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At first, I thought this was a joke...

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Posted by: Frogman

By DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press Writer Wed Jul 5, 5:23 PM ET

WASHINGTON - When "say," "they" and "weigh" rhyme, but "bomb," "comb" and "tomb" don't, wuudn't it maek mor sens to spel wurdz the wae thae sound?
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Those in favor of simplified spelling say children would learn faster and illiteracy rates would drop. Opponents say a new system would make spelling even more confusing.

Eether wae, the consept has yet to capcher th publix imajinaeshun.

It's been 100 years since Andrew Carnegie helped create the Simplified Spelling Board to promote a retooling of written English and President Theodore Roosevelt tried to force the government to use simplified spelling in its publications. But advocates aren't giving up

They even picket the national spelling bee finals, held every year in Washington, costumed as bumble bees and hoisting signs that say "Enuf is enuf but enough is too much" or "I'm thru with through."

Thae sae th bee selebraets th ability of a fue stoodents to master a dificult sistem that stumps meny utherz hoo cuud do just as wel if speling were simpler.

"It's a very difficult thing to get something accepted like this," says Alan Mole, president of the American Literacy Council, which favors an end to "illogical spelling." The group says English has 42 sounds spelled in a bewildering 400 ways.

Americans doen't aulwaez go for whut's eezy — witnes th faeluer of th metric sistem to cach on. But propoenents of simpler speling noet that a smatering of aulterd spelingz hav maed th leep into evrydae ues.

Doughnut also is donut; colour, honour and labour long ago lost the British "u" and the similarly derived theatre and centre have been replaced by the easier-to-sound-out theater and center.

"The kinds of progress that we're seeing are that someone will spell night 'nite' and someone will spell through 'thru,'" Mole said. "We try to show where these spellings are used and to show dictionary makers that they are used so they will include them as alternate spellings."

"Great changes have been made in the past. Systems can change," a hopeful Mole said.

Lurning English reqierz roet memory rather than lojic, he sed.

In languages with phonetically spelled words, like German or Spanish, children learn to spell in weeks instead of months or years as is sometimes the case with English, Mole said.

But education professor Donald Bear said to simplify spelling would probably make it more difficult because words get meaning from their prefixes, suffixes and roots.

"Students come to understand how meaning is preserved in the way words are spelled," said Bear, director of the E.L. Cord Foundation Center for Learning and Literacy at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Th

ry's larjest teecherz uennyon, wuns a suporter, aulso objects.

Michael Marks, a member of the National Education Association's executive committee, said learning would be disrupted if children had to switch to a different spelling system. "It may be more trouble than it's worth," said Marks, a debate and theater teacher at Hattiesburg High School in Mississippi.

E-mail and text messages are exerting a similar tug on the language, sharing some elements with the simplified spelling movement while differing in other ways. Electronic communications stress shortcuts like "u" more than phonetics. Simplified spelling is not always shorter than regular spelling — sistem instead of system, hoep instead of hope.

Carnegie tried to moov thingz along in 1906 when he helpt establish and fund th speling bord. He aulso uezd simplified speling in his correspondens, and askt enywun hoo reported to him to do the saem.

A filanthropist, he becaem pashunet about th ishoo after speeking with Melvil Dewey, a speling reform activist and Dewey Desimal sistem inventor hoo simplified his furst naem bi droping "le" frum Melville.

Roosevelt tried to get the government to adopt simpler spellings for 300 words but Congress blocked him. He used simple spellings in all White House memos, pressing forward his effort to "make our spelling a little less foolish and fantastic."

The Chicago Tribune aulso got into th act, uezing simpler spelingz in th nuezpaeper for about 40 years, ending in 1975. Plae-riet George Bernard Shaw, hoo roet moest of his mateerial in shorthand, left muny in his wil for th development of a nue English alfabet.

Carnegie, Dewey, Roosevelt and Shaw's work followed attempts by Benjamin Franklin, Daniel Webster and Mark Twain to advance simpler spelling. Twain lobbied The Associated Press at its 1906 annual meeting to "adopt and use our simplified forms and spread them to the ends of the earth." AP declined.

But for aul th hi-proefiel and skolarly eforts, the iedeea of funy-luuking but simpler spelingz didn't captivaet the masez then — or now.

"I think that the average person simply did not see this as a needed change or a necessary change or something that was ... going to change their lives for the better," said Marilyn Cocchiola Holt, manager of the Pennsylvania department of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

Carnegie, hoo embraest teknolojy, died in 1919, wel befor sel foenz. Had he livd, he probably wuud hav bin pleezd to no that milyonz of peepl send text and instant mesejez evry dae uezing thair oen formz of simplified speling: "Hav a gr8 day!"

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060705/...us/simpl_wurdz

Posted by: MonsterMark

I guess if you can't teach kids how to read, write and speak, it is easier to change what you need to teach them.

Posted by: mach8

This movement is (hopefully) doomed to failure. Laguages evolve over time to adapt to peoples needs and in doing so don't change so fast as to become unusable. To make radical changes like this serve no purpose other than to destabilize society. Think of how much information would become lost or difficult to understand to the new illiterate spellers unable to understand what was written only years before they were "educated".

In many ways written words are very similar to icons and the only way to learn what they represent is to memorize them (in speed reading you read entire groups of words, much as you look at and recognize a picture).

English has become an international standard for many reasons, one of which is its ability to absorb words from all over the world, as well as to create new words for things and concepts which have never existed before. Because of this there will always be anomalies in spelling vs "pure" languages.

This has bothered the french for decades and they have made a national effort to create new "french" words for our current world. German, as well as several others, is a terrible language (I feel). Instead of calling a nut to go on a bolt simply a nut, it will call it something like "a button that threads onto the end of a bolt", a discription in other words. What a waste of ink.

Sometime when your where muli-language signs are posted look at them and see which language needs the most words to convey the message. I think you'll find the english version to be the shortest, and if you can read any of the other languages you might notice the english words often are also more precise in meaning.

Easier doesn't always mean better, minds get better by being used, not by being spoon fed. But there are many in this world who do not want use to use our minds, they wish to do our thinking for us.

Ignorance is bliss, work will set you free, Sieg Heil

Posted by: Calabrio

Mach8 makes a good point. Changing the language would effectively destroy the culture.

Posted by: Frogman

Holy crap! Four people agreed in a Politics and current events thread, in succession! This is unheard of!

Posted by: noppid

This is part of the dumbing down of america. Give the lazy americans what they want. We need mindless citizens to supply the corps with cheap labor and to keep them from objectively being able to participate in the election process.

Keeping the man down by making it difficult to get an edication leads to crime. Crime leads to arrests and arrests lead to people being removed from the political process.

The idea that america is a democracy is just a fallacy.

Posted by: mach8

Quote:

Originally Posted by noppid

..........................
The idea that america is a democracy is just a fallacy.

No, the reality is even worse. America IS a pariticipitory democracy, but most Americans can't be bothered, so what we live with is the actions of those who do.

Posted by: Calabrio

America has never been a democracy, and that is by design.

A Democracy is essentially mob rule. We live in a representative republic. Calling it a democracy is something that has been embraced, but it's misleading.

Posted by: JoeyGood

Quote:

Originally Posted by Calabrio

America has never been a democracy, and that is by design.

A Democracy is essentially mob rule. We live in a representative republic. Calling it a democracy is something that has been embraced, but it's misleading.

Democracy HA that 's good one! like we have a choice on what is done. If we disagree or agree it happens anyway, They (government) decide not us. They just make it seem like it was a choice, so where is the Democracy?

Posted by: Calabrio

Quote:

Originally Posted by JoeyGood

We're not supposed to have a democracy. A democracy is mob rule.
We have a representative republic, democratic republic. A pure democracy is not stable and doesn't have much staying power. A mob is an example of democracy.

The fact that we erroneously call our system of government a "democracy" is a failing of our education. It isn't, nor should it be a democracy.

Posted by: mach8

We are a democracy in so much as we have the opportunity to select those who RERESENT our interest at the various levels of government and if we don't like this representation we have the opputunity to get rid of them and replace them, as was done in California with Mr. Davis.

If we chose to not participate in this process, monitor this process, or learn how this process operates perhaps we should just move to a nice, sensible country like Cuba and drink margaritas while watching ESPN.

Mob rule is emotions running rampant, not rational people doing their best to live according to the laws of the republic they are supposed to be a part of creating and maintaining.