I never had any large respect for good spelling. That is my feeling yet. Before the spelling-book came with its arbitrary forms, men unconsciously revealed shades of their characters and also added enlightening shades of expression to what they wrote by their spelling, and so it is possible that the spelling-book has been a doubtful benevolence to us.
Mark Twain: Autobiography
As to those who do not spell well, if the two difficulties are compared, [viz.] that of teaching them true spelling in the present mode, and that of teaching them the new alphabet and the new spelling according to it; I am confident that the latter would be by far the least. They naturally fall into the new method already, as much as the imperfection of their alphabet will admit of; Their present bad spelling is only bad, because contrary to the present bad rules; under the new rules it would be good. The difficulty of learning to spell well in the old way is so great, that few attain it; thousands and thousands writing on to old age, without ever being able to acquire it. ’Tis, besides, a difficulty continually increasing; as the sound gradually varies more and more from the spelling: and to foreigners it makes the learning to pronounce our language, as written in our books, almost impossible.
Benjamin Franklin: Letter to Mary Stevenson, 28 September 1768
It is the generations of children to come who appeal to us to save them from the affliction which we have endured and forgotten.
William Dwight Whitney
The only reason I ever wrote about the absurdity of standardized English spelling was because of what I wrote about here the other day, that it discourages people from writing their ideas down where they can see them, notice where their thinking isn't clear or doesn't make sense or conflicts with their better parts and aspirations and to improve their thinking. Thinking more morally, more clearly has to come before acting better.
That and the fact that stupid people with a rather minor skill of visual memory like to lord their adherence to standardized English spelling over the majority of English speakers as if it were a sign of superiority, whereas a really superior person with such a skill wouldn't use it in such a base and stupid way. The troll who tries to volunteer as the tireless little meter maid of my spelling (who, by the way, I have caught in some of those, myself) is a particularly stupid and base specimen of that type of snob.
Anything that prevents anyone who speaks English from using it in all its forms, for speaking, thinking, reading or writing promotes a social and, inevitably, economic caste system. I think the most muddled thinkers of normal intelligence are capable of far clearer thinking than such snobs dearly love to believe they are capable of. If ten or five percent of people who have been discouraged by being "bad spellers" from writing and re-reading what they wrote and improving the clarity and moral content of their thinking through that review started writing and reading what they wrote, I think the political character of the United States could improve enormously.
That an American who delights in his minor skill of spelling according to the American standard rules uses those to mock any idea of spelling reform is especially stupid and only proves his ignorance BECAUSE NOAH WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY IS, ITSELF, AN INTENTIONAL REFORM OF THE SPELLING OF ENGLISH.
Noah Webster was struck by the inconsistencies of English spelling and the obstacles it presented to learners (young and old alike) and resented that American classrooms were filled only with British textbooks. The spelling reform featured in his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, was based on the author's combined vision of logic and aesthetics. He changed the –ce in words like defence, offence, and pretence to –se; abandoned the second, silent "l" in verbs such as travel and cancel when forming the past tense; dropped the "u" from words such as humour and colour; and dropped the "k" from words such as publick and musick. The "publick" readily accepted many of these changes and just as readily rejected some of the others.
Or, as he, himself wrote:
The simplicity of the orthography would facilitate the learning of the language. It is now the work of years for children to learn to spell; and after all, the business is rarely accomplished …
But with the proposed orthography, a child would learn to spell, without trouble, in a very short time, and the orthography being very regular, he would ever afterwards find it difficult to make a mistake. It would, in that case, be as difficult to spell wrong as it is now to spell right.
As someone capable of reading can see from that, his goals were similar to mine, the democratization of the written language.
A correct orthography would render the pronunciation of the language, as uniform as the spelling in books. A general uniformity thro the United States, would be the event of such a reformation as I am here recommending. All persons, of every rank, would speak with some degree of precision and uniformity. Such uniformity in these states is very desirable; it would remove prejudice, and conciliate mutual affection and respect.
Though, as experience has proved, his successful reform has not gotten the job nearly done because, as he, himself noted, the irrationalities and irregularities of English spelling are so many. I honor Webster's democratizing intentions far better than the snobs who use HIS standardized spelling as a venue of snobbery and class divide. I'd rather be on the side of all of those people named above than a person so bereft of intellectual content that he has to inconsistently go on about it like he does.
And, as you can see from that excerpted essay linked to, one of Webster's main objectives was to separate the American language from the British language, something which those at the Oxford Dictionary use rather mockingly in their own brand of Simpian snobbery:
Have you ever wondered why Americans use the spellings honor, neighbor, valor, while the British use honour, neighbour, valour? Has a computer spellchecker or human copy-editor ever stopped your wingèd prose as it travelled (traveled) up through the clouds of Parnassus and subjected it to a tedious extra round of labour (labor), changing cheque to check, theatre to theater, and gaol to jail (or the other way around)?
You can lay the blame for this offence (offense) on Noah Webster, an American lexicologist of the 18th and 19th centuries who wrote and published the first American dictionary. Webster advocated far-reaching reforms in written American English, saying: ‘Let us then seize the present moment, and establish a national language, as well as a national government.’ Not all of his dreams for American English took hold, but enough of them did to make the first rip in a tradition that eventually tore apart – to become, in the quip of George Bernard Shaw, ‘two nations divided by a common language.’
. . . Today, linguists have amassed piles of evidence to show that the idea of reforming spelling in the English language by connecting letters absolutely to phonemes is silly and unworkable. Even in Webster’s time, many onlookers considered spelling reform to be ridiculous. Most efforts to implement it didn’t work, even when powerful institutions were involved. (For instance, in New York, Governor Theodore Roosevelt asked the state government to adopt in official documents a system of reformed spelling that an institution called the Simplified Spelling Board had developed; public ridicule soon made him abandon the plan.) Still, the hard work and dedication of one lone crank in Connecticut managed to have a lasting effect on the writing of a nation. It’s enough to give hope to all of us with an opinion about language and a dream. (Here’s mine: I think the word carillon should be pronounced carry-on.) And life without dreams would truly be a matter for greef.
perhaps that mockery is motivated, in part, because, as Webster pointed out, among the advantages of the United States having a different spelling, it would lead to the creation of a publishing and printing industry in the United States using his reformed spelling because, as he wisely noted, the Brits would never adopt American spelling. Oxford doesn't like the competition.
From that you can also see that Webster, himself, realized only a partial reform to a more democratic form of written language that was possible in his reform of English spelling in his time. Though it seems to be news to those at Oxford, Webster's partial success proves that it is possible to gradually reform spelling. The largest obstacle of that, the snobs, the champions of traditionalist snobbery, the poseurs who pretend to that because they want to be mistaken as learned, etc. will give way to the return of unstandardized spelling, intentional or unintended. I'm in favor of that.
So, mock on in your ignorance, oh, Great Speller, I couldn't care less what you say on the subject.
Note: I have given Thorstein Veblen's wonderfully dry mockery of the standard spelling of English before but it's so good I'll give it again.
As felicitous an instance of futile classicism as can well be found, outside of the Far East, is the conventional spelling of the English language. A breach of the proprieties in spelling is extremely annoying and will discredit any writer in the eyes of all persons who are possessed of a developed sense of the true and beautiful. English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection. Therefore it is the first and readiest test of reputability in learning, and conformity to its ritual is indispensable to a blameless scholastic life.
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