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ourspell.htm
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ourspell.htm
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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8"/>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">
<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet">
<title>Our Spelling System</title>
</head>
<body>
<div class="content">
<h4><a href="index.html">Home</a></h4>
<h1>OUR SPELLING SYSTEM - MISUNDERSTOOD</h1>
<p>A boy I once taught, writing about his struggles with spelling, wrote <q>I think
English is a stupid langwig</q></p>
<p>Two learned American professors of language, however, called it <q>a near-optimal
system</q></p>
<p>Who is right? Most people I know would side with the boy. Again and again people
complain that the letters don't always stand for the sounds they should stand for.
They don't and they couldn't be expected to because there are only 26 letters and about
44 sounds in English; the number varies according to how people speak.</p>
<p>One reason for the problem is simply that hardly any of us have any idea how the
system works. English is a mixed language, so it is not surprising that it has a mixed
spelling system. Some spellings depend on sound, but a lot of others don't and
because of our seafaring history and contacts overseas, we have also brought in huge
numbers of words straight from other languages, often (but not always!) adopting the
spelling of the country they came from. It is sometimes easier to read words if they
are not phonetically regular. Finally English has a huge number of words (like write
and right) which sound the same but are written differently because they mean
something different. "One Spelling One Meaning" is a better slogan than "One Letter
One Sound".</p>
<p>So there is undoubtedly more work attached to learning English spelling than there is
for Spanish, say, or Finnish, which have almost entirely regular phonetic spelling. But
we have to learn it because it isn't at all likely to change. People are always agitating
for reform but no-one has ever found a system yet which has caught on. Think of the
difficulties. A lot of powerful people would have to agree on a new system and
printers all over the world, since English is now a world language, would have to
change all their machines. Neither of these things is at all likely to happen.</p>
<p>So it is hard to learn but we make it much harder by not understanding it and by
not understanding how children's spelling develops. This causes us to mislead
children, albeit with the best intentions. And some of that happens in the teaching.
Many children learn to be poor spellers in their classrooms.</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>