Definition:
Any organized effort to simplify the system of English orthography.
Over the years, organizations such as the Spelling Society have encouraged efforts to reform or "modernize" the conventions of English spelling, generally without success.
See also:
- The Case for Spelling Reform, by Benjamin Franklin
- Cut Spelling
- For Freedom of Spelling: The Discovery of an Art, by H.G. Wells
- The Futility of Spelling Reform: Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, and the Rotten English Alphabet
- Noah Webster's Plan to Reform English Spelling
- Silent Letter
- Spelling Pronunciation
- Why the Spelling Society Won't Be at the National Spelling Bee
- Writers on English Spelling
Examples and Observations:
- "[Noah] Webster proposed the removal of all silent letters and regularization of certain other common sounds. So, give would be giv, built would be bilt, speak would be speek, and key would be kee. Though these suggestions obviously didn't take hold, many of Webster's American English spellings did: colour - color, honour - honor, defence - defense, draught - draft, and plough - plow, to name a few."
(Kristin Denham and Anne Lobeck, Linguistics for Everyone: An Introduction. Wadsworth, 2010) - "[S]ince the middle of the [19th] century, there has been a long succession of individual scholars, writers and even politicians with strong views on spelling reform and offering a wide spectrum of proposals for change. Why should spelling not be open to reform in the same way as currency, weights and measures and other institutions of society? The main argument for reform is self-evidently valid: that the removal of irregularities in our present writing system would make for greater and easier literacy. . . .
"A wide range of spelling reform schemes have competed, with little tangible success, for public approval. The most extreme proposal was undoubtedly the Shaw alphabet, subsidized by the estate of George Bernard Shaw . . .. This was based on the strict alphabetic principle of one consistent symbol per phoneme. The new alphabet could have been contrived by augmenting the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet with extra letters or accents, but Shaw took the extreme option of commissioning a completely new set of 40 letter shapes in which, to a limited extent, phonetically similar sounds had a similar form. . . . The criterion of economic cost, which was Shaw's main argument for his experimental alphabet, underpins the system of 'Cut Spelling' proposed by [Christopher] Upward . . ., which dispenses with any letters considered to be redundant."
(Edward Carney, A Survey of English Spelling. Routledge, 1994) - "Why has spelling reform in English not met with greater success, considering the number of proposals for reform? One reason is the natural conservatism of people. Reformed spelling looks strange. . . . [T]he general public reaction is to invoke the adage: 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'
"If we take a more scholarly, scientific view of spelling reform other problems emerge. One, English is spoken with many dialects. Which dialect would be chosen as a standard? . . .
"The second concern is that evidence from psychology suggests that some of the so-called irregularities of English actually serve to facilitate reading, especially for the experienced reader. Experienced readers tend to perceive words as single units and do not 'read' them letter by letter. Evidence suggests that we process the information slightly faster when homophonous morphemes are spelled differently: pair-pear-pare."
(Henry Rogers, Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach. Wiley-Blackwell, 2005)
