Simplified Spelling: An American History

Or "simplifid speling: un umerican historee."

In 1971 (#4.1), Word Ways published a piece by Kenneth H. Ives called “Simpler Riten English Is Possibl.” The piece begins its bold calls for reform with a concession: “Efforts to reform spelling have ocurd since 1554, with only partial success” (sic).

The reformists’ arguments are simple: English is a complicated beast, with over 500 spellings corresponding to some application of its 41 standard sounds. Cutting down on that would make the language more accessible to beginners, promoting literacy and the easy sharing of knowledge.

One of the first supporters for the idea to gain note in America was Melville Dewey, he who gave us the Dewey Decimal System. Melville began spelling his name Melvil, and later rendered his last name as Dui.

The American Philological Association and its London counterpart pushed for the idea in 1883. Prominent supporters at that time included Charles Darwin, Isaac Pitman, and Alfred Tennyson. 1n 1898, the NEA adopted twelve simplified spellings: tho, altho, thru, thruout, thoro, thorofare, catalog, decalog, demagog, pedagog, program, and prolog. In modern English, catalog, program, and to some degree prolog have stuck, and thru, tho’, and altho’ are understood as slangy variants.

Teddy Roosevelt, as President, proposed a list of 300 simplified spellings for use in government documents. Congress refused, so the spellings only saw use in the executive branch.

These re-spellings weren’t all Roosevelt’s idea but proposed by the Simplified Spelling Board, one in a line of organizations supporting the cause. About half of them were already in common use or trending that way (color instead of colour, traveled instead of travelled). Nine revisions on the list did become standard English some time later—anaesthetic, anaesthesia, axe, catalogue, despatch, hiccough, programme, sulphur, and sulphate into anesthetic, anesthesia, ax, catalog, dispatch, hiccup, program, sulfur, and sulfate.

Andrew Carnegie supported the Simplified Spelling Board from 1906 (the year of Roosevelt’s proposed changes) to 1919. After that, political support for spelling reform dried up considerably—in America at least. Germany and Portugal imposed some spelling changes in the 1990s, with partial success.

But in the States, post-1920 proposals are usually the work of individual intellectuals and get little traction. Of course, “slang spellings” have gotten more—witness how the last thirty years have seen increasing acceptance of alright.

Spelling reform assumes a centralized approach to language that has never really governed English—and especially not American English. Changing every though to tho, or even a majority of them, would require a single authority running through what’s published in books, closed captions, periodicals, the internet…and if such an authority existed, it would have far too much power for comfort. I can’t imagine its edicts would stop with orthography.

Which is not to say I’ve never looked at a word like phlegm and thought “Do we really have to spell it like that and not F-L-E-M?” But I recognize that that’s not my decision.

Next: I’ll be taking it easy this weekend and focusing on getting Journal materials together. I might offer up some scraps this weekend, but I think posting will be light until Monday, when I’ll do a deep dive into the wordplay that can be derived from a single word. Until then!