Kids Corner

It started about 1000 years ago - before printing existed - when scribes (usually monks who were the few people who knew how to write) decided that joined-up writing was difficult to read when you had several downward strokes next to each other, as in the word 'mum' (mum). They were right: it was hard to see where one letter ended and the next began. So they decided to use the 'o' for every 'u' before an 'm' or 'n'.

That's how we ended up with 'monk', 'some', 'month' and 'mother', although for today's purposes it is illogical because....
a) we now have printed books
b) most writing is done on a keyboard and
c) joined-up writing is not the most popular way to communicate.

Using 'o' instead of 'u' has just been handed down from generation to generation.

The main reason for most of the unnecessary '-e' endings is that early scribes and printers preferred long words to short ones. There was a good reason for this: they were paid by line of text. So longer words and doubled letters earned them more money!

They also had an eye for neatness: they hated ragged-looking margins, or space at the end of a line. When a word fitted in a line giving a neat ending they used sensible spellings like 'at', 'had' and 'it'. But, when they had space to fill, they used 'atte', 'hadde' and 'itte'.

Many of the useless '-e' endings were dropped around 400 years ago, but many have also survived - with no purpose. Examples of these are 'gone', 'done' and 'love'.

In fact 7 million British adults and 40 million US adults are 'functionally illiterate' (meaning for everyday purposes they're not able to read and write). That's around 20% of all British and 20% of all American adults.

That means one 1 in 5 of us never do learn to spell properly.

2 Years!
 

Italian is one of the many languages that has had its spelling modernised, so that you spell words as you hear them and read them as you spell them. Many other European countries have also modernised their languages in the last century. A simple spelling system is called a 'shallow orthography'.

English, however, has not done so systematically over the past 600 years.

So English people don't spell by sticking to rules as the Italians do. We train ourselves to remember the spelling from dictionaries, memorising the look of the word like a photograph. And, because nearly 4000 of our spellings are quirky, we take a long time to learn to spell 'properly'. If 'head', 'said' and 'friend' (which rhyme with 'bed' and 'send') were spelt logically, we would have learnt the spelling much faster - we would have learnt 'hed', 'sed' and 'frend' in no time. A complicated spelling system, such as English uses, is called a 'deep orthography'.

Before 1066 English spelling was quite simple, but during the next few centuries French, Latin and Greek words entered the language - and major pronunciation changes.

Over time, as pronunciation changed and new words entered the language, the match between letters and sounds broke down. As a result the spelling became incoherent.

Like all human systems, spelling occasionally needs modernizing. For ease of reading and writing, spelling should show pronunciation and pronunciation should determine spelling. If the match between letters and sounds breaks down, then learning to read and write becomes harder and all education can suffer. The lack of literacy in Britain is estimated to cost the nation £10 billion a year.*

For this reason, most languages have modernised their spelling in the 20th century. English, however, has not done so systematically over the past 600 years.

Although the British House of Commons actually passed a Spelling Reform Bill in 1953, nothing was done about it. Now it's up to the British people to decide if they want it enough to ask for that reform to happen.

*The report by Ernst & Young from which this figure is taken is quoted in a government paper 'National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal'.

Since the 17th century when the printers chose the spelling forms we now consider correct, eminent linguists, educationists and other famous people (such as American statesman Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster of Webster's dictionary and Isaac Pitman) have noisily called for reform to English spelling. The Simplified Spelling Society (founded in 1908) proposed introducing 'New Spelling' - a fully phonetic system - and has carried the cause forward to this day. The American president Theodore Roosevelt took up the cause of the movement to reform English spelling in 1914. It was great news when, in 1953, the British House of Commons actually passed a Spelling Reform Bill. The bad news was that, despite research done at the time which unquestionably demonstrated that children learnt to spell faster with a simpler spelling system, nothing was done about it! Different people have proposed alternative schemes for simplifying our spelling over the years, but what they all agree is that SOMETHING has to be done about it. There are roughly 3,500 words that are irregular, but if even the 500 most commonly misspelled words were simplified, it would have a big impact on how quickly people learn to read and write: we wouldn't have to put up with 1 in 5 people not coping and 1 in 5 adults not being able to read and write.

Please feel free to copy and paste this list and add any words of 3 letters or more that you have - or used to have - difficulty spelling. Then e-mail it to a friend or friends as an attachment to add their pet hate words.

When the list reaches 500 words, forward it to Mashabell@aol.com of the Simplified Spelling Society.

Difficult words to spell

• Parrallel
• Believe / Receive
• Separate /Desperate
• Lead / Led

Can you suggest a better way to spell them?