Making English Spelling EZer

A movement to simplify English spelling has been going on for more than two centuries, but nothing major has ever come of it.

“Reform efforts have all failed--partly because English spelling works so well, even though it’s confounding,” says Ronald Macaulay, a Pitzer College professor of linguistics. “Its strength is that it’s written the same--irregularities and all--all over the English speaking world.” Thus, East-end Cockney can communicate with South African colonial, Texas oil baron or Hong Kong jogger, all of whom may pronounce the same word in different ways.

Spelling reformists--whose ranks have included Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster, George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Darwin, Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain--call written English everything from “a flawed tool” to “the world’s most awesome mess.”

It should be simplified, they argue, not only for sanity’s sake, but for the sake of general literacy among the English-speaking masses.

“From a sociological point of view, one could argue that the educated class has a stake in not backing spelling reform--to keep the illiterate classes illiterate,” says Charles Kleber, president of the Detroit-based Better Education Thru Simplified Spelling.

Kleber and other reformists argue that a more logical, more phonetically sound English spelling system (for example, hav , thru and tho ) would increase literacy and, eventually, reduce school dropout rates, recidivism, unemployment and crime. Says Kleber: “The implications are almost unimaginable.”