Until the middle twentieth century, children learned to read by learning the sounds of the letters. They did that because that is what an alphabet is for. The alphabet was a great technical innovation that made the act of reading simpler by orders of magnitude. Instead of having to learn a written sign for every idea, you learn the sounds represented by the letters. Then, when you come across a word you have never seen written before, you still read it at once, because the sounds form in your mind, and you know what the word is.
In English, however, we have never had as many letters as we have sounds, and furthermore our spelling has not kept up with our pronunciation. So there are rules to be learned. The young reader must be taught the wondrous properties of silent E, which without being pronounced itself alters the sound of a vowel before the preceding consonant: win becomes wine, thus giving us two vowel sounds for the price of one letter. The more advanced student learns more advanced rules, and discovers that silent E is a special case of a more general rule: a vowel followed by one consonant and then another vowel is long, but a vowel followed by two consonants or a consonant that ends the word is short. Thus wining is different from winning.
Some of these rules are imperfect. The combination -ough in an unfamiliar word might stump any reader, because it can be pronounced five different ways—“The tough coughs as he ploughs through the dough” is a sentence we recall having heard from Dr. Seuss. We might add two more obscure pronunciations to that list: lough for bodies of water in Ireland, equivalent to the Scottish loch, and Yough, the short name for the Youghiogheny river, which is pronounced Yock because the river is pronounced Yock-oh-GAY-nee. (Dr. Boli recalls a radio announcer of the 1930s who had moved to Pittsburgh from elsewhere and had never had to pronounce “Youghiogheny” until the Yough flooded in 1936. He bravely faced the word, read it as “Yuff-ee-OG-en-nee,” and did not drown himself after his news report. That was a man of courage.)
Such imperfections in the rules bedevil beginning readers, and some of those bedeviled readers never got over their bedevilment. They grew up to become orthographic reformers.
The spelling reformer’s axiom is that the letters ought to represent the sounds of our language unambiguously. The -ough problem shows that they do not. American spelling reformers had a few limited successes: most of us write plow these days instead of plough and jail for the inexplicable British gaol (which the British have mostly given up as well). But these petty victories were not enough: the spelling reformers wanted to win the war. That they failed was due, first of all, to the inability of any two spelling reformers to agree with a third; and second, to the fact that English spelling largely worked, and every attempt to reform it just created more inconsistencies to confuse young readers.
But for a long time, we always had spelling reformers with us. George Bernard Shaw was the most radical of the prominent reformers: he would have thrown out the whole Latin alphabet and substituted one of his own invention. Shaw was an insufferable pedant when it came to spelling (Dr. Boli considered removing that qualification “when it came to spelling,” but decided this was not the time to get into a debate with Shaw’s fans), and one of his insufferable pedantries is instructive. He wrote that “fish” could just as well be spelled “ghoti” in English—gh as in enough, o as in women, and ti as in nation. Dr. Boli will be charitable and say that here Shaw was making an argument that he knew was false, but was counting on his readers to be stupider than he was. The uncharitable assumption would be that Shaw really was that stupid himself. English spelling is imperfect, but there are some knowable rules: gh is pronounced like f only when following the letters ou; ti is pronounced like sh only when followed by another vowel and then a consonant, as in nation or partial; and as for the o in women, it is indeed an exception, but a unique exception, and therefore has to be learned as such once, and the student is done—just as French readers have to learn that the word femme is a unique exception to the rules of French pronunciation.
But at any rate, we had spelling reformers in herds, and if they had gained power they might have been as successful as Lenin, who had several letters of the Cyrillic alphabet taken out and shot as one of his first priorities when he found himself in charge. But our spelling reformers did not gain power, and we may ultimately be worse off because they did not.
The spelling reformers complained about the inconsistencies in English spelling until they managed to convince certain educators that there were no rules at all for English spelling. The idea took root that reading should be learned, not by the sounds of letters, but by recognizing the shapes of whole words.
Have you ever had the embarrassing experience of watching some unprepared reader—say, a lector in church—come across a word he has never seen before? If it is someone who never learned the sounds of letters, then one of two things will happen: either the reader will substitute a word that bears a visual resemblance to the unknown word, or the reader will just grind to a halt and say, “I can’t go on.” YouTube is full of videos by people who want to explain things to us, but don’t know how to pronounce the words for the things they want to explain and substitute similar-looking words for them. The results make us laugh or weep according to our current humor.
For readers like those, the alphabet is broken. It does not function as intended. And such people are the large majority now.
That means that English spelling has become practically equivalent to something like Chinese writing, where a word is a shape that we learn to recognize. That we have only twenty-six strokes with which to make these shapes makes typesetting them easy; but as a technology that enables us to read words we have never seen written before, the alphabet is broken. Chinese writing has its advantages, but they are not the same as the advantages of the alphabet.
Once we have observed that the alphabet is broken, what shall we do about it? Well, obviously, we should completely reform our educational system and put it back on a sound basis. But we can predict from the observed fact that our educational system has never rested on a sound basis that our reforms will fail.
So we fall back on individual effort. In a world where very few people know how to use the alphabet the way it was intended to be used, those of us who understand the principles of English spelling have certain advantages over those who have been taught as dogma that there are no principles of English spelling. Reading unusual words at sight becomes the kind of parlor trick that earns one a reputation as a miraculously brainy sort. We are also more easily able to resist the incorrect suggestions of our artificially intelligent assistants when they invade our writing tools, which spares us much embarrassment when our writings are released into the wild for every pedant with an Internet connection to examine.
Dr. Boli would like to be able to offer a better and more charitable suggestion than to use the rising tide of ignorance to float one’s own reputation for unusual intelligence. But a smug feeling of superiority to the common herd is, after all, its own reward.
