Rebecca Dana sums up the latest in an epochs-long, inconsistently waged war for phonetic spellings, warmed over anew by the National Spelling Bee press coverage:
A fyoo duhzen ambishuhss intelectchooals, a handful ov British skool teechers and wuhn rokit siuhntist ar triing to chang the way we spel.
While this scheme has flaws, such as extant dialectal pronunciation tics, it would flatten the on-ramp to fluency. Still, I think there’s something… for lack of a better term, romantic, about our hodgepodge English tongue, gently frayed by time, geographic dispersion and vernacular encroachments - that merits unobtrusive cultivation.
How am I going to feel superior to people because of my amazing spelling ability if we bother to spell phonetically?
Ugh. Never mind that English spelling encodes with it important etymologically and phonological cues. For instance, in a lot of Western U.S. dialects, the words “caught” and “cot” are pronounced identically, while in my Wisconsin dialect, the difference is strictly maintained. How would we standardize this pronounciation difference? Better yet, why would we want to lose this important clue about the history and development of U.S. English?
And there is the fact that English is essentially a global lingua franca and that language reforms are incredibly difficult endeavors. International politics and trade along with entire fields in science, academics and technology all use English because it’s the language that connects you to most people across the world (or the most people that matter in those fields). Consequently, there will be no Great Global Spelling Reform. Whatever changes that take place will be regional and dialectal, and regional legitimization is not an easy process. Indeed, the standardization process essentially requires four stages: selection (of the spelling convention), adaptation (use by writers and speakers), documentation (recording of the variation in dictionaries) and full-scale adaptation (governmental, institutional usage). As we can see, it takes a long-term community-based effort to make linguistic reforms, and from this perspective, English spelling reforms are little more than pipedreams, despite their accommodating intentions.
