 First edition | |
| Author | Owen Wister |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Frederic Rodrigo Gruger |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Macmillan |
Publication date | 1907 |
| Media type | |
| ISBN | 978-1-103-90429-7 |
How Doth the Simple Spelling Bee is a short story by Owen Wister that was published in book form in 1907. It is a satire about spelling reform efforts of the time, which also humorously and in a good-natured manner pokes fun at academia in general, and the folly of typical professors' endeavors.
The story's protagonist is Chickle University professor Masticator B. Fellow, and is about his efforts to enlist the story narrator's support for spelling reform. Fellow advocates spelling all English words in a simpler, phonetic manner in order to make spelling easier for children and foreigners. Debates quickly ensue regarding whose pronunciation should be considered standard for phonetic spelling.
The story then changes focus to a couple who are attending the convention for spelling reform. This couple is much more interested in their blossoming romance than they are spelling reform. The narrator finds the woman of this couple attractive, attempts to woo her, and a love triangle ensues, forming some basis of suspense for the plot. The book ends with neither Fellow's attempts at spelling reform nor the narrator's attempts to win a woman's esteem proving the least bit successful.
In August 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered that all federal publications use revised spellings of 300 words based on the work of the Simplified Spelling Board. Wister's story lampooned the change with his story, implying that these spelling changes went too far. [1]
The Deseret alphabet is a phonemic English-language spelling reform developed between 1847 and 1854 by the board of regents of the University of Deseret under the leadership of Brigham Young, the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. George D. Watt is reported to have been the most actively involved in the development of the script, as well as being its first serious user.
Daniel Jones was a London-born British phonetician who studied under Paul Passy, professor of phonetics at the École des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne. He was head of the department of phonetics at University College London.
English orthography is the writing system used to represent spoken English, allowing readers to connect the graphemes to sound and to meaning. It includes English's norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.
Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. Through the Phoenician alphabet's major child systems, the Egyptian hieroglyphic script is ancestral to the majority of scripts in modern use, most prominently the Latin and Cyrillic scripts and the Arabic script, and possibly the Brahmic family of scripts.
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.
Phonetic transcription is the visual representation of speech sounds by means of symbols. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Owen Wister was an American writer and historian, considered the "father" of western fiction. He is best remembered for writing The Virginian and a biography of Ulysses S. Grant.
A phonemic orthography is an orthography in which the graphemes correspond to the phonemes of the language. 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. However, because of their relatively recent modernizations compared to English, the 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.
The Russian orthography has been reformed officially and unofficially by changing the Russian alphabet over the course of the history of the Russian language. Several important reforms happened in the 18th–20th centuries.
Russian orthography is formally considered to encompass spelling and punctuation. Russian spelling, which is mostly phonemic in practice, is a mix of morphological and phonetic principles, with a few etymological or historic forms, and occasional grammatical differentiation. The punctuation, originally based on Byzantine Greek, was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reformulated on the French and German models.
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.
The letter Ъ of the Cyrillic script is known as er golyam in the Bulgarian alphabet, as the hard sign in the modern Russian and Rusyn alphabets, as the debelo jer in pre-reform Serbian orthography, and as ayirish belgisi in the Uzbek Cyrillic alphabet. The letter is called back yer or back jer and yor or jor in the pre-reform Russian orthography, in Old East Slavic, and in Old Church Slavonic.
The English Spelling Society is an international organisation, based in the United Kingdom. It was founded in 1908 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. The Society publishes leaflets, newsletters, journals, books, and bulletins. Its spokespeople feature regularly on TV, radio, and in print.
Language reform is a kind of language planning by widespread change to a language. The typical methods of language reform are simplification and linguistic purism. Simplification regularises vocabulary, grammar, or spelling. Purism aligns the language with a form which is deemed 'purer'.
Inventive spelling is the use of unconventional spellings of words.
Yiddish orthography is the writing system used for the Yiddish language. It includes Yiddish spelling rules and the Hebrew script, which is used as the basis of a full vocalic alphabet. Letters that are silent or represent glottal stops in the Hebrew language are used as vowels in Yiddish. Other letters that can serve as both vowels and consonants are either read as appropriate to the context in which they appear, or are differentiated by diacritical marks derived from Hebrew nikkud, commonly referred to as "nekudot" or "pintalach". Additional phonetic distinctions between letters that share the same base character are also indicated by either pointing or adjacent placement of otherwise silent base characters. Several Yiddish points are not commonly used in any latter-day Hebrew context; others are used in a manner that is specific to Yiddish orthography. There is significant variation in the way this is applied in literary practice. There are also several differing approaches to the disambiguation of characters that can be used as either vowels or consonants.
Glosa is a constructed international auxiliary language based on Interglossa. The first Glosa dictionary was published 1978. The name of the language comes from the Greek root glossa meaning tongue or language.
The Simplified Spelling Board was an American organization created in 1906 to reform the spelling of the English language, making it simpler and easier to learn, and eliminating many of what were considered to be its inconsistencies. The board operated until 1920, the year after the death of its founding benefactor, who had come to criticize the progress and approach of the organization.
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