Britain's Latest Goal: Record-Setting Illiteracy

[vegasrebel29]

Originally Posted by The Times

We mustn't give in to those who can't spell
Just because students can't spell ‘their' and ‘truly' doesn't mean we should accept variations that break all our useful rules

Vivian Cook

So English spelling is in the dock once again. This time it's students who write “thier”, “ignor” and “arguement” (and obviously don't know how to use a spell checker). The solution? According to Ken Smith, an academic at Bucks New University, we should now tolerate variant spellings. Students are now incapable of learning the spellings of “their” and “truly” that countless millions have mastered over the centuries. So let's change our attitudes to spelling to help this deserving minority.

Two important things are left out of this argument. One is that English spelling does have a system. The silent “e” in “tone” shows that the preceding “o” is long; the lack of “e” in “ton” show the “o” is short.

And so on with all the other vowels: “Dane/Dan”, “pin/pine” etc. (The exception is TV commercials for Danone that pronounce the name to rhyme with “salmon” in breach of the silent “e” rule.) If we allowed odd variants like “ignor/ignore”, this would obscure the silent “e” system in English. Better to teach people the real rules of English spelling, not folk myths about “i” before “e”, which at best affects 11 common words.

The real advantage of a sound-based system like English is indeed that anything can be read aloud - as newsreaders demonstrate with foreign names, such as Solzhenitsyn and Pervez Musharraf in the past couple of days. As the system has been around for centuries, it has stuck with various anomalies, like the 11 ways of saying “a” - “age”, “bad”, “bath”, “about”, “beat”, “many”, “aisle”, “coat”, “ball”, “beauty” and “cauliflower”. The only languages that don't have such problems are those with “shallow” spelling systems that were standardised comparatively recently, such as Finnish.

English is called a “deep” spelling system because of rules like silent “e” and because it treats words as wholes. When we're reading silently, we don't read words like “the” and “of” letter by letter; we recognise them as wholes, just as we recognise a Nike swoosh or McDonald's golden arches. We go straight from the whole word to its meaning without passing through the sounds. We recognise the two hundred or so most frequent words of English as shapes - and we couldn't read silently at speed if we didn't. But reading whole words also applies to the famous oddities like “lieutenant” and “yacht”: we store them as one-offs and don't work out their pronunciation letter by letter.

If we made the spelling of “they're”, “there” and “their” interchangeable, we would be ignoring all the aspects of English writing other than sounds. The three forms fit into sentences in very different ways; the difference in spelling helps us to see the structure of the sentence.

Spelling makes distinctions that are impossible in speech, such as “whole” versus “hole” or “beech” versus “beach”. Reducing writing to a pale shadow of speech is impoverishing the English language.

There's nothing very unusual about using whole words: it's how Chinese works. Speakers of the different Chinese dialects can understand each other in writing even if they have different words for the same character. An educated Chinese speaker knows about 5,000 characters; a dictionary has 40,000. Surely we can manage a few hundred unique words in English? Memorising the spelling of the hundred most common words of English would mean that you spelt at least 45 per cent of the words correctly in any piece of typical writing, quite a useful start.

The panel (above right) shows some of the words that English-speakers are most likely to get wrong, the variants that people produce and the percentage of web pages that get them wrong. Would accepting all these variants make life easier?

One type of variation is between styles of spelling. Look up “judgment” or “minuscule” and the preferred spelling varies between North American and British dictionaries and from publisher to publisher. It's a matter of identity; use “color” and you're American, use “colour” and you're British.

The most common type concerns the consonant doubling rules of English - “embarrass”, “accommodate”, “desiccate”.

“Supersede” and “definitely” are probably examples of one-offs where you have to remember the word as a unique whole.

Before adopting greater tolerance to spelling, we need to take many factors into consideration, not just how letters go with sounds. And we need to take far more people into consideration than UK students.

The majority of people using English in the world are not native speakers and live outside English-speaking countries. Any change will have to take their needs into account, in particular the need for a consistent spelling system with constant word forms rather than something based on native speakers' pronunciation and characteristic spelling mistakes.

Vivian Cook is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University and author of Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary (Profile Books)

Source (Article was in response to one found here)

[vikiradTG2007]

Idiots.


Honestly, some English people are worse at speaking and writing their own language than some of us foreigners are at speaking and writing in English.

[anti-net]

^ Yeah, half of the people on this forum who are not from a English speaking country speak better English than me (well, can spell better than me)

I also think this professor is talking shit, even I, the king of the spelling mistakes (dyslexia is a pain in the arse) think spelling should still be important. My concern if you let mistakes in you'll get people writing everything in "txt speak".....which is vile and annoying.

[James May's Hair]

Originally Posted by vikiradTG2007

Idiots.

Honestly, some English people are worse at speaking and writing their own language than some of us foreigners are at speaking and writing in English.

You are, I'm sad to say, correct. The standard of English in this country has reached a nadir in recent years. It is a consequence of the lazy 'slacker' attitude that has taken hold amongst the younger generation.

A lot of American spellings have 'infected' written English, not to mention American misspellings. for example: 'loose' instead of 'lose'. 'You're going to loose the race'. I am disgusted by it.

Stupid is the new black.

[NooDle]

Originally Posted by anti-net

^ Yeah, half of the people on this forum who are not from a English speaking country speak better English than me (well, can spell better than me)

Wait what?

I don't get this. From all the languages I've absorbed (and there are many) English is the one I speak/write the best IMHO. Because thats the only one with clear cut rules about spelling.

Many of the others have as many exceptions as there are rules, so it becomes a bit of a guess everytime.

Also because English is the unofficial "internet" language, I insist they don't change the rules because some dumbasses can't be arsed to remember them.

[vikiradTG2007]

Originally Posted by James May's Hair

You are, I'm sad to say, correct. The standard of English in this country has reached a nadir in recent years. It is a consequence of the lazy 'slacker' attitude that has taken hold amongst the younger generation.

A lot of American spellings have 'infected' written English, not to mention American misspellings. for example: 'loose' instead of 'lose'. 'You're going to loose the race'. I am disgusted by it.

Stupid is the new black.

Also it's annoying to see people confusing, on a very wide scale, possessives and plurals. Even on my activity schedule one of the activities was written as "Oxford's High's and Low's".

I mean... for God's sake, is there some proper grammar in the house? What's in bold is not by any means a pair of possessives, it should be a pair of plurals. "Oxford's High's and Low's Highs and Lows"

[James May's Hair]

Originally Posted by vikiradTG2007

Also it's annoying to see people confusing, on a very wide scale, possessives and plurals. Even on my activity schedule one of the activities was written as "Oxford's High's and Low's".

I mean... for God's sake, is there some proper grammar in the house? What's in bold is not by any means a pair of possessives, it should be a pair of plurals. "Oxford's High's and Low's Highs and Lows"

Holds his head in his hand's in despair

The placing of an apostrophe is indeed a mystery to most people.

Edit: Just found this site.

[vikiradTG2007]

Originally Posted by James May's Hair

Edit: Just found this site.

+1 to you sir.

[LeVeL]

Ridiculous. I propose that I be made the supreme judge of the world and that I am given the power to bring back the death penalty. Trust me, no one would ever suggest that we destroy the English language just because some idiots cant be bothered to learn how to spell.

[Dr_Q]

These things really do sadden me. Illiteracy in children just keeps creeping up despite everyone having the opportunity to gain these life skills at a very young age. Even worse is that if a parent is illiterate they will sometimes actually prevent their children from being literate as some form of control (or maybe they fear their children will actually do something with their lives). I have to agree that the US English is now creeping into our language which is pretty odd. I know this is off topic but I find it extremely annoying (and a bit insulting) that pretty much ALL software only has the option for US English. Especially when they charge Europeans more to add their languages in to software (people from the UK just get US English anyway).

[Cobol74]

Not so, most dictionaries have UK English option, well on the software I buy any way. Damn annoying that the stuff defaults back to US English tho' following upgrades.

[chaos386]

Thank you! There are so many times I come across people online who use horrible grammar and spelling and get defensive when people correct them, claiming "wel its not a englis papar! i can rite how i want!" Now I'll have something to direct them to. I doubt they'll actually read it, but it should at least confuse them for a few moments.