One of the rallying cries of students rejecting their English classes is "spelling doesn't matter." It's a pretty divisive issue; people tend to feel strongly on one side or the other. Though I do believe spelling matters, I can understand both sides of the issue.
Spelling is the bane of the English language. Since English absorbs words from just about every language, it has the spelling rules from just about every language. What's worse is that English is over 1100 years old, meaning that it has not only been absorbing new languages for over a millennium, but it has also had ample time to evolve itself. However, as the pronunciation of the spoken language has evolved, the spelling has not. This is of course due to prescriptivist grammarians (also known nowadays as Grammar Nazis).
'Conscientious' has no business being spelled the way it is. It should be kahnshe-enchuss. I am proud that we get our fast food at the "drive thru" and it is open during the "late nite" and that we can guzzle it down with a "lite beer". In fact, according to the spellchecker in Firefox, all of those phrases are acceptable and do not appear as typos.
However, even if our spelling is ridiculous and rarely allows us to figure out how to pronounce a word we've never seen before, it does serve a useful purpose. When you spell things properly, people will know exactly what you mean every time. When you start using the wrong spellings, you can have some unfortunate implications.
My favorite example is this: "Eminem is my favorite raper."
Oops? I sure hope that was a typo.
It also allows us to distinguish our homophones. 'Weight' and 'wait' sound identical, but have different meanings. By giving them different spellings, they distinguish the intended meaning. Consider the word 'fit'. It can be an adjective meaning in good health. It can be a verb meaning to make an object occupy a particular space. 'Fly' can be an insect, a zipper, or something that jets do. Imagine if each meaning had a different spelling that distinguished their meanings. It would be wonderful. And even though we don't have that for every homonym, we can at least enjoy the ones we do have.
I'm ok with spelling changing. I'm totally fine with it evolving to match its present pronunciation (instead of reflecting its etymology). However, whatever the spelling of a word ends up becoming, spell it consistently so we have any idea what you're talking about.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I just read this entry in its entirety and I actually agree.
ReplyDeleteWe have weight and wait.
We have light, and light. But this makes no sense. Because a lite beer is referring to it's caloric content, and not its ominous glow (if your beer is glowing, you either drank too much or shouldn't be getting your beer from the chernoybl brewery). So it really should be light and lite.
Not sure why night should be changed to nite. They mean the same thing.
I thought this was going to be a rant on college kids complaining about their english teachers forcing them to correctly spell words like cuckoo or ruckus and not that maybe our language could use some evolution to its spelling.