Not even the spelling is a broken tool, only the teaching of that spelling. English spelling can be taught in a systematic, logical manner that makes as much sense as any other language, maybe even more. The problem is the people who’ve taken it upon themselves to do so choose to ignore that fact and teach in faddish, incomplete manner. Updating spelling is a losing proposition, since it introduces far more problems than it solves, as have been elucidated in the thread above.

What we need is the clear, systematic teaching of English spelling. If I, and everyone with whom I went to school could learn it from complete, systematic instruction, it clearly can be taught. It’s just not being taught. Sad.

The English Language is not an “inferior, unreliable, broken-down tool”. I linked earlier to the 26 Letter, 29 Rules, and 70 Spellings for 44 sounds. You (and everyone else reading this) should visit that link and read it. When English is considered from that standpoint, which is built on the historical and orthographical roots of the language, it makes an incredible amount of sense. While that might make it more complex than say, Italian or Spanish, it still makes it much less complex than other languages, such as Chinese.

The fact is that literacy is low not because the language is broken but because the teaching of that language is broken. The mechanics of the sound and spelling relationships are know, but when it comes time to teach them, the powers running the schools replace them with fads like whole language or see-say, which results in your comment: I guess he, like us, must hav had a good memory when yung (i dont now!), and a bent towards language

I’m going to say that if you believe you need a good memory to learn how to spell standard English, you were not taught the rules of spelling correctly. Personally, I have *very* few words memorized, and those that I do are mainly of foreign origin, “rendezvous” for instance. The way I recognize misspellings is that, as I’m reading, something will look wrong to me, and it almost always is a violation of one of the 29 rules.

To do as you’re suggesting would suck a lot of the meaning out of the language as well as making it more difficult for people who have strong regional difference in dialect to read standard English. Imagine a world in which English speakers in New Zealand had one spelling system, while speakers in California had another, where speakers in Liverpool couldn’t read something written by speakers in London. It would be an interesting world indeed.

There’s no way English spelling can conform with a language that’s constantly changing and that has different dialects with different pronunciations.

You’re right about that. It’s been an excuse, one among the battery, of those for whom reading instruction is a celebration of vanity rather then a means to teach kids/adults to read, for decades. Antiquity, however, does not confer veracity.

> It’s always been thare, befor and after Samuel Johnson codifyed it with his 1755 English Dictionary.

Kinda makes you wonder how Samual Johnson learned to read then.

> Until recently the problem was hidden, because there was work avalable for the illiterate, work that has largely disapeerd in the IT age.

Yet there are all those volunteer-run adult literacy centers filled with people who teach reading and learn to read without waiting for the language to improve. Doesn’t sound like the problem was all that well hidden or even all that much of a problem once a reasonable approach is taken to instruction.

The notion that the arrival of computers on the scene precipitate “end times” for illiterates is just laughable even if the problem of illiteracy is anything but. Jobs for illiterates haven’t disappeared but it’s the increasingly large component of skill in every product and job that’s making the already tough situation of illiteracy gradually tougher.

I assure you they aren’t teaching the 8 parts of speech in grade school. They’re journaling, my friend. So, please be careful about blaming texting or anything else when the kids can’t write. They don’t get any practice past the naval-gazing of their 3-sentence journal entry.

Then, by third grade they leap dramatically to the 5-paragraph essay required by the state, which is crammed into them by the most rote process possible (in accordance with the newfangled writing curriculum developed specifically to ace such tests).

Somewhere around the 4th or 5th grade they may get a little grammar packet to fill out for a couple of weeks. That’s about it. If you don’t teach them at home, they will be woefully unready for writing by middle school.

So, that’s what you get. Good luck getting them ready for high school. You are their only hope.

Now that you mention it, I can hear the New Zealand accent in your simplified spelling. You’ve brought up an interesting point about capturing regional variations in pronunciation.

Gahrie -

You said that it takes too much effort for your eighth graders to memorize the parts of speech. That just plain scares me.