by hajile | 2025-10-03 01:30:04+00:00
> i find it hard to believe the true statistics are as dire as you say but i'm prepared to accept that it is.

https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...

> It's annoying enough for me when some books use French words.

From around 1060 to 1360, French was the official language of England. It wasn't normal French though as William the Conqueror spoke Norman French. Both French dialects mixed in what can only be considered English style. For example Norman French said Warder while other French speakers said Guarder. English adopted both Warden and Guard, but gave them two different meanings. Overall, some 30% of our words are French though over 800 of the most common 1000 words are English in origin.

> would adding half a dozen letters to the alphabet really help with increasing literacy?

ITA (International Teaching Alphabet) shows the benefits and problems.

ITA students rocketed ahead the first couple of years and could read way more words than their traditional counterparts. The problem was the transition. Learning both systems seems to have evened things up or maybe even caused a net negative for ITA students. I believe this was because they had to learn two sets of spelling for everything. If you would like to see the difficulty in learning a new way to read/write and have a bit of fun, try learning Shavian script.

In an ideal world, they would have phonetic spelling only. I believe under those conditions that their advantage would continue to grow all the way through school. The problem is that this study is unethical to conduct because even if it is correct, the students would graduate and be unable to read traditional English which would permanently harm them.

This leaves the tricky problem of bridging the gap. This can't be done too quickly or the older generations get left behind. There's also an issue of transcribing everything into the new spelling. Technology has made that easier than ever, but it would still be a very hard proposition.

The first and easiest step is cleaning up the spellings using the letters we currently have. Stuff like all those -ough endings get rewritten in sane letters as an accepted alternative spelling. Silent letters start going away. We start moving toward consistent vowel and consonant digraphs. This will take time for older people to adapt to, but more consistent rules will mean they will have an easier time sounding them out.

After this, we start adding back letters. Maybe eth and thorn come back for the two "th" sounds. We certainly need a new letter for the S in "treaSure" and maybe bring back the elongated S to use for SH. At some point, we then start working on slowly adding new characters to stand in for the vowel digraphs.

I don't think you could convince adults to do more than a couple of steps at a time each generation. Such a plan would likely take decades to maybe even a century or two. Until the creation of the printing press, such slow changes were considered normal. Only in recent times have we attempted to gate-keep what "real English" is. If we allow the language to grow more organically, I think it could be guided into something far better than we have today.