With its 44 sounds represented by 1,100 different letter arrangements—to say nothing of silent letters, confusing vowel combinations and homonyms—English spelling is so convoluted that Mark Twain once quipped it must have been “invented by a drunken thief.”
In Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling, self-professed “crap speller” David Wolman, MA ’00, takes an orthography-themed road trip to try and understand how “i before e, except after c” came to be. (Incidentally, “olde” was invented not in a medieval monastery, but on Madison Avenue.)
For nearly as long as English has had relatively stable spelling, people have been trying to reform it. Prominent proponents of simplified systems have included Benjamin Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt, Melvil Dewey of Dewey Decimal System fame (who changed his given name from Melville to eliminate extraneous letters), and Stanford University president David Starr Jordan.
Add to that list Allan Kiisk, a retired professor of engineering, fluent in three languages. Kiisk, MS ’68, has developed a spelling system in which each letter represents a single spoken sound. The method, called Simpel-Fonetik, ditches “unnecessary” letters c, q, x and y, and introduces new symbols to differentiate among the various sounds of the letter a.
Gud luk with thät!
