Clearest Problems of Modern English Spelling

The Clearest Issues with Modern English Spelling that could be corrected without replacing it with an entirely new system.

This is an essay about English spelling. However, it may be of interest to those involved with the Anglish project who wish to devise new spellings.

I think the clearest place where English spelling is sub-optimal is the use of spelling variants (mainly redundant vowel digraphs) that never correspond to different diaphonemes (in words that follow regular spelling-pronunciation correspondences). However, some people also see utility in having etymological information encoded in spelling. Interestingly, most of the spelling variants that never correspond to a distinction of pronunciation, also do not correspond regularly to an etymological distinction. The most etymological information they give at best is hints as to what the source language was; they generally don’t mark distinctions between etymologically different vowel phonemes.

The only arguments I can think of that remain in favor of these variants would be:

a) having arbitrary variant spellings for the same sound in different words causes different words to have a more distinct shape. Because of this, it is easier for experienced readers to read (the “bouma” hypothesis). I think this argument is pretty lame, because even if the variants don’t look like each other, one of them might look more like another word (for example, the digraph oa has the same bouma as the digraph ea). And of course, the “bouma” hypothesis was never proven.

b) Having arbitrary variant spellings for the same sound allows us to spell homophones differently, which is a good thing (because it prevents confusion or something like that).

Well, maybe. If this is a real advantage, it would still have to be weighed against the cost of learning and remembering the variants and which words have which spelling.

Neither of these arguments convince me, so I’m going to make some recommendations for what  the optimal respelling of these sounds should be, if their spelling were to be reformed. The recommendations are mainly for a reform that keeps most of the rest of the current English spelling system in place.

Redundant digraphs:

Long O/digraph OE and digraph OA

oCe, oaC, o# and oe# are the same vowel phoneme for everyone.

Therefore, the distinction between words like bone and loan is in general completely useless.

It doesn’t regularly reflect any etymologicial distinction. The only slight information it encodes is origin language: words with the “oa” digraph are not Latin or Greek-derived, but generally Anglish or French.

Use of o# and oe# is slightly more regular:

In monosyllables, oe# clearly indicates the GOAT lexical set, while o# frequently represent the GOOSE vowel in a subset of common content words.

In multi-syllabic words, generally o# is used to represent the unstressed GROTTO vowel, while oes# is used to represent the plural. Although this rule is somewhat regular, it still causes difficulty for native speakers, c.f. Dan Quayle’s confusion about “potatoe”.

Ways to resolve the problem using current rules:

Etymology-based: If we wanted to take advantage of the already existent different spellings to repurpose them to mark an etymological distinction, it might make sense to use oCe to represent originally short vowels that became lengthened due to being in an open syllable, and oaC to represent originally long vowels, correspoding to OE ā. However, the problem with this is that there was also shortening of the reflex of ā in closed syllables or due to trisyllabic laxing, as in “holiday”. So this method doesn’t even show the etymology in all cases. And an etymology-based spelling system that indicates a misleading etymology part of the time is worse than useless.

Simplicity-based: We might choose to use only the digraph “oa” in order to avoid using the problematic silent e. However, this looks odd in Latinate words, and anyway it is not possible to get rid of silent e without completely breaking the current system of English orthography.

Since we’re going to have to use both “o” and “silent e” in some cases anyway, we might as well use it in all cases. Therefore, the digraph “oa” should be eliminated, and replaced with “o”, with silent e’s added where they would be necessary. (Masha Bell reaches the same conclusion as I do, coming from a slightly different perspective).