Simplified Spelling Society

Did you know that the English language has a Simplified Spelling Society?  It was started around the turn of the century (19-20) and had a goal to make English an easier language to learn and understand through spelling simplification.  They want the language to grow and change and have writing that better reflects the pronunciation.  One of their arguments was that all our extra letters waste lots of paper and ink.  Anyway, this group is still alive and well today.  One of their current initiatives is the freespell, where people are incouraged to randomly change words in their writing to be closer phonetically.  To signify this and let people know that it is not out of ignorance that they are making these errors/changes, they are to designate this with an "f" at the top of the paper and a corresponding footnote.  So basically, put an F at the top and you have free reign to neglect spell check.  Now don't get me wrong, this is not a bad idea, exactly.  The language should continue to evolve and that includes the written form.  And making it easier to learn would certainly be helpful.  And it's true that a large scale initiative to make sudden changes would probably not succeed.  However, neither will a few people with misspellings in their writing.  Perhaps as blogs continue with loose grammar, abreviations, and a fast pace that is accepted as imperfect, this medium will help lanuage change.  I never knew it existed before.  They've chosen a hard place to enact change, however I wish them luck.

Comments

[John Myles White]

While I entirely support any group debating the merits of modernizing English spelling (the worse orthographic system of any European language I know), the truth is that if we are going to spell English properly we need more characters, not fewer. We have between two and three times more distinct sounds than letters in our alphabet. Getting rid of any letters is just a poor choice even if makes the spelling of night more obvious.