No sooner was the Scripps National Spelling Bee organized than protesters organized, too. As reported by Rebecca Dana of Wall Street Journal, a perennial movement to popularize simplified English spelling has in recent years used the celebrated American spelling bee as a platform for drawing attention to itself.
This protest is irritating on several levels. First is the sheer lunacy of demanding changes that would require everyone who speaks English to essentially learn a new language. Think it's hard to stay on top of common errors like the confusion of your and you're? Imagine how overwhelming it would be to learn new spellings of hundreds, even thousands, of words you've been writing for years.
Besides, English doesn't work like that. Standard English spellings and usages generally do not change by force; they evolve when speakers and writers naturally adopt them in the mainstream. Style guidelines reflecting these new usages then follow. It doesn't work the other way around without a convincing impetus. "Because we want it" does not qualify.
Even those who back the simplified-spelling movement acknowledge that they are probably wasting their time. Edward Rondthaler, who has spent decades behind the movement, explains why he believes change should come, yet even he is quoted as saying, "I have always known it would not happen."
Despite the admittedly fruitless nature of their efforts, those who endorse simplified spelling are not crackpots. In fact, the principal organizer of the yearly Scripps demonstration is Elizabeth Kuizenga, a teacher of English as a second language and a literacy and language expert with a number of published books and studies under her belt. Surely learned academics like Ms. Kuizenga should recognize that any single change that is adopted comes with a host of new problems; the widespread changes they hope for could only create a bigger mess.
Let's say, for example, we drop the silent e that appears at the end of so many words. It sounds like a simple fix, but in practice, it would require other rules to support it. Consider the word site.
Drop the silent e.
site --> sit
Sit already exists as an entirely different word, so it follows that we must do something to distinguish the two. Changing the spelling of the vowel sound would do it. So let's adopt the combination ie to represent a long-i sound:
sit vs. siet
Unfortunately this creates a new problem: following both rules, the words sight and site would end up with the same new spelling, "siet." English already has many homographs; is adding more advisable...or simplified?
Add to that another oft-proposed rule, changing all s-pronounced c's to s's, and the word cite will end up on that list of homographs, too:
| Current word | Definition | Simplified spelling |
| site | a location | siet |
| sight | visual sense | siet |
| cite | to credit a source | siet |
The surrounding context will tell a person which siet was meant by the writer. But why ask readers to work so hard to decipher a single sentence?
Multiply the complications of that single example by the thousands of oddly-spelled words in our lexicon, and the result is chaos. There's nothing simple about simplified spelling, and adopting it would do nothing to improve our communications.
All that aside, I find myself most offended by the Scripps protest for another reason. Regardless how useful one believes spelling ability is, one has to admit that this annual event is something to get excited about. How many other nationally televised competitions celebrate dedication to learning? Encourage kids to challenge their brains? Give the socially awkward student who is never chosen first for a kickball team a way to be regarded a winner? A spelling bee is just good, clean fun.
And there's nothing worth protesting in that.
© 2008 by AnnaLisa Michalski