Should we change the way words in the English language are spelled, to make them more like the way they are spoken?

[sippincoffee]

 

Everyone finds some parts of being at school difficult, but seems that students find learning the English language harder than most. Both English-speakers and people learning English as a foreign language have complained about how hard it is to spell English words correctly. Compared to other languages English does seem to be more tricky, as many words do not seem to be said out loud (pronounced) the way they are spelled on paper. For example, “cough” is pronounced “coff”, “women” is pronounced “wimmen” and “nation” is pronounced “nayshun”. Rules of spelling are taught in schools, but there are many exceptions – “tomb”, “bomb” and “comb” do not rhyme with each other. And some words which are said the same way have different spellings for different meanings, like “to”, “two” and “too”, or “their” and “there”. \r\nOne reason for these problems is that English has roots in both Latin and Germanic languages. Another is that the way English vowels (a, e, i, o, u) are pronounced also changed a lot five hundred years ago, but spelling never caught up with these changes. Finally, there has never been an agency in charge of updating English in the way that there has been for some languages like French, Spanish, Chinese and Swedish.\r\nOf course, other languages are different from each other, but most seem to be easier to read, write and spell correctly than English. Languages like Spanish, Italian and Swedish are usually written phonetically – meaning groups of letters represent sounds in a predictable way, so that if you can say a word you can also spell it correctly. Other ways of writing like Japanese and Chinese use characters to communicate meaning so each usually stands for a whole word rather than sounds making up part of it. Again, this prevents confusion.\r\nOver the years many people have argued that the spelling of English should be made simpler and more logical. Those in favour include Benjamin Franklin, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain and Prince Philip. This topic looks at whether such a spelling reform would be a good idea.

 

[justmeplusthree]

I think it might be better but I am to set in my ways to start spelling words differently. Its true that english is hard, but I think that in todays society everything is made to easy. so in ways yes and in ways no :)

[mom5160]

Quoting justmeplusthree:

I think it might be better but I am to set in my ways to start spelling words differently. Its true that english is hard, but I think that in todays society everything is made to easy. so in ways yes and in ways no :)

This is true.  I am even guilty of spelling my daughters name Haleigh which isn't pronounced the way it is spelled.