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The Tangled Story of English Spelling
By Laura Knoy on Tuesday, December 9, 2008.
The American tongue is chock full of inconsistencies and exceptions, like why d-o-u-g-h, r-o-u-g-h and b-o-u-g-h all look the same but sound so different. The author of a new book tells the story of American spelling and those who have tried to reform it, from Noah Webster to Theodore Roosevelt to today’s cyber world.
Guest
- David Wolman, author of Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling
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What does this spell? ghoti
Take 'gh'from laugh
'o'from women
'ti'from nation
and you get "fish"!
Orthographically Reformed English (OR-E)
OR-E (pronounced "or-E" ) is a spelling system for English. It uses an alphabetic character set based on the International Phonetic Alphabet. There are 5 easy rules for using this orthographic system.
I forgot to include the following web link to a spelling proposal:
OR-E.org
Here is what I found on Wikipedia:
In the United States, Z is pronounced zee; in most other English-speaking countries it is pronounced zed, which spoils the final rhyme. (This is also the case when it is sung in French, where "y and z" becomes "i-grec, zed".) Generally the absent zee-rhyme is not missed, although some children use a zee pronunciation in the rhyme which they would not use elsewhere. Variants of the song exist to accommodate the zed pronunciation.
Perhaps Mr. Webster had good intentions, but I suspect he did not think as deeply about spelling as he might have.
It's my belief that "theater" and "center" should be spelled with a trailing"re" to be consistant with derivative words such as theatrical and central.
Also, "traveling" should be spelled "travelling" to provide a proper pronunciation. One "L" would actulally be pronounced "traveeling." Consider the word "running" which is not "runing."
Many of our words, thus much of our spelling, comes from other languages. Therefore, we should be cognizant of the origins.
Ken
There is precedent in other languages for dropping the e from -er words when adding endings. Some Latin nouns ending in -er originally ended in -rus: ager < *agr < *agrus, "field" (cf. agriculture). When the -us ending was lost, and the now-final r was preceded by a consonent, an e was inserted to facilitate pronunciation. In forms with other endings (agro, agri, agrum), the r was no longer final, so no extra e was needed. Also, compare the pronunciation of theater with its French source théâtre, where the e is the worn-down remnent of -um from the Latin theatrum.
As for "traveling", I think the e doesn't need a doubled consonant to avoid changing its pronunciation because it is unstressed; the u in "run" is stressed, and therefore susceptible to lengthening when appearing between two vowels.