I’m late on this story, but I’m going with it anyway, just because as an American-Australian I think it’s nice to remember that anglophones aren’t the only ones with transnational spelling issues.
This time it’s lusophones. That is, speakers of Portuguese.
Brazilians start 2009 facing the task of learning new spelling rules that have just come into effect.
The spelling reforms have been agreed by Portuguese-speaking nations, but the language seems set to have different written forms for some time to come.
In Portugal, there has been fierce resistance in some quarters to the changes because many of the changes are to spell words the Brazilian way.
Isn’t that always the way? The European colonisers get alarmed by these American upstarts taking over the language.
Any language with an alphabetic writing system will eventually have this kind of trouble because every language undergoes sound change, making old spellings archaic. And when dialects of a language diverge, there are bound to be struggles over whose dialect gets represented in the writing system.
So what are the changes?
- Silent consonants are getting dropped, like the silent ‘c’ in ‘actualmente’ (actually) or the ‘p’ in ‘optimo’ (great). A tip: if you’re a Portuguese consonant, don’t hang out before ‘t’. There’s no future in it.
- Some accent marks are being discontinued — diphthongs ‘éi’ and ‘ói’ will lose their accents
- Letters k, y, and w are being officially added, though they’ve been in use unofficially.
As a linguist, I usually think of language change as slow, like two tectonic plates sliding past each other. And usually it is. But, as with land masses, when the language gets locked into place in the form of writing, we can expect periodic earthquakes. This is one of those cases.
UPDATE: If you’re curious about this issue, here’s a nutty little article about it, written in ‘Simplified Spelling’ English. It’s cute. You can imagine yourself as a citizen of Parallel England, or you can imagine that you’re hanging out with Simplified English advocates like George Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain. And here’s a challenge — try reading it aloud without unconsciously affecting a dopey overbite accent, like Cousin Floyd from the country. It’s harder than you’d think.
13 January 2009 at 12:07 am
Spelling changes of course ar changes to an artificial creation, and so can be mor of a ‘periodic earthquake’ than changes to the language itself, which ar natural.
For the sake of literacy learning, English is sadly in need of such an earthquake, and we would do well to encourage it.
Too many English speakers (20% plus, worldwide) ar functionally illiterate. English-speaking children take, on average, two to three years longer to learn reading and riting than do most children speaking other European languages.
We need to be seeking a spelling upgrade to facilitate literacy learning.
14 January 2009 at 7:55 am
/gʊd lʌk wɪθ ðæt/
15 January 2009 at 12:44 am
Daniel: We need mor than good luck. We need activ peeple like yourself to see the need and start doing sumthing about it!
15 January 2009 at 8:33 am
Allanstr – it’s a nice dream but let’s take your example – dropping the ‘e’ off the end of words. You wouldn’t be abl to do it in every instanc becaus – oh dear look that ‘c’ has just becom hard so we’ll now hav to chang the whol word to instans. except that now rhymes with pans – oh goodness whats a chang (rhymes with rang)? I guess that would hav to be chanj but how would I know that the ‘a’ sound is flat? So you’d have to creat at rul which says that you only hav and ‘e’ at the end when it’s needed to indicat the pronounciation. Oh, but isn’t that case already. I suspect that’s why American English has only been able to simplify a few rules such as color/colour.
And what’s a ‘sumthing’ is a thing which is added up?
🙂
The thing is that people think that English hasn’t got spelling rules or that they are illogical. Actually the rules are pretty sound – they’re just complicated, but they do work.
The difference between English and many other languages is that English is made up of different linguistic roots so it’s a conglomeration/mixture/blend/fusion. It’s what makes English unwieldly but also what makes it a fantastic language for expressing ideas, literature, poetry.
And interestingly, although it’s hard to learn to spell, it’s not hard to work out what someone’s trying to write even if it’s spelled incorektly because we’re used to dealing with different spelling rules.
the solution isn’t to simplify spelling rools, it’s to get children excited about their language heritage early on.
15 January 2009 at 8:49 am
Is there some way we can help illiterate people that doesn’t involve impersonating them?
15 January 2009 at 11:02 pm
Was I being offensive? I didn’t intend to be. I assumed, perhaps incorrectly that Allanstr was deliberately dropping ‘e’s in order to illustrate a point.
I think there is a big difference between being a bad speller and being illiterate. My point was actually that being a bad speller is not a huge problem in English because on the whole one can still work out what the writer is saying. Spanish is great for learning spelling – but what happens to dyslexic kids there?
16 January 2009 at 2:24 am
Snowqueen: U may hav noticed i did not drop ‘e’ indiscriminatly. I was using DUE process (Drop Useless E)!
In words such as ‘are’, ‘have’, ‘gone’, etc the ‘e’ does nothing except take up space and confuse youngsters learning to read.
I could not at present omit it from ‘change’ in which it performs two functions: It lengthens the ‘a’, and softens the ‘g’. Eventually it may not be needed for the latter function, ‘g’ being replaced by ‘j’.
U also comment: ‘… the rules are pretty sound – they’re just complicated, but they do work’. I could agree with this if u changed ‘do’ to ‘should’. The rules ar relativly good, but they hav so many exceptions they ar virtually useless.
When they ar applied fully, our spelling will be much mor regular, and wil not, as at present, be a handicap to literacy learning.
16 January 2009 at 3:17 am
Snowqueen’ No, I thought your explanation was great. I was referring to the way I had to reread Allanstr’s writing to see if he was misspelling, or just following a pattern. I’m sure simplified spelling advocates must get mistaken for bad spellers all the time.
Anyway, you won’t find me adopting it. Utopian movements are so 19th century.
17 January 2009 at 10:51 am
Allanstr, by practising DUE you are simply adding another rule, not simplifying anything.
You say that the rules are virtually useless – I disagree. I have a dyslexic child and the main reason she found it hard to learn to read and write was because of the stupid fad for teaching early literacy with basic phonetics ‘ah’ ‘beh’ ‘k’ etc. which is utterly pointless with English (brilliant for Spanish where every letter is always pronounced the same way). So when faced with words such as ‘right’ my poor daughter was totally confused and promptly gave up.
when she was 8 and still could hardly read and write and the school were uninterested in my concerns I took her to a specialist teacher who did two things; taught her the spelling rules of English and taught her synthetic phonics. In 3 months she could read and write fine with a few acceptable spelling mistakes. She asked me why the school hadn’t taught her the spelling rules earlier. ‘Because they think children are too dumb to learn them’ is the correct response but I chose to keep it to myself.
I have a huge extended Arab family who all somehow managed to learn to read and write perfect English – clearly Arabs are much cleverer than English speakers because they can learn those impossible rules when it’s not even their own language. 😉
17 January 2009 at 9:30 pm
Snowqueen: On the contrary, by following DUE process i am following an existing rule, not adding another. At school we wer told that ‘magic’ or silent ‘e’ lengthened the preceding vowel; eg hop (short ‘o’) became hope (long ‘o’) when ‘e’ was added. Similarly mat/mate, bit/bite, cut/cute. Also save, brave, gave, pave all had long ‘a’s, so what about have?
I and many others overcame these ‘exceptions’ (absurdities could be another word to use!) but it gave problems (and still does) to others. 20 percent of us, in fact.
They become functionally illiterat. Maybe okay in the days of laboring work, but in an IT age?
I agree with u about the teaching of rules, even tho they hav so many exceptions. Your experience of Spanish is the kind of experience all English speakers should hav with English!
Arabs ar not necessarily cleverer than English speakers. Learners of foreign languages tend to concentrate mor on rules and structure. A professor of German at an English university told me that his English students wer better spellers of German than of their own language.
Finally, if our spelling is so well structured, why do we hav to memorize spellings rather than reason them?
Here is the reply of Evan O’Dorney to an interviewer, immediatly after he had won the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee final in Washington, DC, when asked about his three competencies:
‘My favorit things to do wer math and music, and with math i really like the way the numbers fit together. And with the music i like to let out ideas by composing notes – and the spelling is just a bunch of memorization.’
18 January 2009 at 7:38 pm
Snow Queen:”Spanish is great for learning spelling – but what happens to dyslexic kids there?” Dyslexia is diagnosed about 5 times less in Spain and in the other countries that have transparent orthographies. There are still dyslexics, however it appears not to be such a handicap in the business of learning to read.
Daniel wrote: “Utopian movements are so 19th century.” So true, but the German speakers, Hungarians, the Maltese and now the Portuguese, have had reforms to some of their spellings all in the past 5 years. English is highly irregular and so not user-friendly; repairs to it are not going to bear fruit [in terms of literacy levels] immediately.
English is a “fantastic language for expressing ideas, literature, poetry”; that would be true whatever code or spelling standard you use. But first you have to learn to read and 20% fail to do that.
19 January 2009 at 12:11 am
I don’t think English will be ready to undergo any spelling changes until another hundred years of sound change. Just because it would involve some conversion of existing literature, and that would have a cost. And the system sort of works: the sound to letter correspondence in English isn’t great, but it isn’t tragic.
19 January 2009 at 1:37 am
Daniel: ‘The sound to letter correspondence in English isn’t great, but it isn’t tragic.’
Isnt tragic??? Daniel, where do u liv; in an ivory tower?
What do u think it means to that 20percent-plus who never learned to read and write at primary school because they continually failed to cope with irregular spelling?
Giv them a chance, and a bit of empathy!
19 January 2009 at 4:51 am
(I really can’t get used to the simplified spelling.)
Look, Allanstr, there are two possible scenarios here.
1) Everyone adapts to make the system easier for a user.
2) The user has to adapt to the system.
Given that the system isn’t under any one person’s conscious control, and the mind of the user is, which scenario do you think is going to be more likely? One guess.
The burden, unfair as it is, is going to be on the user to learn the system. I think you’d have much higher ROI if you tried teaching the spelling rules of English, such as they are, rather than convince everyone to modify the entire system. Your approach has failed consistently for a hundred years.
I don’t mind the idea, but on a practical level, it’ll have to wait until the sound/spelling divergence gets a whole lot more (um) pronounced.
Oh, and just for accuracy, the NCES has functional illiteracy at 14%. Which is still high.
19 January 2009 at 9:57 pm
It is tragic Daniel, however you define it. We have 20+% of 11 year-olds failing their literacy milestones & a similar percentage of the work force having the reading age of 13 year-olds. When you add the illiterates to the semi-illiterates you get the larger number.
While a massive overhaul of the orthography is unlikely [but you never know, some changes are not easy to predict] it is, though, still worth making some changes. For instance the UK could adopt more US spellings [shades of Brazil & Portugal]; get rid of the practise/practice anomaly; re-spell many of the words with silent b's in them – numb, comb, bomb etc. We could usefully lose many of the silent k's too [knot, knife, knee] without any loss of cultural richness. These would be some of the things high on my wish list.
Programme is now often spelt without the terminal -me. Musick, physick, comick and shew [for show] are all 19th century spellings that we hav changed in the 20th.
English had already undergone a simplification to its grammar system – mostly through 'natural processes' [non-political] – but hardly to its spellings system. Allowing change to happen in the direction of greater rule-orderliness would help the many people like me who struggled at school & university.
20 January 2009 at 1:32 am
Daniel: I agree with your scenarios. And English being English its unlikely that a top-down change will be easy. Tho the recent changes to decimal currency in Britain, Oz and NZ, driven by business and legislated by governments, wer not too difficult. Most of us hav got used to them, and ar glad they occurred.
In my response to Snowqueen i pointed out that my small spelling changes here wer in line with spelling ‘rules’. Rather than relying on teaching the rules (and their exceptions) to improve literacy it would be better to seek their universal application. We can all be part of a bottom-up campaign to achieve this by following the rules mor religiously!
It is regularity in spelling that is needed, not necessarily a new fonemic system, which would not suit all varieties of English.
The literacy angle is probably the only valid reason to seek change, always disruptiv for some.
I had yesterday red about the 14% illiteracy rate, which is an improvement on the generally recorded 20% plus across English-speaking nations, but, as u say, it is still high. It needs to be lowered to Scandinavian levels.