if you’ve ever been taught how English orthography works, then you’re fully aware that it isn’t
a very well designed system.
colonel.
ginkgo. one.
you know all the common examples.
it’s pretty much mandatory for me to bring this one up: did you know you can spell “fish”
and it would be consistent with English spelling?
I mean, you can’t.
that’s definitely not how English spelling works.
and are only /f/ and /ʃ/ in specific contexts.
you could however spell “fish” and that would be consistent with English
spelling.
oh, and if you’re okay with ignoring context, we can all agree that “the in nation”
is absolutely too tame, right? might I suggest “the in fuchsia” instead?
despite everything, I don’t think it’s fair to claim that English spelling is “broken”,
or even that it’s unusually irregular.
could it be better? yes, absolutely, but for the most part you can pretty easily derive
pronunciation from spelling.
and sure, you absolutely would not be able to guess from pronunciation alone that, say,
/flɛm/ is spelled , but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad spelling.
you could probably guess that the is silent, because in English whenever the spelling implies
a consonant cluster that isn’t allowed phonotactically, normally the first consonant is dropped.
and keeping the silent in the word helps show the connection to phlegmatic.
so English orthography isn’t perfect, but it’s definitely good enough.
that hasn’t stopped a whole lot of people from trying to fix it anyway.
I’m jan Misali, and most English spelling reforms are bad.
most english spelling reforms are bad
part wun: wut a speling riform is
let’s make sure we’re all on the same page.
what exactly do I mean by “spelling reform”?
a spelling reform is a proposed change to or complete replacement for the spelling rules
of a language’s orthography; in this case, English.
due to the perceived problems with English spelling as it currently exists, there have
been a lot of ideas for how to fix it.
I classify English spelling reforms into three main groups.
the first group consists of complete aesthetic overhauls to English spelling.
this includes fully new alphabets made for English, or any system for writing English
with the Latin alphabet that doesn’t take how the Latin alphabet is normally used, in
English or otherwise, into consideration.
these reforms don’t burden themselves with needing to consider people’s expectations
of what written English “should” look like. and as a result, they tend to be very
functional, making it very easy to derive spelling from pronunciation and vice versa.
these would also be the most difficult to actually implement as a theoretical replacement
for English spelling.
nobody wants to learn a new alphabet, or unlearn everything they know about the alphabet they’re
already using.
the second type of English spelling reform is the dual of the first, preserving most
of the current English orthography, only respelling individual words that are deemed too irregular,
or groups of words that are all irregular in the same way.
these are the least effective type of spelling reform in terms of practicality, putting a
bandaid on the problems with English orthography without really changing how it works underlyingly,
and inversely are the most effective in terms of actually being implemented.
every English spelling reform that has had any amount of success in the history of Modern
English has been in this category, most notably the one made by Noah Webster.
while not all of Webster’s ideas caught on, the ones that did became the distinct
features of American English spelling we know today.
the third type of spelling reform is those that are somewhere between the first two.
these are spelling reforms that rebuild English orthography from the ground up, but in a way
that’s meant to be intuitive to those who are familiar with the current system.
if done well, one of these reforms could have the best properties of both of the first two
types, being fully regular without requiring English speakers to relearn everything.
if done poorly, one of these reforms could have the worst properties of the first two
types, being completely incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with its rules while inheriting
many of the inconsistencies from the current orthography.
these spelling reforms are the most interesting type, and the most fun to make. as a result,
there are a lot of them.
English speaking conlangers especially tend to enjoy making them, often with secondary
goals like ASCII compatibility or maximizing how many words are spelled the same in the
new system.
part tu: wêr môst speling riforms go rong
there are a few specific common mistakes that I see a lot looking at different spelling
reforms.
one that’s embarrassingly common is where a spelling reform is presented as though it
actually has a chance of becoming the new default way of writing English.
maybe this was possible to achieve a few centuries ago, but it’s definitely impossible now.
even the reforms that acknowledge that fully replacing English spelling with a new system
made by someone on the internet would be completely impossible almost always have some portion
of their description spent going over the potential benefits of making the switch, as
though people are actually going to do that.
and like, I get why they all do this.
it’s so they can justify having made their spelling reform.
even though the actual reason is usually because making an English spelling reform is just
a fun design challenge.
it’s really fun to look at English spelling and say to yourself, “yeah, I could do better”,
and then have a go at actually trying to do better.
this usually is entirely a problem with presentation, but there are some reforms that genuinely
were created with the intention of replacing English spelling, and if that’s not what
you actually want, then you should be completely clear about that.
and of course if that is what you actually want, then you’re setting yourself up for
failure because again it’s an impossible goal.
another issue concerns how the multitude of English dialects are handled.
English is spoken by a lot of people in a lot of different ways, and a truly phonetic
writing system for English would have to take all of those different ways into account.
this leads to one of two situations, neither of which is ideal.
option one is having the new standard spellings of words take into account the different ways
those words can be pronounced.
this effectively leads to requiring everyone to memorize how every word is spelled individually,
which is exactly how English spelling already works.
so this option isn’t very helpful.
option two is allowing words to be spelled in multiple ways, reflecting their multiple
pronunciations. this is better, but it means that every dialect of English has its own
separate written form, fragmenting the written language.
you could also just not bother, and enforce one specific dialect of English as the standard,
which is unambiguously worse than either option.
so no matter what you do this is going to cause some problems.
outside of these nearly universal fundamental structural problems, there’s a few specific
design choices I see a lot that I just don’t like personally.
a lot of spelling reforms try to be compatible with the ASCII character set.
this is a reasonable thing to want, but it’s completely impossible for an English spelling
reform to be fully phonetic in a way that looks good while also being ASCII compatible.
you can make an ASCII compatible system that looks good, and you can make an ASCII compatible
system that’s fully phonetic, but you can’t have all three.
now, what I actually mean by a spelling reform “looking good” is obviously going to be
different from what other people think looks good.
so like, this looks better to me than this, which looks better to me than this.
each of these ways of spelling the same word has its own unique aesthetic.
none of them look very much like English, but my preference is definitely towards the
ones that look more “languagey” in general.
one little thing that definitely ends up being super important is the way the schwa vowel
is written.
the reduced /ə/ is the most common vowel in English, so it’s important to get it
right, and most reforms that use the Latin alphabet do not get it right.
a large number of English speakers merge schwa with the STRUT lexical set, myself included.
now, the STRUT lexical set is usually written in English with the letter , so it makes
sense to write it that way in a spelling reform.
however, if you use to write schwa, the results look absolutely terrible.
the dilemma is that things that work for STRUT don’t work for schwa, and vice versa, so
if you’re set on writing them the same way, one of them has to be written unintuitively.
the solution, of course, is to not write them the same way.
schwa only appears in unstressed syllables, and the STRUT vowel only appears in stressed
syllables, so it’s not that difficult to tell them apart, even if you pronounce them
the same way.
on the topic of vowels, English’s long vowels tend to be handled pretty inelegantly in spelling
reforms.
there’s this temptation to try to preserve the relationships between the vowels that
were long/short pairs in Middle English, like the FLEECE vowel being the “long” version
of the DRESS vowel.
as we all know, the Great Vowel Shift made it so that these historic pairs no longer
sound very much like each other.
it makes more sense in Modern English to consider the FLEECE vowel to be the long version of
the KIT vowel instead, for example.
preserving these archaic pairs does have its advantages, namely that it allows some words
to be spelled more closely to their current standard spelling.
the problem comes when someone decides that a Middle-Englishy way of spelling a vowel
should be the only way to spell it.
invariably, words that are currently spelled in ways that make sense with Modern English
vowels always look worse when respelled according to imaginary Middle English pronunciation
than words spelled in ways that make sense with Middle English vowels do when respelled
according to Modern English pronunciation.
“tofu” with double looks worse than “soon” with double .
“kiwi” with double looks worse than “green” with double .
“café” with looks worse than “pay” with .
any of the myriad of potential issues that come from using the Latin alphabet in a spelling
reform can be completely sidestepped by creating a fully new writing system instead, a solution
that works so well that it’s basically cheating.
a spelling system can’t be unintuitive if nobody learning it has any intuitions for
it.
now the question is, what would I do?
part thri: the Fun Riform
I have made a lot of spelling reforms.
or at least, I’ve started and abandoned a lot of spelling reforms.
the ones I’ve actually published I largely created as jokes, like the etymological spelling
reform I made that was briefly mentioned on the Lingthusiasm podcast that one time.
the other spelling reforms I’ve worked on I either decided partway through designing
them that I didn’t like them, or decided shortly after completing them that I didn’t
like them.
in fact, it’s my own experience with creating so many spelling reforms that allowed me to
better understand how I feel about what works and does not work.
earlier this year, I created my first spelling reform that I am actually satisfied with.
it’s called the Fun Riform.
my goals are for it to be a fully defined Latin script orthography for English that’s
possible to comprehensively describe on one screen of plain text, to be intuitive enough
that an English speaker who doesn’t already know how it works can still read text written
in it, versatile enough to be able to handle any dialect of English, aesthetically pleasing
to me personally, and fun to use.
so, how did I do?
well, what you’re looking at now is a full description of the Fun Riform and how it works.
I won’t go over everything here, but there’s a link in the description to my full definition
of the reform on seximal.net.
so that’s the first two goals achieved.
as for how intuitive it is, here’s The North Wind and the Sun.
I’ll let you be the judge for how easy this is to read.
it’s worth noting that since one of the goals is versatility, there’s a practically
unlimited number of ways that this text could have been transcribed into the Fun Riform.
and, yes, I do think that this looks pretty good, and that I have fun using it.
so the Fun Riform achieves everything it set out to achieve.
great!
but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect, just that it does what I wanted it to do. and there’s
some things that the Fun Riform does that I know other people wouldn’t like.
some parts of it are intentionally ambiguous, like how is used for both dental fricatives,
and how could either be one or two sounds.
there’s also rules that serve no practical purpose that are only there to make things
look nicer, like how any word that ends with a voiced fricative has a silent inserted
after it.
the Fun Riform also has a built in lack of standardization.
one of the most important rules is that if a word looks wrong to you, then it is wrong,
and you should spell it differently.
this means that in theory every single person using the Fun Riform could be using it completely
differently from everybody else.
other people might look at these aspects of the Fun Riform and conclude that it’s a
bad spelling reform, and I think I’m okay with that, because to me they’re key features
of what I wanted the Fun Riform to be like.
I mean, it’s right in the name, this is a spelling reform that I just made for fun,
so I don’t have to worry about if other people like it as long as I’m happy with
it. and I am!
part for: The Perfekt Speling Riform [Epik]
to be completely honest, the actual ideal spelling reform for English wouldn’t look
much like the Fun Riform. if the goal is to actually replace English spelling, then the
perfect spelling reform wouldn’t even be something that looks like a reform at all.
the perfect spelling reform for English would be for English speakers globally to agree
that it’s okay to misspell things.
there isn’t an organization regulating the English language.
nobody is in charge of how it works, it’s completely up to the speakers.
the only thing getting in the way of English spelling becoming more regular is the idea
that any given word has one “correct” spelling.
if every English speaker decided to stop correcting each other’s spelling mistakes and to disable
autocorrect and spellcheck, all irregularities in English spelling would disappear within
a single generation.
if you consistently can’t remember how to spell a word, it’s not your fault, it’s
that word’s fault.
and you as an English speaker have the power to change it.
almost nobody spells “hiccup” with anymore.
“miniscule” with an is replacing “minuscule” with a , and more recently “thru” and
“tho” have gained alternate spellings that indisputably make more sense than their
standard spellings.
so English really doesn’t need a spelling reform to fix the irregularities in its orthography.
if you want English spelling to be better, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from
making it better yourself.
thanks for watching.
I’ve been jan Misali, and “amature” is spelled with .