English Spelling Society

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The English Spelling Society is an international organisation, based in the United Kingdom. It was founded in 1908 [1] as the Simplified Spelling Society. It primarily aims to raise awareness of problems caused by English spelling's irregularity and to improve literacy and reduce learning costs, including through the use of spelling reform. [2] The Society publishes leaflets, newsletters, journals, books, and bulletins. Its spokespeople feature regularly on TV, radio, and in print.

Contents

Structure

The Society is based in the United Kingdom, but has a worldwide membership, including Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. [3] It is governed by a committee elected at its Annual General Meeting. The Society maintains links with the American Literacy Council, which has similar objectives. [4]

Aims

The English Spelling Society primarily aims to make known the problems caused by English spelling's irregularity in an effort to improve literacy and reduce learning costs, including through the use of spelling reform. It also wishes to raise awareness of the alphabetic principle and its "corruption during the long history of written English" and to prepare a graded set of proposals for a more regular English orthography. [5]

The Society believes that both recent research and the continuing governmental concern about literacy rates in the English-speaking world strengthen its position. In particular, it points to evidence that Anglophone children have a harder time learning to read and write than do Italian children. [6] [7] It also quotes evidence that dyslexia is less of a problem in Italy and linguistically similar countries which have more phonemic writing systems than English. [8] Finally, it points to a recent study [9] by the KPMG Foundation that estimates the total costs to the public purse till age 37 arising from failure to read in the primary school years at £1.73 billion to £2.05 billion a year.

Specific reform systems

As of September 2021, the Society has not endorsed any specific alternative English spelling system. [3] However, through its "Personal View" series, [10] it provides a forum for authors of alternative systems to publish their work and submit them to peer review. The forum includes resources for Simple-Fonetik and SoundSpel, among others. [11] Its listed proposals vary in their recommendations from regularising only a few words to making English almost completely phonemically written.

In the November 1983 edition of the Society's newsletter, it printed a five-part reform proposal called "Stage 1". One of these was Harry Lindgren's SR1 proposal. [12] In April 1984, SR1 was adopted as the Society's house style at its yearly meeting. [12] The Society said that the newsletter's proposed reforms could be used either together or individually (as a step-by-step change). [13]

In April 2021, Stephen Linstead's Traditional Spelling Revised (TSR) was approved by the International English Spelling Congress [14] [15] [16] as the best alternative to English Orthography. The Society, sponsor of the Congress, is affording TSR a degree of support and publicity.

Spelling bee protests

Protesters from the Society have regularly taken good-humoured action against orthodox English spelling and its promotion (e.g. by demonstrating, most conspicuously in the form of 'BeeMan,' at the annual Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.). [17]

Books

See also

Related Research Articles

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A spelling reform is a deliberate, often authoritatively sanctioned or mandated change to spelling rules. Proposals for such reform are fairly common, and over the years, many languages have undergone such reforms. Recent high-profile examples are the German orthography reform of 1996 and the on-off Portuguese spelling reform of 1990, which is still being ratified.

Spelling is a set of conventions that regulate the way of using graphemes to represent a language in its written form. In other words, spelling is the rendering of speech sound (phoneme) into writing (grapheme). Spelling is one of the elements of orthography, and highly standardized spelling is a prescriptive element.

A phonemic orthography is an orthography in which the graphemes correspond to the language's phonemes. Natural languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographies; a high degree of grapheme–phoneme correspondence can be expected in orthographies based on alphabetic writing systems, but they differ in how complete this correspondence is. English orthography, for example, is alphabetic but highly nonphonemic; it was once mostly phonemic during the Middle English stage, when the modern spellings originated, but spoken English changed rapidly while the orthography was much more stable, resulting in the modern nonphonemic situation. On the contrary the Albanian, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin, Romanian, Italian, Turkish, Spanish, Finnish, Czech, Latvian, Esperanto, Korean and Swahili orthographic systems come much closer to being consistent phonemic representations.

Cut Spelling is a system of English-language spelling reform which reduces redundant letters and makes substitutions to improve correspondence with the spoken word. It was designed by Christopher Upward and was for a time being popularized by the Simplified Spelling Society. The resulting words are 8–15% shorter than standard spellings. The name Cut Spelling was coined by psychologist Valerie Yule.

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For centuries, there have been movements to reform the spelling of the English language. It seeks to change English orthography so that it is more consistent, matches pronunciation better, and follows the alphabetic principle. Common motives for spelling reform include quicker learning, cheaper learning, and making English more useful as an international auxiliary language.

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Spelling Reform 1 or Spelling Reform step 1 is an English spelling reform proposal advocated by British/Australian linguist Harry Lindgren. It calls for the short sound to always be spelt with E. For example, friend would become frend and head would become hed. SR1 was part of a 50-stage reform that Lindgren advocated in his book Spelling Reform: A New Approach (1969).

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Dyslexia is a complex, lifelong disorder involving difficulty in learning to read or interpret words, letters and other symbols. Dyslexia does not affect general intelligence, but is often co-diagnosed with ADHD. There are at least three sub-types of dyslexia that have been recognized by researchers: orthographic, or surface dyslexia, phonological dyslexia and mixed dyslexia where individuals exhibit symptoms of both orthographic and phonological dyslexia. Studies have shown that dyslexia is genetic and can be passed down through families, but it is important to note that, although a genetic disorder, there is no specific locus in the brain for reading and writing. The human brain does have language centers, but written language is a cultural artifact, and a very complex one requiring brain regions designed to recognize and interpret written symbols as representations of language in rapid synchronization. The complexity of the system and the lack of genetic predisposition for it is one possible explanation for the difficulty in acquiring and understanding written language.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">SoundSpel</span> English spelling reform proposal

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SaypYu is an approximative phonetic alphabet of 24 alphabet letters to spell languages, including English. The spelling system was developed by the Syrian banker Jaber George Jabbour to write English more phonetically. The 24-letter alphabet includes 23 Roman alphabet letters and the addition of a 24th letter, the IPA letter "ɘ" to play the role of schwa. The letter represents the initial sound of "ago" or "about".

Traditional Spelling Revised (TSR) is an English-language spelling reform alternative to the semi-regular conventional English orthography (EO). TSR is a relatively conservative scheme. It seeks to identify the underlying rules of EO but to apply them more consistently, thereby reducing the number of irregularities that must be memorized. TSR makes it possible to predict pronunciation from spelling, if not always the reverse. Words are only respelled when they cannot be brought within the rules.

References

  1. ↑ The Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language. Ed. David Crystal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. p. 277. ISBN   0521401798
  2. ↑ The English Spelling Society. "Our Aims." http://spellingsociety.org/our-aims, accessed 20 Sep 2021.
  3. 1 2 N. Paterson. The English Spelling Society, http://spellingsociety.org/about-us, accessed 20 Sep 2021.
  4. ↑ American Literacy Council
  5. ↑ N. Paterson. "Our Aims." The English Spelling Society, http://spellingsociety.org/our-aims, accessed 20 Sep 2021.
  6. ↑ "How do children learn to read? Is English more difficult than other languages"? Seymour, Philip H K (2001) presented at the British Festival of Science, Glasgow, Sep. British Journal of Psychology 2003.
  7. ↑ G. Thorstad. "The effect of orthography on the acquisition of literacy skills". British Journal of Psychology (1991), 82, 527-537, https://web.archive.org/web/20071012040116/http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/books/thorstad.pdf
  8. ↑ Eraldo Paulesu; et al. (2001-03-16). "Dyslexia: Cultural Diversity and Biological Unity". Science . 291 (5511): 2165–2167. Bibcode:2001Sci...291.2165P. doi:10.1126/science.1057179. PMID   11251124. S2CID   20362533.
  9. ↑ KPMG Foundation: "The long term costs of literacy difficulties" December 2006
  10. ↑ "Personal Views".
  11. ↑ Spelling Society : West African & Britic Archived 2008-05-11 at the Wayback Machine
  12. 1 2 "The Society's 1984 Proposals" Archived 2011-07-22 at the Wayback Machine . Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society (February 1988).
  13. ↑ "Tough Though Thought - and we call it correct spelling!" Archived 2011-04-16 at the Wayback Machine . Simplified Spelling Society (1984).
  14. ↑ "International English Spelling Congress | the English Spelling Society".
  15. ↑ http://spellingsociety.org/press-releases_p26
    Press release 2021-04-12
    Revised Spelling System Approved
  16. ↑ http://spellingsociety.org/uploaded_iesc/report-of-voting-misc.pdf
    CLOSE OF VOTING: 12 NOON (UK TIME) ON 1 APRIL 2021
  17. ↑ The English Spelling Society. "Bee Man demonstrates at Grand Hyatt". https://archive.today/20150126011142/http://spellingsociety.co.uk/news/media2006/spellingbee2006.php, accessed 20 Sep 2021.
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