This is a joke, right? It doesn't surprise me that some crackpot with "Dr." in front of his name should decide that we could solve the widespread problem of students' appalling inability to spell by merely accepting their mistakes as "spelling variants." After all, professors of education have promoted weirder ideas, and Ken Smith is only a lecturer in criminology who is fed up with wasting his time trying to correct the failures of his students' spelling teachers. It's not our children's fault they had the misfortune to be born into an era of standardized spelling. Dr. Smith's frustration can't be much more than mine as I try to decipher the writings of my intelligent, well-educated, and highly respected colonial American ancestors, who couldn't even spell their own names consistently.
What makes me sure of the intended humor is this passage in the article: Dr. Smith said there was no reason many commonly misspelt words were configured the way they were. The word 'twelfth', for example, would make more sense as 'twelth', he said. 'How on earth did that "f" get in there? You would not dream of spelling the words "stealth" or "wealth" with a[n] "f" (as in 'stealfth' or "wealfth") so why insist on putting the "f" in twelfth?'. Since a moment's thought about both the origin and the pronunciation of "twelfth" would reveal the answer, Smith must be pulling our legs, perhaps making his point in the spirit of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal.
As the story spreads, however, some folks are finding the idea of this Irish baby fricassee more palatable than not. All I can say is that my friends who teach college math should have thought of this years ago. Instead of complaining that your students can't add two and two and get four, much less construct a simple proof, why not simply accept 2+2=5 as a variant sum? And who are you to decide what's "true" and "proven," anyway?The "This is a joke" link takes me to the page where you post a new blog entry. It doesn't seem from the text that such was your intention.
Thanks; I fixed it. But did it really take you to the new post page? If it didn't ask you for a password, I have more problems than an incorrect link.
Do you have a copy of that link, or can you try to make a new one? There is a way to encode the session id in the URL (which would give anyone your permissions (as long as they used it within some number of minutes of when you posted it), though I thought that was disabled on my server.
I don't think I know of any other way to do it.
As for the spelling, there is an article written (at least legend has it) by Andrew Carnegie, who was in favor of "simplifying" spelling, by removing extraneous characters, ie. the English language doesn't need a 'c', just get by with a 'k' and 's'. And then the piese goes on, rule by rule, following the previous rules. It ends with being almost kompletely unreadable.
Sigh. I knew as soon as I fixed the problem that I should have saved the link, but by then it was too late. Since it was an error, I'm not sure how I did it. But I'll see what I can do.
I don't think *simplifying* spelling is outrageous. Its only unreadable because you're not used to it.
Unfortunately, I can't find a link to the article (which probably means it wasn't true), but it really did get unreadable by the end. Each rule on its own was fine, but the combination of them left about ten letters or something.
I did find this link, which is similar to what I was talking about, though only the start.
And a mention of how to spell those animals that don't have legs that swim in the sea: g-h-o-t-i.
gh like enough
o like women (depends on your accent, I guess)
ti like vacation
Don't forget the attempt at legislating simplified spelling that resulted in Harrisburg vs. Pittsburgh, and Hillsborough vs. Hillsboro. The Chinese tried to simplify their language, and in consequence people must learn -- and papers must be printed in -- both simplified and traditional characters. The simplification idea worked better when Communist China was more isolated -- though even then the language switch effectively cut young Chinese off from their own history and literature. Now that they are communicating more with Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Overseas Chinese, it seems they're stuck with two systems.
While some small amount of spelling reform might be reasonable, trying to spell words the way we pronounce them would be a disaster. There are plenty of different dialects of English. With standardized spelling, people whose spoken English is hardly mutually intelligible (due to different pronunciation) can communicate just fine in writing. (I'm not denying there are dialects that are hard to understand in writing too.)
I'm disappointed in the Chinese. What's the point of a totalitarian government if they can't even force people to standardize their language?
Even they can't force Chinese people outside of their own country to adopt the new characters. Yet.
As one who finds it terribly unfortunate that we live in a time of standardized spelling and has borne a great deal of embarrassment and frustration in connection with spelling, and as one who appreciates logical systems, I find Dr. Smith's idea of accepting some spelling variants much more palatable than a simplified system such as Cut Spelling. Languages changes, words change, and truely and truly seem a fine pair, though there and their are best left alone for clarity's sake. The greatest problem I have with any alternate system is that I could never learn both. I am visual and have only learned to spell with my eyes (and spell check), and seeing the same word in an alternate system would forever ruin my ability to write in the old system. I know it's more work, but I think it's worth it. We've inherited the language and should not throw it out easily. For the curious, in this comment I had to double check the following words: unfortunate, standardized, borne, embarrassment, palatable, inherited, and confidence. Thanks to spell check it's easy to check if my guess for spelling is correct on most of those words and then I have enough energy left to look up potential homophones. That makes life for a bad speller much better than the days where every unsure word had to be checked with a dictionary. Given that a poor speller is unlikely to have high confidence, imagine how much patience it took to look up every third word or so! So thank you, spell check, or patiently, consistently, (and without ridicule,) pointing out my errors and teaching me to spell, even if you are not perfect and don't know everything.
Unfortunately, the spell checker doesn't know the difference between "or" and "for". But don't get me started on grammar checkers (oops, too late). I find them annoying because most of their suggestions are wrong either because they fail to parse the sentence properly (mainly a technical problem) or they push nonsensical prescriptivist stylistic changes. Passive voice should be avoided. Always. Not.
Closer to the original topic, I'd support a modest spelling reform that targets a few of the most commonly misspelled words for simplification. For example, why not change "through" to "thru", or at least accept both as equally "correct"? But let's not go overboard and make the transition difficult by changing a lot of words at once.
To be realistic, the way I see this happening is from the bottom up. That is (to stick with my example) so many people spell "thru" that eventually it becomes generally accepted as a correct spelling. No authority figure is going to impose spelling reform on the rest of us. It just wouldn't work.
You can always move to France, where I am told there is a top-down committee that legislates what changes are allowed, as in the recent change of removing the accent over the e (^) I forget what it is called. I suppose you could call it a bottom-up change, as many people left it off for a while before the change officially occurred.
