Alphabetical (31 page)

Apart from the pratfalls I've already described, these little stories are warning shots to all spelling reformers: you may succeed but end up creating more problems than you solve. The other side of the same coin is that you may invent something so perfect that no one wants it.

The examples already cited are successes of a sort. In 1662 James Howell turned ‘logique' to ‘logic' and was a successful anti-doubler, turning ‘warre' to ‘war' and ‘sinne' to ‘sin', as well as ‘toune' to ‘town'.

There have been hundreds of such efforts across the centuries. These are a few examples, taken fairly randomly.

After the ‘International Convention for the Amendment of English Orthography' that was held in Philadelphia in August 1876, societies were founded such as the English Spelling Reform Association and the American Spelling Reform Association. That year, the American Philological Society adopted a list of eleven reformed spellings for immediate use. These were: are→ar, give→giv, have→hav, live→liv, though→tho, through→thru, guard→gard, catalogue→catalog, (in)definite→(in)definit, infinite→infinit, wished→wisht. In 1898, the American National Education Association adopted its own list of twelve words to be used in all writings. These were: ‘tho', ‘altho', ‘thoro', ‘thorofare', ‘thru', ‘thruout', ‘catalog', ‘decalog', ‘demagog', ‘pedagog', ‘prolog' and ‘program'.

The Simplified Spelling Board was founded in the United
States in 1906. The SSB's original thirty members consisted of authors, professors and dictionary editors. Andrew Carnegie, a founding member, supported the SSB with yearly bequests of more than US$300,000. In April 1906 it published a list of 300 words, which included 157 spellings that were already in common use in American English. In August 1906 the SSB word list was adopted by Theodore Roosevelt, who ordered the Government Printing Office to start using it immediately.

In December 1906 the US Congress passed a resolution and the old spellings were reintroduced. Even so, some of the spellings survived and are commonly used in American English today, such as anaemia/anæmia→anemia and mould→mold. Others, such as mixed→mixt and scythe→sithe, did not survive. In 1920, the SSB published its
Handbook of Simplified Spelling
, which set out over twenty-five spelling reform rules. The handbook noted that every reformed spelling then in general use was originally the deliberate choice made by a single writer, who was followed at first by a small minority. In this spirit it encouraged people to ‘point the way' and ‘set the example' by using the reformed spellings whenever they could. However, with its main source of funds cut off, the SSB disbanded later that year.

In Britain, spelling reform was promoted from 1908 by the Simplified Spelling Society which attracted a number of prominent supporters. One of these was George Bernard Shaw and much of his considerable estate was willed to the cause. However, the conditions of his will gave rise to major disagreements amongst the members of the board and this hindered the development of a single new system. Even so, a Shavian system exists.

Over a two-month spell in 1934, the
Chicago Tribune
introduced eighty re-spelled words, including ‘tho', ‘thru', ‘thoro', ‘agast', ‘burocrat', ‘frate', ‘harth', ‘herse', ‘iland', ‘rime', ‘staf' and ‘telegraf'. An editorial in March 1934 reported that
two-thirds of readers preferred the reformed spellings. Over the next forty years the newspaper gradually phased out the respelled words.

In 1949, a Labour MP, Dr Mont Follick, introduced a Private Member's Bill on spelling reform, which failed at the second reading, although in 1953 he again had the opportunity and this time it passed the second reading by 65 votes to 53. Because of anticipated opposition from the House of Lords, the bill was withdrawn after assurances from the Minister of Education that research would be undertaken into improving spelling education. This led in 1961 to James Pitman's Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA), which was introduced into many British schools in an attempt to improve child literacy. Some people reading this book will have been taught ITA. Although it succeeded in its own terms (people learned to read ITA texts), the advantages were lost when children transferred to conventional spelling and after several decades the experiment was discontinued.

In 1969, the engineer and linguist Harry Lindgren proposed Spelling Reform 1 (SR1), which called for the short /ε/ sound (as in ‘bet') to be spelled with (for example friend→frnd, head→hd). For a short time, this proposal was popular in Australia and was briefly adopted by the Australian government.

Fully worked-out alternative alphabets include Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet, the Deseret alphabet, the Initial Teaching Alphabet, Interspel, the Romic alphabet, the Shavian alphabet revised into Quikscript and Unifon. Great names attached to spelling reform also include: John Milton, Samuel Johnson, Noah Webster, Charles Dickens, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Theodore Roosevelt and H. G. Wells.

Wholesale spelling reform today is doomed for the time being because all present texts are in ‘traditional orthography', i.e.
present-day spelling. A switch to a new spelling system would require people to develop a new kind of bilingualism: old and new reading.

That said, there may be another theoretical problem dogging the whole movement. What if we don't read alphabetically? Or, to modify that, what if people read only partially alphabetically? What other systems do such people use to read? Ultimately we read with and for meaning. That's to say, we make sense of the squiggles. We may use alphabetical clues, we may on occasions – or even quite often – sound the parts of a word, but for it all to matter, we use other systems. In short, these systems are grammatical and semantic.

One grammatical way is that we use the grammar we know to help us anticipate what comes next. We can do this to eliminate impossible combinations or include others. So if I am reading ‘I will . . .' and, let's say, those are the last words on the page, I know for certain that the next word is not going to be ‘the' or ‘a' or ‘an' or ‘some' or ‘both'. Without necessarily knowing what a ‘verb' is, I will also have a sense of what kinds of words come after the expression ‘I will . . .' These kinds of predictions about category go on all the time while we're listening, talking, reading and writing.

Also involved is a myriad of predictions to do with meaning. Meaning spreads even more widely than grammar. That's to say, I will bring all the ideas, feelings and information that precede the words I'm reading to bear on those particular words I am reading. That phrase ‘I will . . .' is embedded in who this ‘I' is earlier in the book, what this ‘I' has done, and is likely to do – according to my judgement of them prior to this point. What's more, as I read and figure out what goes on in books in general, I have another, wider set of predictive powers to do with what characters do and how they do it, what heroes and villains do,
what it means for a story to be ‘first-person narrative', what happens in realist books, what is described in non-fiction books, memoirs, letters, ads and so on.

If I – and others who think like this – am right, then what we need is not so much spelling reform as reading reform. This involves making attractive reading matter much, much more available. It involves freeing up time in education and in life for people to get hold of this reading material. It involves a commitment to reading, to personal choice in reading, and to free discussion about what we read – assisted educationally, locally and nationally by our representatives. Historically, people have seized opportunities for themselves, most notably in the societies created by working people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It's possible that digital communication has opened up new possibilities. Interestingly, as these have expanded, people have instituted their own spelling reforms in order to make reading and writing more enjoyable. They get the alphabet to do the work they choose it to do.

As ever, change in language comes about when the requirements and the technology change. Pitman succeeded with his shorthand because he was on the cusp of two major changes: political change, and the growth of the popular press and publishing. Pitman shorthand was a key tool for the masses to gain access (via the shorthand-using reporters) to what was really being said in courts, parliament and ‘on location' where news was being made. As industry became more complex and bureaucratic, the dictating of letters and reports became more necessary. The ‘shorthand typist' like my mother provided a means by which those letters and reports were distributed and, in turn, she used those skills and sense of herself to become greedy for more information about society and literature to develop herself intellectually and socially.

Pitman failed with his spelling reform because it was out of kilter, out of synch with the culture and technology of written material. He could theoretically reform the spelling of what someone might write tomorrow but he couldn't reform the spelling of what was written the day before – unless he had been able to hire thousands of copyists of all previous written material for decades on end. In theory, the internet could do just that. It could ‘translate' any text into a reformed alphabet if there was a popular political and cultural will to pick up where Pitman left off. Even if this were to be enacted, though, I'm not sure that by itself it would solve the question of how and why our levels of literacy and our uses of literacy vary so widely. That matter is, I believe, cultural rather than alphabetical.

THE STORY OF

•
THE PHOENICIAN ‘Q'
from 1000
BCE
was ‘qoph' which possibly meant ‘monkey', possibly ‘a ball of wool'! It was a circle with a line running down through it and on down: a monkey with its tail, or a ball of wool? Those who say that this letter was a ball of wool say that it was inspired by an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph. The ancient Greeks adopted it around 800
BCE
calling it ‘qoppa'. Whereas the Phoenicians distinguished between the ‘k' of their ‘kaph' and the ‘q' of their ‘qoph', the Greeks did not, and so they dropped ‘qoppa'. But the Etruscans, with their long-standing connections to Greece, adopted it, kept it and passed it on to the Romans with a pronunciation more like ‘kw'. A recognizable ‘Q' appears in Roman inscriptions as early as 520
BCE
.

It was the Romans who seemed to have invented the first form of the ‘“u” after “q”' rule. It was needed whenever the ‘q' sound came before a vowel even if that vowel was ‘u' as in the famous ‘equus'. Amongst the various struggles that took place between the Germanic settlers of Britain and the Romance-language-speaking Normans, one was over the ‘kw' sound. As we know now, Romance ‘qu' beat Germanic ‘cw'.

q

A ‘q' without a flick-up at the end of its tail appears in Latin manuscripts in the
AD
600s; Charlemagne's scribes liked that and adopted it for their ‘Carolingian minuscule' and, following the usual pattern, the Italian printers adopted this form for their lower-case ‘q' in the 1500s.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

With the modern French pronunciation of ‘q' as being like a tight-lipped version of our ‘cue' sound, we can assume that the Normans brought it in as that sound – more or less. As all French children know, the letter-name for ‘q' is identical in sound to the word ‘cul', meaning ‘bum', a word that appears in English in the phrase ‘cul-de-sac'.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

When it is the first letter of a word, in English ‘q' is always followed by a ‘u', to create an initial ‘kw' sound, as in ‘quarter'. ‘Liquor', with its internal ‘qu', is not usually pronounced ‘lick-kwor' but ‘liquid' is ‘lickwid'. ‘Q' also appears occasionally as a final sound as in ‘torque' and ‘bisque' where it's a simple ‘k' sound. It appears in some loan words like ‘risqué', ‘pique' and ‘parquet' (all three from French) where it is also a ‘k' sound. I've never been sure whether to say ‘kw' or ‘k' in the craft of ‘marquetry'. In Arabic and Hebrew imports it appears without a ‘u' as in ‘Qatar' and ‘Qabbala'. One modern way of transliterating Chinese is to use a ‘q' for the ‘ch' sound as in ‘Qin'.

In the preposterously spelled ‘queue' (and the name of the letter itself), the ‘q' sound is neither a lone ‘k' or ‘kw' but is sounded as ‘ky' as if the word were written as ‘kyoo'. Only one word I can think of has two Qs in it: ‘quin-quireme', the most popular use of it being in the poem ‘Cargoes' by John Masefield, where it comes from Nineveh. This was compulsorily recited by the seven- and eight-year-old children of Pinner Wood Primary School in 1953.