Spelling Reforms

From 4th all the way through 8th grade, I was the spelling bee kid. In 7th grade, I even made it to nationals, though unfortunately not far enough to get to the televised part.

However, you don't need to be a spelling bee kid to know that English orthography is complete and utter ass. For god's sake, it's the only language where spelling is so fucked as to make spelling bees viable as a competition!

It should come as no surprise, then, that plenty of people over the years have had a go at trying to make English spelling better. Most of their attempts were terrible. This is because they were trying to do it with the Latin alphabet, which is hilariously unsuited to writing the sounds of the English language. I don't blame them, though; only a Latin-alphabet reform would be able to expect to garner any traction among people. Who wants to have to learn dozens of brand-new letters?

Another big reason why most spelling reforms suck is due to the abundance of accents with which people speak English. While there's very little variation in consonant sounds across accents, vowels are all over the place. For instance, the vowel in LOT as pronounced by just about any Brit does not exist in my accent. I tend to turn the LOT vowel into the FATHER or CAUGHT vowel, often at random. In some words (e.g. "what," "was"), it even becomes STRUT. So any reform that retains LOT would require me to learn what words contain that vowel so I can spell them properly. Likewise, non-rhotic accents would need to learn what words to spell with rhotic vowels that they don't otherwise pronounce if a given spelling reform were to retain rhotic vowels. Many spelling reforms fail to account for various splits and mergers of vowel sounds across accents.

There's also the fact that any spelling reform that deals specifically with pronunciation will end up jettisoning quirks of spelling that preserve relationships between words, as well as obscuring etymology. For instance, there's a silent <g> in "phlegm" to reflect the voiced <g> in "phlegmatic," and the <ph> in both shows that they came from Greek. That said, I don't really see the loss of this information as such a tragedy. Why should etymology and whatnot be encoded into spelling?

I hope you can see at this point that despite how broken conventional English spelling is, any reform to it would have its work cut out for it. However, there's a few I actually like, and I've collected them here on my website so I can ramble about my opinions on them. On their respective pages, I'll go into how they handle the challenges any English spelling reform faces, as well as link you to various resources for them.

I should also note that I'm under no illusion that these reforms or any other will ever actually become the new way we write English. Like, no, that's never happening. Ultimately, these are just for personal use. For fun.

The Fun Riform

The Fun Riform is the only Latin-script spelling reform I like, for reasons I'll go into on its page. Though even then, it uses diacritics, since its creator believes no Latin-script spelling reform can function and look good without them. I'm inclined to agree.

Shavian

Shavian is the spelling reform that came the closest to actually becoming a Thing, mostly because it was commissioned by a rich British playwright in his will. Of course, when you're rich, you're only allowed to do whatever you want with your money while you're still alive, and by the time the vultures were done with the man's fortune, only a fraction of the money he set aside to fund a spelling reform was actually used for that purpose. Who knows how far it could've gone if it'd had the finances he'd intended for it?

Runes

Way back in ye olden times, the Anglo-Saxons wrote in runes. We obviously don't anymore, but some people like to see if runes might be useful for writing today. There are a few competing schools of thought regarding how to adapt runes for modern use, none of them with any terribly significant number of adherents. On this page, I'll introduce you to my favorite among them.