[lg policy] Spelling Reform Dry Spell

[Harold Schiffman]

 Dry Spell
[image: 580px-Robert_R__McCormick_cph_3b30054]<http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/files/2014/02/580px-Robert_R__McCormick_cph_3b30054.jpg>

Col. Robert McCormick, publisher of the *Chicago Tribune,* wanted to
simplify English.

The other afternoon I was surprised by a phone call from a concerned
citizen who identified himself as Eugene Segar of Detroit, 83 years old. He
wanted to talk about reforming English spelling to make it more accessible
to students and second-language learners.

His message wasn't what surprised me. The ineluctable complexity of English
spelling has been evoking calls for reform for centuries. No, it was rather
the realization that in two and a half years of Lingua Franca posts, more
than 600 of them, I don't remember anybody who has touched on the subject.

We've had detailed discussions of practically everything else involving
language, with no lack of arguments over matters of usage, style, and
language change. But not spelling reform. Is it a dead issue?

In the past it certainly wasn't. Noah Webster, America's most famous
lexicographer, in the early 19th century not only advocated simplified
spelling for the American version of English but actually accomplished it,
which is why we use spellings like *favor* and *center* nowadays.

Committees and societies promoting simplified spelling proliferated on both
sides of the Atlantic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, attracting
support from such notables as Andrew Carnegie and Theodore Roosevelt.

For several decades in the mid-20th century, the World's Greatest Newspaper
(as the *Chicago Tribune* modestly proclaimed itself) not only advocated
spelling reform but boldly demonstrated it *thru* several dozen
simplifications, including *agast, altho, crum, fantom, thoro *and* sherif*.
It was a pet project of the publisher, Col. Robert McCormick. But it was
unpopular with the paper's staff, who reverted to standard spellings after
he died.

Despite all that concern, here we are in the 21st century with English
spelling if anything more firmly fixed than ever. Vocabulary comes and
goes, usage changes, grammar bends a little, but spelling is locked in.
Spell-check software patrols our writing to make sure we don't deviate,
even from difficult spellings like *accommodate*, *supersede*, and
*consensus* that a mere human might be tempted to spell otherwise. Yet
aside from Mr. Segar, nobody complains.

Why is that?

My guess is that it's the software. Spell checkers have relieved us from
paying attention to spelling. So we don't see any knead for reform.

It's not that we don't care about spelling. We do, but we leave it up to
software that usually nose better than we do. Rite?

http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2014/02/13/dry-spell/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en




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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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