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From 1972 to 1975, the Australian government
informally had a Ministry of Helth. H-E-L-T-H.

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Why? Spelling reform.

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Every so often, someone has a brilliant idea
to reform English spelling. There's an old

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joke from an unknown reformer about how fish
can be spelled ghoti and still be consistent

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with English. Obviously, it can't, because
any fluent English speaker would pronounce

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it ghoti, but that doesn't help anyone learning
the language.

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And you're probably thinking that I'm about
to go off on a rant about how spelling reform

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never works, and that prescriptivists are
doomed to failure. The trouble is... sometimes,

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just sometimes, it does work.

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Spelling in English used to be a mess. Well,
it still is a mess, but it was a mess that

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no-one could agree on Shakespeare signed his
name several different ways, and we just happened

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to settle on the current one in the last century.

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In 1920, Andrew Carnegie's Simplified Spelling
Board -- an organisation with a surprising

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amount of money behind it -- released the
Handbook of Simplified Spelling. It's been

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scanned and is available online, and it's
worth having a quick look through. It's written

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in simplified spelling, which does tend to
get a bit confusing. But it does make a really

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good point. If we were designing a language
from the ground up -- and heaven knows, people

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have tried -- you would design it with a simple
method of spelling. There *are* natural languages

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out there which are more or less consistent.

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While most of the Spelling Board's suggestions
withered on the vine, some did survive. They're

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the reason that American English spells mould
without a U. Indeed, a lot of American versus

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British differences are the remnants of attempted
spelling reforms throughout the years. Color

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and center are spelled differently in the
US because Mr. Noah Webster just decided they

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should be... and he was writing the dictionary.

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There's even the more extreme suggestion of
throwing out the current alphabet altogether:

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playwright George Bernard Shaw invented a
new alphabet, which was eventually refined

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into something called Quikscript. It's actually
a rather elegant alphabet, but... well, good

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luck converting people to that. When we're
trained since birth to understand one set

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of squiggles, and reinforce that training
constantly, it's strangely difficult to shift

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to another set of squiggles.

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What we do tend to see is the slow adoption
of new spellings. Miniscule, with two Is,

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used to be an incorrect spelling. Now it's
a "variant". To-day used to be hyphenated,

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as did wire-less and e-mail. And the Associated
Press Style Guide only switched from Web site

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to website in 2010.

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But just imposing spelling reform from on
high doesn't generally work. Particularly

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not now, and particularly given how many accents
of English there are. Would you say resistance

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is futile, with an E? Or futil, without? In
regular speech, a lot of Americans would say

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fudil - voicing the T to turn it into a D.
How do you spell that? And more to the point:

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how do you get everyone to agree to it? For
crying out loud, America can't even shift

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to the metric system, and Britain still...
has a monarchy. That got away from me.

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So next time that someone says they don't
know whether judgment has an E in the middle

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of it? Tell them it doesn't matter. Because
in those cases? It really doesn't.

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Next time: a language reform that's steadily
creeping in without anyone really trying.

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