Spell check – or ‘spel chek’?
For many people spelling has always been a bugbear (this word derives from an obsolete meaning of bug = bogey + bear). Now, the English Spelling Society has devised a new system,
Traditional Spelling Revised (TSR),
TSR will change some 18 per cent of words: wash becomes wosh; love is luv; educate, edducate; field, feeld; and surrender, surender.
Stephen Linstead, a retired civil servant who is behind TRS, said the result is as predictable as modern French spelling and will ease the burden of tens of thousands of children.
The International English Spelling Congress said that TRS will be promoted in the hope that it gains support and “will eventually become the new norm, thereby accelerating access to literacy”.
Those who have supported spelling reform in the past have included Charles Darwin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, H G Wells, Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt, the Duke of Edinburgh, and my father, who was working on a pbonetic dictionary 50 years ago when he died; it was called Ilex (the holm oak). Sadly his drafts have disappeared.
A knotty problem
The story of TSR was reported in the Sunday Times on 18 April. And in last Sunday’s Letters to the Editor, Professor Simon Horobin of Magdalen College, Oxford, wrote: “The plan to make spelling reflect pronunciation more closely fails because of the variety of British accents and because removing silent letters, such as the “k” in “knot”, creates a different set of problems.”
Jean Inson, who has taught in a primary school for 40 years, added: “Changing the way English is spelt will not improve matters. If the new scheme is taken up, it will immediately form a barrier between children and classic stories, newspapers, instructions on medicine bottles and much more.
“It is the responsibility of teachers, with the help of parents, to ensure that children develop a love of reading. Large classes are no excuse. My largest class had 46 children: they would read in groups, and I would make sure I listened to each group.”
Indeed, as Colin Hayes pointed out, poor spelling usually provides clues to detect scam emails and texts, because they often originate from overseas.
Don’t get me rong
While spelling has always come easily to me, I sympathize with people who struggle. And I maintain that English is a strong and flexible language, where the key thing is to make yourself understood.
Perhaps there is a middle way whereby young people start with phonetic spelling for words which are easy to get when spoken or written – e.g. rong for wrong.
Some universities are allowing their students more room for error in their spelling, especially if they are dyslexic or English is not their main language. Indeed a few universities won’t mark students down for poor punctuation, because this and good grammar/ spelling are considered elitist. But that is a different matter, as I explained in a recent newsletter. Incorrect punctuation can easily change the meaning of a sentence, which is bad for both the author and the reader.
Take a deep breath
Remember to read out loud and breath to show where you pause, and that is the place to put punctuation marks.