by hajile | 2025-10-03 00:08:45+00:00
Time to get on the English/American spelling reform and alphabet reform soapbox. 54% of US citizens have a less than 6th grade reading ability and 21% are functionally illiterate. The cause of this is almost entirely non-phonetic/phonemic spelling.

We pretend phonics exists, but it's just a lie we tell little kids to kickstart their learning. In reality, English spelling is more like learning Kanji. The original meanings of the words is warped beyond belief and we tell the specific pronunciation of specific letter sequences based on the surrounding letter sequences (much like telling which Kanji reading to use based on the surrounding Kanji). Words aren't so much sounded out as memorized and because English has such a massive vocabulary, the memorization work needed to be proficient is very extensive.

The classic example of this is "ough" which has NINE different pronunciations for the same letters and no real rules to indicate which one should be used. Spelling reform would make such situations completely unnecessary.

Languages with more phonetic alphabets tend to have much higher literacy rates for the same education quality and literacy can be achieved much faster. This works because once you memorize the sounds the letters make, you can sound out any word or write any word (provided you pronounce it correctly). The memorization process slowly kicks in where common words are still sight-read, but that process can happen much sooner and the individual can start independent reading much earlier with a focus on comprehension rather than memorizing weird rules and exceptions.

English departments have done massive damage in this regard. English started finalizing how words would be spelled around the same time the great vowel shift happened and completely screwed up everything. We then mass-adopted words with foreign spellings that used completely different phonetic systems. Despite the issues, English departments insist that these bugs are actually features despite the great harm they cause students and not only codify them, but denigrate all attempts to fix the problems.

English departments aren't the only ones. Even 150 years ago when Webster was trying small spelling reforms (some stuck around and some did not), people complained that the writing was childish. When Teddy Roosevelt tried a further spelling reform of getting rid of unneeded letters, he was turned into a laughing stock for the same reason (again with a handful sticking around). Modern "text speak" is yet another unofficial attempt to simplify spelling so it is more consistent, but once again, better, shorter alternatives are derided as making someone look unintelligent.

This still doesn't deal with the more fundamental phoneme/alphabet mismatch though. English has 44 common phonemes and a bunch of less common and regional sounds (for example, the χ sound in "cloCK"). Our adopted Latin alphabet has 26 letters of which at least 3 are unneeded (C as K or S, Q as KW, and X as KS). This leads to a horrible situation where a lot of sounds no longer have letters (Futhorc didn't get all the sounds, but still did better with 33 letters of which something like 11 were vowels). Some English sounds like the S in "treaSure" seem to have no real, unique spelling at all. Others like th and th have no indicator if it is supposed to be voiced like "THen" or unvoiced like "THink" (we used to have thorn and eth for this). We have 18 unique consonants and 24 common consonant sounds.

The vowel situation is even more dire. We have just 5 vowels and around 20 common vowels leaving each vowel desperately overloaded with all kinds of weird phonics "rules" and almost all of them having either multiple rules or different pronunciations for the same word (eg, "reed" vs "red" in "I read the book"). There needs to be massive vowel reform (either a ton of stable digraphs, diacritics, or more letters) so that sounds can be differentiated properly.

Spelling reform could all but eliminate our illiteracy problems and open a whole new world of possibilities to more than half of all Americans. In a world dominated by ever-increasing volumes of information, these people would have much better lives if we lowered the bar of learning to read to something more attainable.