Roosevelt Spelling Reform

I am old enough to remember a teacher warning me not to use "thru" even if the Chicago Tribune did: http://www.chicagotribune.com/ct-per-flash-simplespelling-0229-20120129-story.html

"'For more than 40 years, the Tribune crusaded against an "unspeakable offense," a "monster cruelty": English spelling.

"From Jan. 28, 1934, to Sept. 28, 1975, the newspaper adopted a system of simplified spelling, a cause dearly felt by publisher Col. Robert McCormick.

"He wasn't the first at the newspaper to fight the fight. His grandfather, publisher Joseph Medill, also was a proponent in the mid- to late 1800s, when the movement gained popularity in the United States, though Medill never went so far as to force the changes into print.

"Others who backed the "reformed" spelling included authors Mark Twain and Upton Sinclair, industrialist Andrew Carnegie and President Theodore Roosevelt. In fact, Roosevelt ordered the government printing office in 1906 to use simplified spelling — and it did for a few months — until Congress got him to stop.

"But nobody said no to McCormick, and Tribune readers had to get used to spellings such as burocrat, clew, drouth, hocky, skilful, sofomore, thru, tho and thoro. Other spellings that McCormick pushed have since become accepted, such as catalog, analog, dialog, harken and canceled.

"The official list of words expanded and contracted over the years. The first batch was 24. At its height, the list included dozens of words, some more painful (iland, crum, yern) than others (etiquet, definitly, ameba).

"In 1955, the year McCormick died, the Tribune called it quits, sort of. While most words reverted to the dictionary spelling, editors kept the –og endings and tho, thru and thoro. Interestingly, the paper noted, not one reader commented about the change, which had been made without announcement a week earlier.

"Finally, in 1975, thru was through and so was tho, Tribune editors wrote, as it became clear the public wasn't following their lead. At least not yet. It would be another quarter-century before texting teens would pick up where McCormick had left off..."
 
Maybe I'm missing something but other than replacing the -ed with -t it looks like most of that list are acceptable spellings in American English?
 

kernals12

Banned
Maybe I'm missing something but other than replacing the -ed with -t it looks like most of that list are acceptable spellings in American English?
I guess at the time it wasn't. Also note the dropping of silent letters in vowel pairs such as Phenix instead of Phoenix.
 

FBKampfer

Banned
I don't know what Indoeuropean language is the most regular in spelling and grammar, but English isn't it. It basically has no firm pronunciation rules. German is much maligned, but it has clear rules, and non-native learners of languages do need rules to grip onto.


Can back this up. Gendered articles are a pain in the ass, but the regular rules let you take pretty accurate guesses at things you've never seen or heard before.
 
Can back this up. Gendered articles are a pain in the ass, but the regular rules let you take pretty accurate guesses at things you've never seen or heard before.
That's why we invented French. Just enough rules to make you think you should follow them, exception at every turn and then, and then! Even when something is technically grammatically correct, it's not idiomatic and you still sound like an idiot.
Oh, and spelling doesn't make that much sense either
 
I lived six months in Poland and it took me that long just to get the pronounciation right. Can't speak any but I can pronounce it!
Not even talking about... Gaelic *shudder*

Irish and Scottish Gaelic spelling is more logical than English, once you understand the rules. The problem is that you're trying to fit two sets of consonants (palatalised and velarised like Russian) into an alphabet without diacritics (well, we used to have diacritics for consonants, such as ċ, but they were got rid of during the last spelling reform) so "glide vowels" are used to indicate which consonants are hard and which soft, and which also has two forms of mutation that the first letter of a word can undergo and chooses to make it clear what the original word is, e.g. ar an mbord (on the table) rather than ar an mord. Manx had "logical spelling" imposed upon it and as a result is incomprehensible in its written form to other Gaelic speakers.

http://www.nualeargais.ie/gnag/ortho.htm
 
Irish and Scottish Gaelic spelling is more logical than English, once you understand the rules. The problem is that you're trying to fit two sets of consonants (palatalised and velarised like Russian) into an alphabet without diacritics (well, we used to have diacritics for consonants, such as ċ, but they were got rid of during the last spelling reform) so "glide vowels" are used to indicate which consonants are hard and which soft, and which also has two forms of mutation that the first letter of a word can undergo and chooses to make it clear what the original word is, e.g. ar an mbord (on the table) rather than ar an mord. Manx had "logical spelling" imposed upon it and as a result is incomprehensible in its written form to other Gaelic speakers.

http://www.nualeargais.ie/gnag/ortho.htm
So that's where all those extra letters come from! I figured the natives were just screwing with me
 
Some opf the proposed changes are turning a regular word, like "Fix/Fixed" into an irregular one, "fix/fixt" which can't make the spelling any easier.
 
The critical part is making sure that older works can be read. There's a timeline...a plan to make access to older writing much harder by "reforming" spelling once per generation, so that the previous generation's writings seem quaint, and understanding older stuff is progressively more difficult. Getting people to change how they pronounce things would justify subsequent "spelling reforms" as part of a long term plan, much like "newspeak" but more subtle.
 

kernals12

Banned
The critical part is making sure that older works can be read. There's a timeline...a plan to make access to older writing much harder by "reforming" spelling once per generation, so that the previous generation's writings seem quaint, and understanding older stuff is progressively more difficult. Getting people to change how they pronounce things would justify subsequent "spelling reforms" as part of a long term plan, much like "newspeak" but more subtle.
I think it would be fine, Americans can easily understand British English despite odd spellings (i.e. caliber and calibre)
 
I think it would be fine, Americans can easily understand British English despite odd spellings (i.e. caliber and calibre)

A few spelling reforms a generation apart, especially if carefully planned, might well make older works much less accessible.
 
How is English hard to teach? You have no gender, no conjugaison, no gendered adjectives and no declinaison. It's by far the easiest of all European languages to learn (don't know for the rest)

Lots of non phonetic spellings. What is the point of having "Ph" make an "f" sound? Also why does it need to be "have" instead of "hav" or "tough" instead of "tuff"?

"Ough" has six different sounds depending on words as well, it can be a pain in the ass when learning at first.


 
And Germany conveniently reformed their language in 1996 to make it easier to learn.

Those changes were minimal and hardly helpful to foreigners, who still have to go thr(o)u(gh) gendered nouns, adjective declension and compound verbs whose meanings can only rarely be inferred from their originating parts. Not to mention all of the non romance vocabulary.
 
I lived six months in Poland and it took me that long just to get the pronounciation right. Can't speak any but I can pronounce it!
Not even talking about... Gaelic *shudder*

My wife’s best friend was born in Poland and speaks Polish and said it’s possibly the hardest language to learn. Frankly I can’t fathom why people cracked “Polish are stupid” jokes when their language to the untrained eye looks like someone just took random lines off an eye chart and turned them into words, yet they figure it out and the rest of us are left to scratch our heads and go, “Huh?”

So yes, Polish is a bitch to speak, but for written, I can’t imagine anything more insane than Japanese. Two syllabaries - not alphabets - that are both twice as long as the Roman alphabet, those weird tick-marks and one sequence with those fucking circles to indicate a “p” sound, and having to know something like 2,000 kanji just to read a newspaper. Imagine needing to know the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets and a fuckton of hieroglyphics just to be halfway literate and you have written Japanese.
 
How is English hard to teach? You have no gender, no conjugaison,

Really?

http://conjugator.reverso.net/conjugation-english-verb-be.html

no gendered adjectives and no declinaison.

Really?

http://abacus-es.com/sat/nouns_pronouns.html

It's by far the easiest of all European languages to learn (don't know for the rest)

You rate English as easy, based off its lack of grammatical gender. Fair enough (as someone who did German in school, I hated grammatical gender with a passion). Problem is, Finnish doesn't have a grammatical gender either. Or a future tense. And vanishingly few prepositions. And, unlike English, it actually obeys grammatical rules, and is nearly completely phonetic. Finnish ought to be the easiest language in the world, by your reasoning... except that it is commonly considered one of the hardest (on account of the fourteen cases thing. Which is unfair. The nastiest thing about Finnish is the consonant mutation).

I'd say it's really swings and roundabouts. What makes English uniquely easy, I think, is that it is so easy to achieve the all-important immersion. English is everywhere.
 
Last edited:
Most of these are good changes. That said, dropping the e after g (acknowledgment, e.g.) actually messes with phonetics rules. It makes spelling less phonetic rather than more. And replacing 'ed' with 't' makes spelling conform more to pronunciation but at the price of complicating the spelling rules. A rule that you add 'ed' to create the past participle is simpler than one where sometimes you add a 't' instead.
 
I count six possible forms for be (am/are/is/was/were/being).
To this, I shall reply: "Welcome to HELL: http://la-conjugaison.nouvelobs.com/du/verbe/etre.php "

http://abacus-es.com/sat/nouns_pronouns.html
Well, not what I meant (I might have mispoke).
Let's say, you're speaking about a chair.
If you say "The Chair is broken", "I seat next to the chair." "This piece of wood is from the chair." or "This is the chair's cushion." you write the chair in the same way.
In German, it'd be (in order) Der Stuhl (Nomative), Den Stuhl (accusative), Dem Stuhl (dative), Des Stuhles (genitive)


I'd say it's really swings and roundabouts. What makes English uniquely easy, I think, is that it is so easy to achieve the all-important immersion. English is everywhere.
Of course, that's the key point and you're entirely right! English is spoken everywhere and easily accessible compared to German, which has a limited cultural output
 
Top