From Brian White
Valerie Yule would like to see English spelling modified, as has happened
with other major languages
(13 October, p 56).
The chief problem is that English
is now the language of many countries. When Russian orthography was modified
after 1917, or Norwegian was updated, or Turkey adopted roman script, all that
was needed was a single government decision. For English, a global conference
would be necessary.
Moreover, English pronunciation varies widely, so that uniformly phonetic
spelling would be impossible. For example, the “a” of “grass”, “pass” and many
other words can be pronounced in two different ways. To add to the confusion,
two different words can sound the same, for example, Americans pronounce “ant”
and “aunt” alike.
Most striking of all, Americans tend to lack one phoneme entirely, so that
“arks” and “ox” share an identical vowel. In the Judy Garland musical, “a couple
of fa la las” rhymes with “the wonderful land of Oz”.
Coincidentally, it was in Australia that a serious attempt was made to modify
English spelling. The plan was to introduce reforms gradually, and spelling
reform number 1, known as SR1, advocated using just “e” whenever a short “e”
sound occurred, as in bred or sed. For some years the Australian Ministry of
Helth was thus spelt. Perhaps someone could update us on what happened to this
commendable initiative.
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