Weekend Wordery: Ghoti out of Water
Matt Yglesias thinks that a language in which spelling bees are possible is a language that needs to simplify and regularize its spelling.
For a long time, of course, English words were spelled irregularly because spelling simply wasn’t regularized. But for the past 150 years or so spelling words “correctly” has been an important class signifier, even as we lack an underlying set of rules to determine how letter-strings form phonemes. Thus it’s possible for “correct” spelling to differ from country to country, and it’s harder than it needs to be for children to learn how to spell. And it’s worth noting that the adverse impact falls especially hard on children from a low socioeconomic background. It would be one thing to teach such kids a finite set of spelling rules, but to ask a child to master a vast set of brute-force memorizations creates a situation wherein whether or not his parents know how to spell “correctly” is going to be a major factor in his own success.
If you look at French or Russian or Spanish (to name some languages I’m familiar with) by contrast, if you know how the language works it’s very easy to relate what a word sounds like to how it’s spelled. English is full of stuff like the “ough” letter combination that’s pronounced all kinds of ways (”thought,” “thorough,” “tough”) words that are pronounced two different ways (”wound,” “bow”) and nutty spellings like “stomach” that have nothing to do with how the word is said.
Yglesias is obviously not the first to wish for more consistency between written symbols and spoken sounds in English. George Bernard Shaw, noted fellow traveller of this cause (and others), illustrated the absurdity of English spelling by suggesting the word fish be spelled “ghoti”—with the gh from tough, the o from women, and the ti from nation.
I don’t disagree with Yglesias’ inclination to help people thrive by making it easier to learn standard written English. Far from it. But, as I suspect everybody intuitively recognizes, broad-based spelling reform is doomed to fail. There are some fairly obvious and boring reasons for this: inertia, absence of a central body with authority to disseminate new standards, too many speakers in too many places, etc. The more interesting reason is that spelling-reform advocates may misjudge the purpose of a system of writing.
Spelling-reform advocates tend to assume that there’s something wrong when graphemes (units of written language) don’t match up neatly with phonemes (units of spoken language). But written language isn’t just about encoding units of sound. As Steven Pinker writes in the Language Instinct (excerpt here):
English spelling is not completely phonemic; sometimes letters encode phonemes, but sometimes a sequence of letters is specific to a morpheme. And a morphemic writing system is more useful than you might think. The goal of reading, after all, is to understand the text, not to pronounce it. A morphemic spelling can help a reader distinguish homophones, like meet and mete. It can also tip off a reader that one word contains another (and not just a phonologically identical impostor). For example, spelling tells us that overcome contains come, so we know that its past tense must be overcame, whereas succumb just contains the sound “kum,” not the morpheme come, so its past tense is not succame but succumbed. Similarly, when something recedes, one has a recession, but when someone re-seeds a lawn, we have a re-seeding.
[...] Of course English spelling could be better than it is. But it is already much better than people think it is. That is because writing systems do not aim to represent the actual sounds of talking, which we do not hear, but the actual abstract units of language underlying them, which we do hear.
If serving as a pronunciation guide is not the sole purpose of written language, then simplifying and regularizing our spelling would interfere with other language functions, namely the morphemic function. I’m not sure what exactly would happen if we tried, but if spelling reform were even possible, it is not at all clear that the outcome would be beneficial to anyone—perhaps least of all to Matt Yglesias and those of us who are enriched by the nuanced contents of his mind as expressed through the sometimes complex and irregular spellings of written English.
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[...] week I blogged about spelling reform in response to a post Matt Yglesias wrote a while back. I mentioned “Ghoti,” the [...]