"Enuf is Enuf!": Should we Simplify the English Language?
83... Becuz perhaps we shood chanj the way we spell.
I’m a self-proclaimed linguistic snob, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I probably judge you if you repetitively use “your” instead of “you’re”. I cringe a little when you use an adjective where an adverb should clearly be.
(Please realize that I’m addressing a hypothetical “you”… not necessarily you personally. Most of the Hubs I have read have excellent grammar… most likely because most of our fellow Hubbers write well and often. However, I find that I am drifting further and further away from the purpose of this Hub.)
Despite my vanity when it comes to all things grammatical, I am a horrid speller. I’m not ashamed to admit this either. As a matter of fact, I am so humble about my dysfunctional spelling that I think that it cancels out my previously mentioned arrogance regarding grammar. Once again, I digress. But thank God for spell-check. Seriously.
However, despite the fact that my spelling abilities leave something to be desired, I have never thought to myself, “Wow. I really suck at spelling. I think I’ll stage a protest to express my grievances.”
Today, demonstrators gathered in front of the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C., the host site of the upcoming Scripps National Spelling Bee. The army was small but undoubtedly dedicated and unified as they sought to persuade teachers, congressmen, parents, and pretty much whoever would listen that the English language desperately needs to be simplified.
Pointing out the fact that words like “fruit” should logically be spelled “froot” and numerous other examples, the picketers (who were representatives from the American Literary Council and the Simplified Spelling Society) believe that the reason that many ESL students have such difficulty learning English is because of irrational spellings that are frequent in the English language. They say that simplifying such spellings would increase literacy.
I have also read in one article that the protestors claim that in addition to contributing to illiteracy among Americans and increased obstacles for immigrants, these “illogical” spellings contribute to dyslexia. I’m trying to figure out how that works; nothing I’ve read has cared to elaborate on that point. (If you can shed some light on this, please do!)
Carl Weise of Gannett News Service interviewed Scripps Spelling Bee spokesman Mark Kroeger, who defended the English language—“For these kids who understand the root words, who understand the etymology, it’s totally logical.” And I agree. Call me a geek—I really love studying the origins of words (*insert nerdy snort and adjusting-of-the-broken-wide-frame-glasses here*).
Would simplifying the English language and the way we spell things be a breath of fresh air for chronic texters and IM-users? Yeah, probably. But what does that say about us as a society if we simplify the way words have always been spelled just because it would be less of a hassle? Why don’t we just get rid of the word “well”? After all, many people tragically confuse “good” with “well” anyways, so why not just bag the latter altogether?
“I’m not feeling good.”
"I sing very good.”
“You speak good.”
See? All is well. Er… good. All is good.
But see what I’m saying? The little nuances of the language are what make English, well, English. I think the desire to simplify signifies a tinge of laziness. English is not impossible to master. If it were, it probably would have been dead years ago.
To tangent off of my rant about simplifying things to make our lives easier, why, then, hasn’t the U.S. switched to the metric system of measurement yet? What is easier than a measurement system that is 1) observed internationally and 2) based on increments of ten instead of, say, twelve? If you ask many Americans why we don’t “surrender” to the switch, most people will roll their eyes and explain that we’re so used to the American Measurement System that it would be difficult to change, since our security blanket in this realm is composed of inches and feet. And it ain’t broke, so why fix it?
Well… the same applies then to our initial spelling “dilemma”.
I think I’ve done enough damage on this subject for one evening. Maybe I’m irritable today. Or maybe I’m just cynical about protestors this day and age. Don’t get me wrong: I am glad that people are still passionate about things, seeing as apathy is a terrible plague upon society… but this cause just doesn’t make sense to me.
To me, there are more important things to be picketing about… say, for instance, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But, hey. That’s another Hub, another day.
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Thanks, True Blue Tips!
It's a relief to know I'm not the only one who feels that way :) Thanks for the comment and the encouraging words!
I'm a reasonably good speller, but I'm surprised at how much the spell-check still picks up. English has so many exceptions in it - I think it must be hard to learn as a second language. I wonder if other languages engage in text-speak?
Woesofacollegekid, I enjoyed reading your hub as it brought a smile to my face. See? ^-^
I don't think my grammar is very good so I might hide my hubs from you LOL (Just kidding!)
I am here to officially announce your Hubnugget nomination! Yes, this hub is found in the Education & Science category. The juicy details are found here: http://hubpages.com/_hubnuggets10/hub/HubNuggets-M Enuf said, now off you go!...enjoy!
It seems the aim of life these days is to make life simple and easy.People seem to forget that simple and easy stumps intellectual growth.I completely agree with you and your well written hub.I enjoyed it all the way through.
Wow! What a rant, er, I mean a hub :).
Good luck in your Hubnugget nomination!
I think the advent of texting and twitter might add weight to the argument of those who cannot be bothered to learn or use the English language properly. We get lazy, that's my feeling. No, English is not easy, but what a history!
I really enjoyed your hub. Congrats and good luck with you nomination!
I learned alot from your hub!!!!!!!
Veryy interesting hub! That photo is great :D
I've had many a debate about this topic with my fellow English students and my view is that it doesn't matter how things are spelt so long as the message can still be understood - after all, the point of language is simply to communicate, is it not? And if that means makin da lingo easier 2 spell thn so b it! Some people get so wrapped up in this whole "anything that's not in the dictionary is WRONG!" thing, but I disagree; text talk does not destroy the English language, it enriches it by being creative in its use of letter homophones and so on.
Great hub!
Daniella
Thanks everyone for the comments! I haven't been on for a while, so what a pleasant surprise to see that there are still people reading and enjoying my entries :) Thanks, guys!
Awesome hub. I too, consider myself a grammatical snob. This does not work well in social situations, however, as I have a tendency to correct poor usage.
Much of the english language has roots in other languages. A lot of spelling makes sense if you speak another language. So maybe we should require a multi-lingual population.
Congratulations on your hubnugget nomination, and good luck.
Namaste.
Congrats on your nomination and win. Great stuff.
Deborah: That's an interesting thought--requiring a multi-lingual population. I can't imagine such an idea going over very well as a suggested government mandate, but I love languages, so I wouldn't complain :)
elayne001: Thanks for the comment!! Although... I actually think that Baileybear's Hub "Why I am Considering Homeschooling my Child" was the winner this week. You should definitely check it out if you haven't already; it's a great read!
And would the English (from the country known as England) have to comply with yet even more simplyfied changes to their language? Indeed, would England even be allowed to have any say in the matter?
U right good, man.
EnglishM, that's a really great point. America has in a lot of ways customized English to make it their own since way back when English was brought to the Americas (which makes sense... it's kind of like the concept of divergent evolution, only with languages instead of species. Yay biology!)
But my guess would be, no; if for some reason America simplified its English, England would not adapt those changes but instead just sit back and watch the widening gap between English English and American English. Great comment! Thanks!
Time Spiral, thx 4 the compliment! Glad u enjoyd it!
Your hub reminded me of this.
"Daddy, how do you spell colour?"
"C-O-L-O-U-R"
"But my teacher (who wasn't English) said that was wrong."
"I don't care what your teacher said, that's how YOU spell colour."
Excellent hub!
EnglishM: Haha... fun story :)
Gypsy Willow: Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!
Excellent hub! I too am something of a spelling and grammar snob. The misuse of "it's" and making every word meant to be plural possessive instead drives me up a wall. (Also how "to" is universally pronounced "tuh" now.)
A group of librarians picketing *outside a spelling bee* to make spelling "easier" is beyond appalling! Easier for who? For those too lazy to learn to spell properly...or for young teachers from the same generation who text 24/7 who are too overworked to teach proper spelling?
The current generation of young people already have it too easy, as evidenced by the growing rate of morbid obesity in school children. The prevailing mindset is that they should NOT be challenged or stressed any more than they already are by their weight and life in general. Balderdash! We are fast becoming a nation of marshmallows and dimwits! If that had been the case in the 1940s, the spelling of American English words would now be a moot point, as we'd all be speaking German.
For what it's worth, American English is not THE most difficult language to learn or spell. There are others far more difficult. Perhaps those librarians should spend a year in Norway...or Iceland...to appreciate how easy AE really is.
A warm embrace to you, jamaGenee. I couldn't agree more. A warm embrace to you, WoesOfACollegeKid; great hub, great sense of humour (humor), and I like you!
JamaGenee: "Balderdash! We are fast becoming a nation of marshmallows and dimwits!" HAHAHA! I love it. The cynical side of me agrees with that statement, although I'm not sure if the obesity rate in school is caused so much by the newfound "ease" of living as a gross shift in values and interests in society as a whole. But great comment. Thanks!
Oh! And I was in third semester French this past spring, and my professor (just for "funsies", I presume) taught us a little bit of Icelandic. The only word I remember is the Icelandic word for "classroom"--"skolastofa"!
EnglishM: I like you too! :)
The ONLY word I can pronounce correctly in Icelandic is Reykjavik (rake ya vick) and only because a friend who has many Icelandic friends insisted I learn to say it correctly. For this reason, I had a good giggle the other night watching a special on George Shultz in the Reagan years, who pronounced it several times as most Americans do: rikey vick! ;D
If you ask me, people would understand the logic behind English spellings if they would just learn to pronounce things properly. An aunt and an ant are two different things, fruit does NOT sound ANYTHING like "froot" (Contrary to popular belief, you do pronounce both the "u" and the "i," but it is so smooth most people don't realise it.)
I remember when I was in elementary school, and teachers would breathe a sigh of relief whenever I said "my Aunt Mary" because they spent so much time drilling into everyone else's heads that their parents' sisters were NOT small wingless insects that they thought they were going to go crazy. My youngest sister, however, gets scolded by her grade 6 Advanced English teacher if she doesn't say "my Ant Mary" because "Aunt solunds like you're grunting, we speak English, not bear!" (to which my sister one day finally said "Exactly! I do speak English, and I refuse to degrade myself to the extent that I compromise my right to using English rather than what Americans try to pass of as such!"
She ended up in detention for it, but apparently our parents told her to stick up for proper language as much as she wanted.
(For the record, my father was born and raised in Ohio and has battled the improper pronunciations he learned as a child all his life, and regularly tells us that he is sure his poor English has held him back in life. My mother was born and raised in Australia and cringes whenever someone pronounces "Automobile" as "Ottomobile," "Aunt" as "Ant," "Wash" as "Worsh," etc. By the way, yes, I have had marks taken off in school for using British spelling conventions...at which point my parents both beat down the principle's door when I was in grade school, and when I became old enough to defend myself, I harrassed my teachers/college professors/heads of departments until they gave me the points I deserved.)
"Worsh" and "Worshington" are two in my top ten list of mispronounced words. If I were the type to put bumper stickers on my car, the first would be "There's no R in WOSH!". ;D
Oh my goodness... I'm from the Mid-West, so I do hear "worsh" a good amount. I'm fairly used to it; it doesn't really bother me since I've lived here all my life... I just pray that it never works its way into my vocabulary :)
Suiiki, thanks for the comment! I especially loved the anecdote about your sister. My boyfriend is from Indiana (I'm not, although it's where I go to school), so we often find ourselves debating the correct pronunciation of words, one of the most recent being "larynx" ("lare-inks", as opposed to his proposed pronunciation, "lar-en-nix"). The audio feature on the Merriam-Webster online dictionary has become a good friend of mine. It's surprising how much regional differences affect pronunciation. But don't worry, the debates are all in good fun, and I love my boyfriend dearly :)
I'm right along with you in both your rant against dumbing down spelling and your passion for the language.
As for the argument in favor of changing spelling to make it easier to learn English as a second language, I've never heard anything so demeaning in my life. It's as if proponents are saying that those who don't speak English are not intelligent enough to learn it unless it's diluted. What an insult!
My father's family is from rural Ohio, and I'd feel just horrible if they started saying "wash" instead of "woish". Hearing their speech is as comforting to me as eating a big plate of biscuits and gravy.
Outstanding Hub, WoesOfACollegeKid.
Sally's Trove: Hey! Thanks for stopping by. I hadn't thought of it that way--dumbing down English spelling as being an insult to ESL students. But what a great point! Thanks for the comment!
By far one of the most interesting and engaging hubs I have ever read, came upon it completely by accident. Being force fed Mark Twain, Alexandre Dumas, and Dostoevsky since the age of 6 (I no longer have to be force fed classic literature :)), I could never understand the laziness of typing a few less letters to get your point across. Unintentional grammatical errors and misspellings is one thing, sometimes they are bad enough to make me cringe, but doing so intentionally has always been beyond my comprehension. I was always the weirdo that typed out all the words on aim and via texts, still do.
My own grammar and spelling leaves much to be desired by I never do so intentionally.
Alex,
I'm definitely like you in the sense that I type out all the words and use correct grammar on AIM and texts :) We're just too awesome for our own good.
The only grammatical rule I intentionally break is that which states that one is never to begin a sentence with a conjunction. And sometimes I use incomplete sentences. But I think it's okay to break the rules as long as you know them (in the world of grammar and maybe spelling). e.e. cummings pulls it off quite well.
Thank you for the kind words, and I am flattered that you believe this to be one of the "most interesting and engaging hubs [you] have ever read" :)
Why value useless grammar points over spelling? You pointed out yourself that native English speakers still confuse 'your' and 'you're', and don't know when to use 'good' or 'well'. Why not let people write how they speak, making for a. Cohesive language. Personally, I know that I talk much differently than I write. People pick up a language by being immersed in the oral part. By combing what people hear and what they write, it'll be much easier to pick up.
htngk: You make a good point: People pick up a language by being immersed in the oral part. I'm currently studying French, and I most definitely found this to be true, especially in the beginning when I was trying to learn words and the proper way to form coherent sentences. However, once you get to a certain point in any language, you quit learning vocabulary and you start fine-tuning the nuances of the language--spelling, grammar, etc. After reading your comment, I started thinking about why we bother learning said nuances, and the best I could come up with was 1) convention and 2) unity among speakers.
I think the latter is the more substantial of the two... all English speakers speak the language differently. My friend from Tennessee speaks with a southern drawl. My grandfather, a native Filipino, speaks his English with a Filipino accent. Orlando Bloom (so cute!) speaks with an English accent. All these people speak English, but (again) they speak it differently. So, all these people would write/spell differently (possibly leading to an increased difficulty in communicating with one another) if we were to adopt the "write as you speak" ideology, so I'm not too sure I agree that it would make for a more "cohesive" language, even though it would be easier for individuals to grasp.
Thanks for the comment! It really made me think :)
What these intentional dummies want has already been done, and with catastrophic results, in Haiti. And looking much harder at how their problem came about, for some deeper insight, it was chods like them who caused the very problem they whine about in the first place.
There will, after their changes occur, be two classes of people created by virtue of their changes: those who can, and those who cannot, understand the riches in the vast body of Modern English literature. The old library will still stand and a few educated people will be included in that world: those who can pay for that extra language training, with money, with time, with attention.
There will inevitably be many more, after the changes, who will be excluded. Why does Shakespeare look difficult, or Chaucer, or Beowulf? Because we came up after the changes, that have already occurred in English.
Where it has been done is Haiti, where stronger reasons were advanced in this very debate for their particular circumstances, and the party wanting the change from proper French Academy French to spoken Kreyol Ayisyen did get their way. Now it takes special advanced education for the mass of people to change from their logical phonetical spelling to understand Creole Haitien is another way to spell the same thing.
Only certain families...the "elite" families...send their children to Paris for that expensive education which cements their elite status. After all they have access to the vast riches of French literature, while the masses know their 8,000 or so words of Kreyol.
I love the beauty of language and subscribe to the belief that words and the way we choose them define us. As a wordpainter I find myself disengaged and disinterested in a dialogue that murders the English language. Aside from the fact that this snobbish linguist deducts IQ points for every glaring grammatical error committed, I also am guilty of stripping away any credibility the offender might have possessed. Perhaps guilty is a strong adjective as my assessment is wrapped in layers of truth. Perhaps these linguist murderers might be better served picketing the Progressives who are systematically destroying our public school systems by promoting the "Dumbing Down of America" and destroying our moral compass. I am fearful of a people who embrace ignorance and work diligently to pave the road to a subculture of vacuous souls housing bankrupt spirits. We lovers of the English language would do well to maintain our refusal to speak with the murderers of our native tongue. I suggest throwing a copy of the Declaration of Independence at the offenders for the sheer enjoyment of witnessing the pure beauty of stammering, stuttering insistence of their inability to read a foreign language. Of course in the name of posterity this will be captured on tape nestled in a beautifully gift wrapped box containing our proclamation to take the beauty of the English Language back. I am also convinced these same butchers have denigrated the grace and decency of social etiquette. "Get me and do that" are thrown with as much wreckless abandon as "ain't" and "I got to get me one of those"....more's the pity that "one of those" doesn't entail a dictionary or the wonderful rules of grammar in "Woe is I"...which would have been a great title for this rant.
First - lest I forget - for Pete - I'm assuming you know of Patricia O'Connor's book, 'Woe is I' -- but if not, check it out. Second, I agree that there no need for conscious, deliberate revision to the English language; enough of that happens on its own. Third -- and most importantly -- I'm stunned by librarians' participation in the effort to dumb down English because, of all people, they should understand the practical implications. For example, making the changes required to the Library of Congress's card catalog [and THEN to all the card catalogs in all the libraries across the Nation] just to change 'Negro' to 'Black' and then to 'African American' was an enormous undertaking. [And, please, I'm not making ANY political statement here! I'm just offering an example of the kinds of implications that any change in the language can have and this is the best example I can think of at the moment.] Fourth, as far as dyslexia is concerned, the same mechanisms that distort what is written on the page would be at play, regardless of how a word is spelled. Fifth, the rationale that changes would making things easier on those who must learn English as a second language doesn't hold water, either. The reason that English has become the lingua franca (and let's pause for the rich irony offered by the term) is that it's actually more simple than most other languages. I'm currently trying to learn German. In English, you don't have to fret with noun genders (other than the few obvious ones) and declining articles and adjectives. We have two words: 'a' and 'the' -- German has 6, and you use them differently. For example, sometimes 'die' is singular,feminine, nominative; sometimes it's plural nominative, etc. And we use the same word - to - whether we're going to another town, to the beach, to a lake, or to the store. German has a different words for 'to' for each of these cases. And, in most cases, native English speakers can understand English words when spoken with accents. Most of the time when I try to speak German, I can't be understood, even for seemingly simple words like 'Ossa Strasse' -- I can't even hear the difference between the way I say 'Ossa' and the way the Germans say it, and yet no one can understand me. Nor does English have the same degree of tonal differences that exist in languages such as Vietnamese. This is why air traffic controllers use English -- it offers the least opportunity for misunderstanding based on pronunciation. So, if small children can learn English just fine the way it is, why change it?
True Blue Tips 24 months ago
BTW your hub is terrific. lol
Seriously, I couldn't agree with you more. Well done!