Is Spelling Reform, Ten Years Old, a Success? (1916) | Hacker News Reader

Is Spelling Reform, Ten Years Old, a Success? (1916)

sundaymagazine.org

24 pointspfooti17 comments

Language changes, as does spelling, both through drift and deliberate action. Even the morphology of letters changes - see "ye", where "y" is actually "th", and the old "s" which looks to modern eyes like an "f". An interesting one is the distinction between yay and yes and nay and no (negatory vs affirmative), which has utterly vanished at this point.

In terms of deliberate modifications, the most recent I'm aware of is French, which has seen a rapid anglicisation over the past decades (Le weekend, Le ice tea, l'office de tourisme), and had a spelling update last year - http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35496893.

As with then, plenty of purists get their pantaloons in a knotte when they zyxt phantastique new words and spellings, but time ultimately makes the change whether they like it or not.

Notable is that the words in the article which have changed are the commonly used ones. "Woe" isn't in common parlance so hasn't drifted or annealed.

> the old "s" which looks to modern eyes like an "f"

I always thought they looked like that because before modern dentistry, everyone spoke with a lisp.

ftupid fhithead.

It's a Futurama (Suturama?) joke that I absolutely love.

There's been recent controversy about President Obama's executive orders, so I found it interesting that this article describes the impact of an executive order by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 (which was subsequently overturned by Congress).

I hadn't known that executive orders began with George Washington:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_order

And President Obama has issued relatively few executive orders compared with his predecessors.

I find it fascinating that the US could change colour to color which seems a completely useless and trivial change but still hasn't managed to adopt the international system of units.

I suspect both the spelling change and resistance to unit changes have far more to do with protectionism than anything. Both isolate the US and stop them from importing books, particularly textbooks. Someone has probably made a lot of money from that.

From the 1916 article:

"These teachers knew better than any one else how much valuable time was wasted in getting by heart long lists of words."

This is perhaps an interesting argument for simplifying spelling. Namely to give en-US children a competitive edge on the world education scale by increasing the amount of time that is able to be devoted to other subjects.

It's not clear that it would give much of an advantage nowadays. English has become the de facto international language for now, and so currently the difficulties of learning English, such as spelling, are also being inflicted on students around the world.

For most of them English is a second language and thus they have to deal with the spelling on top of the difficulty of dealing with a foreign language. I think that makes it so English spelling is a bigger hinderance for them than it is for students where English is their first language (such as the majority of the US), and so spelling reform would help them more than it would help US students. In terms of competitive edges, spelling reform would lessen the edge of US students.

Of course, that doesn't mean that would be bad. As you note, less time on spelling is more time for other subjects. If spelling reform led to US students getting, say, 1% better in science or math, and led to foreign students getting 2% better, yes that worsens the US position relative to the foreign students, but looked at another way everybody improves.

I think a bigger problem than spelling is people using the wrong words. They'll use defiantly instead of definitely, heal instead of heel, too instead of to, and a number of similar mistakes.

Indeed. But also strategy instead of tactic, culture instead of way of working, engineer, architect and many other have a ambiguous meaning these days, so if you want to precise, it is better to use something else.

> For most of them English is a second language and thus they have to deal with the spelling on top of the difficulty of dealing with a foreign language. I think that makes it so English spelling is a bigger hinderance for them than it is for students where English is their first language (such as the majority of the US), and so spelling reform would help them more than it would help US students.

What negative effects do they suffer if they misspell something?

The same as US students: lower grades, bad interpretation, not making oneself understandable.

US students may get lower grades from spelling errors, but they're not going to suffer from people misunderstanding them.

Foreign students are much more likely to actually produce something unintelligible (regardless of spelling!), but also much more likely to be unaffected by it because they're not trying to communicate anything of any importance.

I really doubt if there's a competitive edge to be gotten. Chinese characters/hanzi and Japanese ones/kanji are a great deal more complicated than the spelling rules of English and less consistent. It doesn't appear to hurt academic achievement at all in either case. Nor is there a difference between countries using simplified hanzi and the traditional ones.

Earlier learning has amazingly little effect on later outcomes. Half of Europe have all play all the time kindergarten with almost non-existent academic instruction. Half of them have academic instruction. If you compare academic achievement of communities on opposite sides of borders but with very different numbers of years of education the differences are tiny.

Obviously, if learning to spell works, whether complex or not, something else could be learned instead. I assume you don't mean spelling would be an exception, but I don't think that's relevant to the made argument.

What if the act of memorizing the spelling words in K-5 has a positive impact of memory-based learning in later years?

A century on, the National Education Association is getting their wish: we're spelling it as 'tho' instead of 'though'. Linguistic engineering is fascinating.

I see the logic in this but am frustrated that the web uses American color not the colour I was taught in school.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com