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This article talks about "habits and lack" of governments. Somehow, these two do not belong together for the Netherlands, where the 1955 Spelling Reform was only made because: - in 1947 it was announced that another reform would come. - it had become a habit to change the spelling.

By the way, further scientific research has proven that: - People learn the word-pictures, even with alphabetical. This has some serious consequences:

 1. Spelling reform is annoying for anybody who wants to read or write.
 2. The quickest recognition can take place if a morpheme always stays the same.
 3. Phonological spellings do not speed up any learning process.
 4. A phonological spelling for English would harm the language abilities of children.

It has thus been proven, that the English spelling isn't too bad. It is very stable, as practically all documents follow the standard spelling, and differences between the US and the UK are very small. It also follows the morphological principle quite good (day-daily is one of the exceptions).

So the only case where spelling reform would be useful, is when morphological structures are not clear, or when the correspondance between speech and writing have become too large. But also this last thing does not apply to English spelling, as 85% of all spellings is completely regular! There is no case where "cat" would be spelt as "dog".

People recognize the general shape of words, not the exact "word-picture". Therefore, spelling reforms that do not radically change the shape of the words do not have a high transition cost. Cut spelling is an example of such a spelling reform. AdamRetchless 22:31, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)

According to most numbers I've read, something like half of the most common English words contain spelling exceptions. I don't know where this person got the 85% statistic, but the only way I can possibly see that as being true is if a couple hundred spelling rules were used (there are about 90 basic ones, for ~40 sounds). If phonological spellings don't affect the learning process, why do countries like Spain and Italy have lower rates of dyslexia and such? And if a phonological spelling would harm the language abilities of children, you'd better notify the Spanish, Italians, Finnish and any linguist creating an orthography for a language that doesn't have one yet - because they're all very phonemic, and presumably that means that Spaniards ought to be deficient, when the opposite is actually true. As for reading by word shapes - the only difference is that you'd learn different "word shapes" - but they'd be easier to learn. -Anonymous

It's probably worth pointing out a difficulty for spelling reform based on pronounciation. The pronounciation of words varies significantly between regions (in English, at any rate), and historical distinctions which have been lost in some dialects persist in others. Thus, a system which might be more "logical" for one group of speakers could be less logical for others.

-- Paul

Several words are described as "anachronisms". This label was incorrectly applied to "thru" and "nite". Both of these spellings are common in informal writing, and "thru" is often seen in "thruway" because it fits on the road signs. I don't know what the author was getting at by labeling them as anachronisms, but perhaps there is another word that describes them better. Obscure? AdamRetchless 22:31, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Those sections are perhaps inevitably pretty subjective. It currently states that "cigaret" never caught on but that "agast" did (a bit), which I find to be pretty much backward. It could also use the addition of some more of Noah Webster's successful whims - for instance the dropped silent e in judgement/acknowledgement/abridgement/lodgement. Unfortunately I don't know where to put these chronologically - they were certainly in place by the 1913 edition (which rather coyly notes that the full spellings are "sometimes" used "in England" ;). Theatre/theater is also missing - they're now in about equal use, though the popularity of the revised spelling seems to be waning (a section on the sociological forces that popularise or revile reformed spellings might be interesting in itself). - toh 20:43, 2004 Dec 15 (UTC)

There is an error - I believe, in classifying American English spellings under dominant spelling; I think it better to place them under "variant spellings" while making clear that they are the dominant spelling for American English, instead of insisting on something that is not true for the vast majority of the English-literate world. User:anonymous

I'm not rejecting your main point, but I looked up some facts, and Americans represent 1/2-2/3 of native English speakers and maybe one third of the persons who use it on a day to day basis...so I don't think anything can represent a "vast majority" of english speakers without including Americans. AdamRetchless 15:28, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Yes, I made a glaring mistake on that... sorry. But I'd like to add that "native" is becoming more of a mystery to define; for instance, some books argue that Singaporeans (educated in an exclusively English medium, and the mother tongue has been mostly reduced to a foreign language; I am sixteen and going through its paces!) are native speakers, while others insist that only Caucasians fit the bill; and some books have "first-class native" and "second-class native" denominations, which seems to be a kind of modern day racism all on its own. User:anonymous

I've noticed that "tyre" -> "tire" is not on the list. It's interesting because the "tyre" spelling is never seen in Canada and "tire" (for the rubber wheel) is never seen in Australia. Also "program" is the only spelling for computer program whereas "programme" coexists with "program" for older uses in Australia.

My recollection of Canadian spelling is that, officially, they follow British usage when the differences cover an entire class of words. For example, Canadians follow the British in the colour class, the theatre class, and (sometimes) in the -ise class, although the American -ize is used in Canada also. Unique words that are written differently in Britain, such as gaol, tyre, kerb and so forth, are spelled in Canada as they are in the United States. Smerdis of Tlön 15:53, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

As a Canadian, I struggle between the American and British spellings. When I write official military correspondance, I use the British spellings. When e-mailing my peers, I use American spelling, as it is closer to the way we pronounce the words. We very frequently consult the Oxford Canadian Dictionary to find the correct spelling. It often lists both British and American variants as equal in preference. When I read the British printing of the Harry Potter novels, some of the spelling looks shocking to me: "plough", when we Canadians use "plow" exclusively. (Brian Merz)

That's pretty true for spelling in Singapore - generally British usage, American terms - best demonstrated as the Singapore English page notes, "sports pages" feature "soccer news". "Tyre" is very interesting too - I believe it's the dominant spelling in Singapore, but it's also true that Singaporeans aren't famous for keeping to their language conventions. Also, perhaps the use of the word "program" for computers is really by poor International English localisation on the part of Microsoft et al... the Mac OS (International English localisation was *removed* quite some time back) avoids this by reverting to the slightly less-familiar "application". User:Anonymous

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French Orthography

As of this year, it would seem the reform might finally see the light. Publications, while not yet in the mainstream, now exist, including a lexicon of the modifications ("le millepatte sur un nénufar", showcasing two of the components of the reform, being a simplification of the rules for composite nouns and the rectification of some words which had what was considered as an anomalous orthography. Associations in the rest of the Francophony have been formed during the period after the adoption of this rectification, and are trying to spread it usage. From the little I know on the field, it is at the very least presented to teachers in colleges and universities in Quebec (and that I'm suggested to take a little time to introduce to students during my peer-to-peer tutor work), and I seem to have heard that teachers in Switzerland are considering its adoption. I'll check for copyright issues however before, but from what I heard the Academy is relatively prompt to answer, so it could be done in one or two weeks. David

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Public domain and distribution

Texts distributed freely on the web are not necessarily considered public domain, am I wrong? David

Just because something's distributed freely online doesn't make it public domain, no. (You can download Linux from a whole lot of places, and of course Misplaced Pages articles are freely available all over the place, but certainly neither is public domain.) There may well be copyright in the work, and if it's not stated in the document you should contact the authors and ask for details. Marnanel 18:35, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)

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Spelling reform poll

Removed and inserted into the Manual of style as suggested below by Cadr.

This is the English Misplaced Pages, and that implies standard English authography (British, American, etc. varients all acceptable). I see no reason to adopt any other spelling method, and it would have to be discussed elsewhere (i.e. in the wikipedia style guide, and that sort of thing). Cadr 17:58, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Peeve

Is there a neutral way to say that reformers can be very nitpicky, while ignoring larger issues of language planning? Something like anathematizing sexist language while ignoring grave cases of sexism?

Other languages' spelling reforms

Here are some rough thoughts of what is missing in this article in the non-English field.

• Changes of script:

  Many languages, especially recently of the former Soviet Union have changed from Cyrillic to Latin; many of those changed from Arabic to Cyrillic at the onset of the soviet period.

  • Malay was written in Arabic script but changed to the Latin script. The former is still in use in Brunei.
  • Turkish was written in Arabic script until the reforms by Ataturk when a Latin script was adopted. See also Ottoman Turkish.

• Changes of spelling:
  • China introduced its standardized simplified characters in the 20th century, they were not adopted in every Chinese-speaking country.
  • Danish had one or more reforms in the late 1940s or 1950s. Changes included replacing "aa" with "å" and ending the practice of capitalizing all nouns as German still does.
  • Dutch The Nederlandse Taalunie or Dutch Language Union was responsible for the modification of the Dutch orthography in 1995. I'm sure there have been several previous reforms.
  • German has undergone several reforms before the current one.
  • Icelandic eradicated the letter "z" in 1973 except in personal and family names. See Talk:Icelandic language (User:Biekko)
  • Irish underwent a spelling reform sometime in the past couple of centuries.
  • Japanese standardized the uses for hiragana and katakana, okurigana; also a few hundred (at most) kanji characters were slightly simplified after WWII. Some kana characters went out of use, when?
  • Korean has more or less eliminated hanja (Chinese characters) - was there an official reform for this in either country? Also several hangul letters have become obsolete - when was this?
  • Spanish used the cedilla (ç) for the sound of the affricate until an orthographic reform in the 18th century. (From Cedilla)
  • Swedish changed its alphabetical order, making å, ä, and ö separate letters coming after z.
  • Yiddish had differing orthographies in Russia and in other communities. A recent effort by YIVO has come up with an apparently popular standard.

Doubtless there is more - this is just off the top of my head as it's a field I've been interested in for some time but not in a very organised way. — Hippietrail 03:35, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Even as an American, I had no idea that "catalogue" and "cancelled" were supposed to be spelled "catalog" and "canceled".Personally, I think that the English language is fine as it is; to change it would be to tarnish the sterling silver of linguistics out of which it is made. Many of the reforms made my Melville Dewey are totally absurd. If he spelled "lodge" as "loj" would he spell "lodged" as "lojd"? That's my take on things. --Amrun en' Sinta

Leading spelling reform proposals?

The "list of leading spelling reform proposals" is a misleading title. This is certainly not a list of the most popular or well-known proposals, so the extent to which these are the "leading proposals" is arguable. For example, I have seen no material about Nuspelynh except for the Nuspelynh website itself, and even that is extremely unlikely to succeed relative to other proposals for two reasons: firstly, it makes no attempt to represent sounds not found in Western American English (e.g. the vowels in the words cot, caught, and calm are spelt identically), and secondly it uses letters like "c", "q" and "x" and vowels, which I think most English speakers would find unacceptable. I don't think at this point we can set out a list of criteria that makes a proposal inherently more likely to succeed, since it will take a long time to even make people aware of spelling reform and willing to go through with it, and their attitudes about "acceptable" and "unacceptable" proposals could easily change in that time. For example, what if North American speakers become more receptive to the idea of using diacritics as Spanish becomes increasingly spoken in the US? By the way, why exactly does the list say that North Americans in particular do not favor diacritics? I haven't met any British, Australian or Indian speakers who advocate diacritics any more than Americans do. Certainly there is a place here for a discussion of how radical a scheme can get before it's too unrealistic, but it's a bit premature to be singling out specific schemes and setting up boundaries between what will and will not be accepted by the general public. — Ливай | ☺ 02:14, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

It does seem that Brits are more receptive to ligatures, at the very least. But nowadays they mostly write them as two letters, e.g. "foetus". -Anonymous

Theodore Roosevelt's spelling reform

This article makes no mention of President Theodore Roosevelt's efforts to reform spelling in the U.S at the beginning of the 20th century. Other Internet sites that I have visited do mention it, but suggest it had no long lasting effect. However when I was working for NASA as a summer intern in 1966, there were two lists of words in the U.S. Government Printing Office Style Manual that mandated certain spellings. One was the familiar list of U.S.--British differences (e.g. color vs. colour). The second was a list of reformed spellings that were only mandated for U.S. Government documents. I was told the lists dated back to the Teddy Roosevelt administration. One word I remember in particular was "align", which came up all the time in my work on guidance systems. In the U.S. Government, the word was required to be spelled aline (also alinement). Our section secretary had to retype (pre-word processor) a long technical memorandum I had authored to change those spellings. --agr 17:36, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

re: The sub-heading List of leading spelling reform proposals... Is unclear wrt to which historical initiatives, versus current politicking (err.. politicing) among the COGNIZATI. No historical 'feel' is given to us readers for current versus past efforts, nor is there a distinction clearly made as to which are US proposals, or those of other English speaking countries. Which fact augments the very point made just above, WHERE IS TR's Letter to the Public Printer of the United States, and mention of the Simplified Spelling Board (Columbia Univ... and for all I know, Mark Twain), or the SSB's newsmaking 'Circular number 6'. Pultzer prize winning British historian Edmund Morris spends several pages (paperback, pp460-461, in Theodore Rex) discussing the impact of Teddy's guidance which targeted 300 words, and kept the press 'buzz' but implies that there was a rare partial failure here by a man who was 'winning everything' at the time. Some historical discussion of where he prevailed, and where he and the SSB did not is surely in order! Fabartus 16:26, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

American variant spellings

It should probably be noted that, at least for the "analog" and "catalog", these words are the dominant forms in American English in some cases.

In my experience,

• analog is commonly used as an adjective (an analog computer), while
• analogue is commonly used as a noun (the toe is an analogue to the finger)

with some crossover in both directions; non-US usage favors "analogue" in all cases.

Also in my experience,

• catalog is commonly used as a noun (The latest Sears catalog), while
• catalogue is commonly found as a verb (I've got to catalogue all of these files).

This might have something to do with the awkwardness of trying to produce the -ing form of "catalog". In any case, there is again some overlap between these uses, and the whole thing seems to be in flux. Non-US usage still favors "catalogue."

Furry-ferry merger

Here's what L. Craig Schoonmaker http://www.geocities.com/sswordday/ has to say about the ferry-furry distinction:

• Quote-THIS is the famous "distinction without a difference", except that there are about 4 times as many -erry's as -urry's. And please note that Dictionary gives woor.ee, foor.ee, and hoor.ee (that's the sound that the U with a 'hat' (circumflex accent) shows: short-OO), which I have not heard so regard as bizarre. Either they heard wrong or they're on drugs.

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• Dictionary, oddly, is sometimes just plain wrong. For instance, "water" is not shown there as ever being pronounced "wut.er", but I listened very carefully to reports of water-main breaks on TV stations in the New York Tristate Metropolitan Area (the broadcasting capital of North America), and wut.er is plainly the pronunciation educated people in this area give that word. The SSWD project, of course, cannot offer "water" precisely because it has more than one common pronunciation.

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• If you put together the -erry's and the -ery's pronounced the same, you get a MASS of words with ER as the crucial spelling, but if you try to use -ury rather than -urry, you get a completely different sound. So I think we'll go with -erry. But I appreciate your views. Cheers.

• Quote-UR, ER, OR, and AR may be pronounced with tiny differences by SOME speakers in SOME dialects as to SOME words. I went to your URL for the Cambridge dictionary, which offers TWO bizarre transliterations (which may or may not be rendered in standard IPA but is opaque to me -- IPA transliterations tend to proceed from the positions of vocal apparatus of the linguists who speak them in preparing to write them; SSWD is concerned about what people HEAR, and if they hear no difference between, for instance, vaann and venn for French "vin", it doesn't matter to them whether the person saying it forms the word one way, because the listener hears it the same no matter which way a speaker might articulate it). Most to the point, the Cambridge dictionary shows TWO pronunciations, British dialect and American standard.

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• I then went to the Merriam-Webster URLs for the other words and clicked on the speaker icon to listen to the pronunciations rendered, in American English, and found no distinction worth making. All those words would rhyme PERFECTLY as most people regard things. Of course, we could avoid the problem altogether by saying that there are two different pronunciations for "worry", so the word can't be changed!

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• For most ordinary , for whom the SSWD project is intended, not for linguistics specialists, there is between a great many word pairs or groups, no difference worth 'worrying' about. There are a lot of overeducated people who have bugaboos about tiny matters of no consequence, and will argue them endlessly, to everyone else's tedium. I'm not about to argue the linguistic equivalent of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, a subject that may have fascinated some medieval theologians but nobody else.

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• The SSWD project is about NEEDED change, and preferably changes that people can readily apply to things they HEAR. One transliteration for a small range of actual sounds is convenient, and all spelling is convention. Few speakers of standard English distinguish in sound between "ferry" and "furry". Having a distinction in spelling for these two HOMONYMS is useful. As to which spelling you favor for a reform of "worry", I have noted that you favor "wurry".

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• The problem may be only that a following-R tends to alter the quality of the vowel before it, for some speakers more than others. I have not yet offered this word (which you plainly render "wurd" and I render "werd") and might select "wurry", on the basis that some people might see it as parallel to "merry", which they pronounce like "Mary". Or I may not offer it at all, since, as some people regard things, it has two pronunciations so cannot be changed if a change would antagonize some significant body of speakers. I am asking for more comments. Cheers.

• Quote- YES, I noted that in checking "merge", some dictionaries use the U with a hat as the vowel. But in any case, that is the ER sound, as shown plainly by the sample words in Dictionary.com's own pronunciation key: "urge, term, firm, word, heard".

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• As for "ont", I suggested that because "ant" is a homophone we can eliminate from a language filled to overflowing with homophones, and seems to those of us who say "ont" -- meaning a large proportion of the best-educated people in the U.S. and almost everybody in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, etc. -- that calling a person by a homophone for an insect is arguably disrespectful. I have no power to impose anything, and the SSWD site is designed mainly to make people think. As for "tord", too-waurd is a spelling pronunciation, and as with ev-er-y and other spelling pronunciations (which my Random House Unabridged labels so people know better than to use them), spelling reformers can properly advise people that tho they think they are being careful to be correct, they are actually being wrong.

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• The distinction between "ferry" and "furry" is, I repeat, not "worth making. All those words would rhyme PERFECTLY as most people regard things." People who try to draw needless distinctions and force people to try to supply only one of essentially interchangeable spellings do spelling reform a disservice. This is not the distinction between "merry" rhyming with "berry" and "merry" rhyming with "Mary". It is TRIVIA that ordinary people do not waste time on and cannot justify wasting educational time and money on. If you see a poem in which one line ends with "ferry" and the next appropriate line ends in "furry" or "worry" or "cherry" or "very", will you be startled by an appalling lack of rhyme? If so, you are one in perhaps 15,000 people.

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• Native speakers of English cannot and do not make the short-E as in "bed" and follow it with R in the same syllable and come out with anything like what most people say for "very", "berry", etc. Following-R changes the quality of many vowels in its same syllable.

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• Make all the silly and PRETENTIOUS distinctions you want. Ordinary people concerned with communication rather than language as an arcane study to itself will not trouble to heed you. 64.12.116.67 04:22, 6 August 2005 (UTC)