion of first draft)

• "Pictures of the Old Port" - 5th Draft, Unsubmitted
• "What Price Stamps" - 3rd Draft, Submitted to The American Drivel Review, July 30th, 2008
  
• "The Frost Fugling" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Black Pudding" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Cora and the Sea" - 3rd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Motley" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Leaves and Sunsets" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "A Happy Ending" - 1st Draft, Unsubmitted
• "The Revenant" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
  
• "Illuminated" - 3rd Draft, Unsubmitted
  
• "A Cup of Coffee" / "Morning Tea" - 2nd Draft, Submitted to Tea: A Magazine, July 29th, 2008
• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Hattie Donnelly's Favorite Doll" - 2nd Draft, Submitted to 24 Hour Short Story Contest, July 27th, 2008

Just yesterday, an article came on on Reuters UK claiming that the authorities of the English language should bow down to pressure and accepted alternate spellings. For example, "thier" instead of "their," "arguement" instead of "argument," and (shudder) "opertunity" instead of "opportunity."

No, no, no, a thousand times no! I agree that many people can't spell correctly, but that's no reason to legitimize bad spelling, no more so that we can reduce crime by making it legal. I think it's a sign that we need better and more effective language education.

Now, I did a grad program in Linguistics, and although I didn't walk away with a degree, I did pay attention in class. I understand that languages change, and that that's okay. If a language doesn't change, it dies.

Here's an example. I was interested a while back in learning some of Tolkien's invented languages, specifically Sindarin. (Okay, I'd still like to.) But one of the difficulties in using such a language is how poorly it can describe the modern world. There is no Sindarin word for airplane or internet. But there's lots of different words for types of trees and other natural phenomena.

In general, a language adapts, or is adapted by its speakers, to fit the purposes to which its speakers put it. This is done in a "natural" way when a language speaker encounters something new and creates a name for it. Other speakers do the same, and the one or two that catch on become the word for the thing. This happens so constantly around us that we don't even realize it.

And the reason is because the quest to have a name for everything is innate to our childhood language acquisition. How many times have you seen a parent pointing to something and saying, "What's this?" The child then has the chance to burble out the nouns they've learned and maybe, just maybe, earn their morning juice. In general, more first language instruction is given in nouns than in anything else, because those words are the handles we use to interact with our world. "Name a thing," the saying goes, "and you have power over it."

So later on in life, when we encounter a new thing, our instict is to give a label to it. And we accept that name as genuine, even if it's an invention, because all things have to have names for us to effectively thing about them.

Invented languages and dead languages have two features in commons--few or no speakers, and a sense of the need for preservation in a certain state. If Sindarin were a real language, it wouldn't take long before it had progressed far beyond the state at which Tolkien left it. Theoretical "native" Sindarin speakers 100 years from now might not be able to understand Tolkien's Sindarin, or it might sound hopelessly antiquated. Because that's what language does when it's used by people--it changes.

Now you might be thinking that I'm arguing against my own point. If language is meant to change, you might say, why shouldn't we update our spelling? Aren't we killing our language by freezing its spelling?

On the contrary, I think we're strengthening it. Because our spelling has been mostly regularized over the last 400 years or so, we can still read the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Now, try cracking open The Canterbury Tales for a bit of Middle English light reading:

Whan that April with his shoures sote
The droughte of March hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veine in swiche licour,
Of whiche vertue engendred is the flour ;
Whan Zephirus eke with his sote brethe
Enspired hath in every holt and hethe
The tendre croppes, and the yonge soune
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yroun

And so on and so forth. Sure, you can make out the meaning, especially if someone tells you how the spelling has changed---that "rote" means "root" and "swiche" means "such," etc. But the general effect is difficult to comprehend through the haze of the different spelling.

Now try Beowulf on for size:

Hwæt. We Gardena in gear-dagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Exactly. That's Old English, my friends. Weep for the loss of our original tongue.

Now you might be thinking, but that's from 1,000 years ago! Of course the language has changed since then. How does spelling affect anything? Why don't I just modernize the spelling in that passage?

What. We Gardena, in year-days
theod-kings, thrim gefrunon
how the Aethelings ellen fremedon.

Now I'm not saying that's easily comprehensible, but it's better, and all you have to know is that "thrim gefrunon" means "heard of the glory" and "ellen fremedon" means "did might deeds" to get some sort of meaning from it: "We Gardena have heard of the glory of the theod-kings, how the Aethelings did mighty deeds."

There's one more point to make on this subject--Icelandic. Written Icelandic has pretty much not changed since the 13th century. So modern readers of Icelandic can still read the old ancient sagas, with just a little bit of training in obsolete vocabulary.

But you don't have to go back to the 1200s to have a reason to keep spelling as it is. Readers of a language don't care about the sound correspondence between words and sounds! For that matter, not all languages even have a sound correspondence--Chinese, for example. It's learners of a language who care about those things. Of course it would be easier to acquire a language with a simple spelling correspondence. But easier is not aways better.

If we change our spelling with the times, we are dooming the past to be a foreign language to future generations. Think of the body of literature that would have to be "translated"--or that, even more sadly, would never be translated. We would be cutting off a huge chunk of our history in return for expedience, and that would be a crime beyond imagining.

Publication Status:

• Submitted: 5
  
• Accepted: 1
• Rejected: 1
• Pending: 3