Spelling Reform - Arguments For Reform

Arguments For Reform

In languages written with alphabetic or syllabary scripts one might expect there to be a close match of the script or spelling with the spoken sound. However, even if they match at one time and place for some speakers, over time they often do not match well for the majority: one sound may be represented by various combinations of letters and one letter or group of letters pronounced in various ways. In cases where spelling takes account of grammatical features these too may become inconsistent.

People who use non-standard spelling often suffer from adverse opinions, as a person's mastery of standard spelling is often equated to his or her level of formal education or intelligence. Spelling is easier in languages with more or less consistent spelling systems such as Finnish, Serbian, Italian and Spanish, than in languages where the pronunciation has moved on since the spelling was fixed, or which use anachronistic or inconsistent spellings, like Irish, English or French.

Spelling reforms have been proposed for various languages over the years; these have ranged from modest attempts to eliminate particular irregularities (such as SR1 or Initial Teaching Alphabet) through more far-reaching reforms (such as Cut Spelling) to attempts to introduce a full phonemic orthography, like the Shavian alphabet or its revised version, Quikscript, the latest DevaGreek alphabet, the Latinization of Turkish or hangul in Korea.

Superfluity of graphemes (letters or characters) is often an issue in spelling reform, which prompts the "Economic Argument"—significant cost savings in the production materials over time—as promulgated by George Bernard Shaw, although in modern times with computer systems changing rapidly and equipped to produce the scripts of a variety of languages this is now a bit far-fetched.

The idea of phonemic spelling has also been criticized as it would hide morphological similarities between words with different pronunciations, and thus obscure their meanings. It is also argued that when people read, they do not in reality try to work out the sequence of sounds composing each word, but instead they recognize words either as a whole, or as a sequence of small number of semantically significant units (for example morphology might be read as morph+ology, rather than as a sequence of a larger number of phonemes). In a system of phonetic spelling, these semantic units become less distinct, as various allomorphs can be pronounced differently in different contexts. For example, in English spelling, most past participles are spelled with an -ed on the end, even though this can have several pronunciations (compare kissed and interrupted).

One of the difficulties in introducing a spelling reform is how to it is reflect different pronunciations, often linked to regions or classes. If the reform attempts to be absolutely phonemic in some model dialect, speakers of other dialects will find conflicts with their own usage.