| 词组 | spelling reform |
| 释义 | spelling reform The inadequacies of English spelling were apparent to some observers as early as the middle of the 16th century—long before our present traditional but inconsistent system was established. Three such observers were Thomas Smith, John Hart, and William Bullokar. Each of them was interested in phonetics and was aware that there were more sounds in English than there were letters in the alphabet—then counted as 24 letters, with i and j and u and v being used as variant forms rather than as one distinct vowel and one distinct consonant. And each of them devised an extended alphabet to remedy the problem, at least one of which, Hart's, was made into printing type, with books being printed from it. All of the new alphabets were failures, but one radical suggestion from both Smith and Hart— that i and u be used exclusively as vowels and j and v as consonants—did bear fruit after a couple of centuries. The hope of these early reformers was to institute a more phonetic system of spelling. (Bullokar was a teacher, and he may have been the first to go on record with the complaint that it was hard to teach children to read with the current method of spelling. The same complaint resulted in the Initial Teaching Alphabet of the mid-20th century). The hope of almost every subsequent spelling reformer has been the same: to bring the spelling of English more in line with its pronunciation. Opposing the reformers have been those who have felt that a strictly phonetic system would obscure the etymological background of words. Jonathan Swift, for one, in 1712 criticized the "foolish Opinion ... that we ought to spell exactly as we speak." The conflict of opposing sets of reformers and etymology preservers in the end produced almost no change of a theoretical sort in English spelling. Probably the most successful spelling reformer was Noah Webster. His reading books, spellers, and dictionaries from about 1787 through 1828 succeeded in instituting most of the major systematic differences between American and British spelling. That we spell honor, music, and theater the way we do is largely his achievement. Webster was not initially a spelling reformer; he had written in 1783 disapproving of several proposals for reformed spelling—the subject was much in the air after the end of the Revolutionary War—and objecting in particular to dropping the u in honour. But in 1786 he met Benjamin Franklin, an ardent spelling reformer (Franklin, too, devised an improved alphabet). Franklin seems to have won Webster over to the side of reform, for by 1787 Webster was directing his printer to use the spellings honor, music, and theater, then usually spelled honour, musick, and theatre. The reformed Webster was an adherent of phonetic spelling, although his system was not as radical as several proposed by such contemporaries as Franklin, because he more or less restricted himself to the regular alphabet. It is interesting to note that where he can be said to have been successful—as in the three words above—the spellings he promoted were not outright inventions, but alternative forms that had been in occasional use all along {honor, for instance, is used in Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness, published in 1607). His more phonetic innovations, such as iz (for is), improovment, yeer, ritten, and reezon, did not catch on at all. Although Webster put what we might call his simplified spellings—honor, music, ax, plow—in his dictionaries, he forebore from including his phonetic inventions. This was probably no more than a matter of good business, as there was considerable controversy about the reformed spellings. Although phonetic systems and new alphabets—some of them very elaborate—continued to be proposed during the 19th century (and are still being proposed today), the next high tide of spelling reform concerned itself less with the implementation of a whole system of spelling than with the simplification, chiefly through the omission of silent letters, of the spelling of particular words. This movement, which was better organized and better financed than previous ones, began in the 1880s and lasted into the first decades of the 20th century. It involved leading scholars, writers, journalists, lexicographers, and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, and several professional organizations as well. Around the turn of the century the participants in this crusade had high hopes of success; books were written predicting adoption of the lists of simplified spellings, and some newspapers and some of the writers associated with the movement actually began using the new forms. President Theodore Roosevelt was convinced of the Tightness of the movement, and in 1906 he issued an executive order directing the Government Printing Office to use a list of 300 simplified spellings suggested by the Simplified Spelling Board. But the GPO resisted, and eventually the order was withdrawn. In spite of the involvement and approval of many prominent figures (including Mark Twain), the simplified spelling movement eventually petered out, leaving behind only a handful of accepted forms—catalog, analog, tho, thru—which have had varying degrees of success. The Chicago Tribune adopted many simplified spellings and stuck with them longer than anyone else, but finally threw in the towel in 1975. So four hundred years and more of proposals for spelling reform have left a few tracks in our spelling, but have had no systematic effect at all. You can see two obvious reasons for the failure. First, if a phonetic spelling scheme were adopted, we would be further from a consistent spelling than we are now, for the language is not pronounced consistently. The more accurate the phonetic system, the more varied would be the resulting spellings. Our present system has at least the virtue of having one traditional spelling that can serve as the visual equivalent of any number of variant pronunciations. The second reason is the considerable investment in time and effort every literate user of English has made in learning the present system. Few of us would be willing to throw that away and learn a new system, no matter how efficient it was. |
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