Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2009

If you are asking for any published "research", none.

Otherwise my teacher 40 years ago was a man whose parents migrated to
USA from Puerto Rico. While pushing for simplification in Gujarati
Spelling ( making it less sanskritized ) I corresponded with a Spanish
clegry who spent most of his adult life teaching Mathematics in
Gujarat).

On the face of it Cuba could stand up against USA largely because of
its literate population.

I don't know about Spanish, but Italian children master reading very
quickly, because the orthography is very surface-phonemic and the
language has little morphophonemics.

You can pronounce any Spanish word just by looking at it.  But then you
get to the tenses...

--Jeff

Nope.  I live in Cheshire, but I am of pure middle-class English
Midlands stock and say "paath", "baath", etc.  So I say the first one
different from the last two.  My children think I'm a soft southerner.

Then there's the "fayther" and something like "feather" pronunciations
to cope with.

Ar an dara lá de mí Eanair, scríobh Django Cat:

Here, I’ll make it: http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/whispanref.htm

DC:  It's a big jump to suggest that there's a relationship between
spelling  conventions and literacy rates,
and that these could somehow be improved through spelling reform.

When someone claims that children learning a shallow orthography
progress much faster
than those learning deep orthographies, Linguist, Peter Daniels,
always asks, "based on what evidence".

SB:  The place to start is probably with the comparative studies of
Philip Seymour.
About a dozen relevant studies are listed at www.spellingreform.org

There is a relationship between the lack of consistent spelling
conventions in a written language and early literacy.

Laubach teachers claim that they can teach illiterates in any language
with a shallow orthography to read a newspaper in 3 months.
They have done it in nearly 300 languages but not in English and
French.  In such deep orthography it takes much longer than 3 months.

You can teach a dictionary key or something approximating a dictionary
key spelling of broadcast English to children in 3 months.
Code literacy means they can read a newspaper article with the same
level of understanding as when the text is read aloud to them.

To achieve the same level of literacy in using the traditional
spelling conventions can take another three years or more.

There is a relationship between spelling irregularity and decoding
success.

The ita experiments in the 1960's showed, according to Downing,  that
just regularizing the spelling in children's readers
enabled students to progress thru them twice as fast as their peers
who had to use traditional readers..

This is a pretty good indication of the impact of a spelling reform
and the adoption of a shallow orthography for our deep one.
Most kids would be reading at a third grade level well before the
third grade.  Early literacy rates would show a significant
improvement.

The long term ramifications are less clear.  Some studies indicate
that English speaking 15 year olds do about as well on reading tests
as their counterparts in countries with shallow orthographies.

You would probably have to have a spelling test to show some really
significant differences in a comparative study of the written language
skills
of HS students.

English writers make more spelling mistakes.  In fact, a few studies
indicate that English speaking 2nd year foreign language students
make fewer spelling errors in the some foreign languages (German,
Spanish, Italian) than they do when writing in their native English.

In a deep orthography, spelling is not a reliable guide to
pronunciation and pronunciation is an unreliable guide for spelling.
In a shallow or transparent orthography, it is easier to see the
connection between the written and spoken word.

If you want to be published, you will follow the style guide of the
publisher in question.

If you're lucky, they'll hire a copyeditor to do it for you.

I don't write for publication any more, and when I did I didn't have
any reason to use any of those ae words.

Noah was trying to generate what amounted to an American language
as a means of rejecting our past ties to the British Empire.

While reading this thread I had a humorous thought. Thinking some more, I
realised that it might be serious rather than humorous.

In the UK any spelling reform would have to be done in accordance with
race-relations law. No group should be advantaged or disadvantaged by the
activities of the spelling reform body. A new spelling system that was
reflected the pronounciations used by one set of English-speakers could be
seen as discriminating against people who use different pronunciations.

Background:
In the UK race-relations laws cover things such as discriminating between
Scots, Irish, Welsh and English.