RIGHTING THE MOTHER TONGUE, FROM OLDEENGLISH TO EMAIL: THE TANGLED STORY OFENGLISH SPELLINGby David WolmanNew 421.52 WolOrthography is a little-known and relatively caliginous subject; its broadest definition is the investigation as to how spoken language is committed to a written format, including the symbols utilized and the process by which such characters are engendered and employed.
In other words, orthography is a synonym for spelling.
David Wolman plumbs the heady depths of English language spelling in his book Righting the Mother Tongue, etc., which was published in October 2008 by Collins. I love the English language and rejoice in its bizarre spelling traditions. I find it delightful that the letter combination ough can be pronounced in such a bewildering multiplicity of ways. Consider the following words: bough, cough, dough, enough, and through -- each corresponds with the following words, pronunciation-wise: cow, scoff, flow, puff, and zoo. Behold the glorious, mercurial inconsistency of it all!
The feckless irregularities of English are the very things which make it an extremely difficult language to learn. For centuries, English spelling has been the bane of its speakers' existence, and through the ages scores of individuals have petitioned to have its orthography radically simplified. One of the earliest pioneers of such a movement was the father of the English language dictionary: Samuel Butler (an Englishman), who authored one of the earliest lexicons in 1755.
We are perhaps more familiar with Noah Webster, an American who published the first dictionary on U.S. soil in 1806. Webster championed spelling changes not only to make orthography easier to comprehend, but also to highlight the difference between American English and its British parent. Webster's influence brought about the disappearance of the superfluous "u" in the American spelling of such words as honor, valor, and color (in England they remain honour, valour, and colour to this day). President Theodore Roosevelt, author H.G. Wells, and playwright George Bernard Shaw were all devoted disciples of spelling mediation.
I was quite surprised to find Melvil Dewey not only on this illustrious list, but that he was at one time America's most impassioned disciple of the simplified spelling movement. Melvil created the Dewey Decimal System, the numerical classification scheme used by public and school libraries to arrange non-fiction materials. At birth his first name was spelled Melville, but in college he dropped the second "l" and silent "e"--for a brief time he even spelled his surname "Dui" in an effort to prove more phonetic. Dewey was cautioned to stifle his spelling-streamline-mania by his employer at his first job as a librarian, at New York's Columbia University.
Dewey courted the philanthropic paragon Andrew Carnegie and was given a generous allottment of financial support for his spelling simplification efforts (Carnegie was himself a poor speller who was very much in sympathy with Melvil's spelling philosophy.) Clearly, however, Dewey's and his colleagues' designs to reinvent English spelling were met with a stunning paucity of success (although various organizations championing the same cause are still extant today.)
Spelling reform does have its positive points. Children would have a much easier time of things in learning the language, for one; non-English speakers would benefit greatly as well if the many contradictory, illogical, and arcane traditions of our written language were to be eradicated.
On the other hand, spelling reform initiaitves have traditionally met with incredibly robust resistance from the masses. Spelling purists (of whom I am one) find the very concept alarming (indeed!), but the majority just cannot be bothered having to re-learn the nuts and bolts of spelling. One of the reasons English has such convoluted spelling practices is because the bulk of the language is borrowed from other tongues. Wolman shares a very brief list of some examples: bungalow (Hindi), guitar (Spanish), bamboo (Malay), kiosk (Turkish), algebra (Arabic), parasite (Greek), cameo (Italian), and curry (Tamil). A huge number of English words are derived from Dutch and German, the two languages with which English shares the most common ground. Moreover, English has a substantial variety of vowel sounds but very few vowels-- re-establishing spelling rules would mean instituting tortuous letter combinations to represent the same sounds, or inventing altogether new letters.
English, like all languages, is constantly encountering alteration, moderation, permutation, and even corruption. An excellent example of this is the contemporary phenomenon of texting, where "texters" utilize all manner of abbreviation in order to save themselves time and exertion. I find this practice as annoying as I do unseemly; besides which, I end up mouthing what the bizarre alpha-numeric symbols are supposed to mean and become frustrated that I'm not reading actual words.
I laughed at myself at times while reading this book. While the American spelling of the word is catalog, I still insist on writing catalogue, which is the British style. I also append the silent "e" in the purals of words that do not actually require them ("volcanoes") and insist on doubling consonants (also a British holdover) for some words (the plural of "bus" in the U.S. is "buses", which to me looks like the second syllable of the word "abuses", and thus has me pronouncing it the same way when I see it written--I use "busses").
This book is not solely for those of us with a penchant for orthographic chronology. Wolman is a breezy writer whose infectious curiosity and self-deprecating humor make for an engaging style of prose. At the outset he bluntly confesses his spelling ineptitude and part of his interest in this subject was a desire to learn why he has always found the subject so very arduous. Both its tone and content make for a highly enjoyable read and I recommend it unreservedly!
