While a perpetual headache for native speakers and adult ESL students alike, the current orthography for the English language is doing a fine job of compromising between transcribing spoken language and preserving a record of the language’s history and origins.

David,

You make some good points in this comment. Although, your response does raise the question of what the purpose of a lingual orthography really is. The main purpose, I would propose, is to provide a means by which the language’s users can communicate in a textual format. How important is it to “preserve a record of the language’s history and origins”? Clearly, English spelling does this, but often at the expense of its utility as a means of communication.

The human brain can sort out this kind of craziness quite well. Even though fonetyk inglysh might be easier for the kindergartener and ESL student, those who already read English fluently would have a difficult time with it. (Thanks to the internet, fluent English readers cover more of the world today than fluent English speakers.) As lnog as teh ltetres aer mtsoly in teh rgiht palces, fluent readers can usually figure it out. We learn letters as a new reader, but somewhere along the line, we start to learn words and word-parts as singular blocks. But doesn’t this happen in Spanish and German just as well as in English? Wouldn’t fonetyk inglysh readers make the same mental leap from phonics to words-as-symbols?

Ultimately, I think that there are some features of our language that are remarkably anti-phonetic. We just have too many vowels, some of which are sometimes slurred into a simpler form (ie, “the” as either ði or ðə.) We have far too many homophones. We have lots and lots of consonants, many of them borrowed from other languages, usually preserving the spelling of the other language. Many words are pronounced very differently in different places (schedule as either “skedjʊəl” or “shedjʊl”.)

As in any evolution through gradual change and competition, the changes that languages go through tend to follow the rubric of “good enough and no more.” Once a language is good enough to survive, it survives—in most cases, mostly intact. As I believe the abysmal failure of Esperanto shows, the obtuse, difficult, misspelled, psychotic language that everyone* speaks is a lot better than the ideal, phonetic, simple, reasonable language that no one knows. In this age of unparalleled textual communication, a large percentage of it in English, there is good reason to believe that our spelling will not go through any major change any time in the foreseeable future.

Ultimately, this topic is an interesting thing to kick around, but I think that’s about it.

* “Everyone” = “the people with power and money”. In terms of linguistic history, that’s all that matters, whether it’s the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Mandarin, or the Americans. I don’t know of many Esperantans with the clout to demand their business partners speak Esperanto.

While a perpetual headache for native speakers and adult ESL students alike, the current orthography for the English language is doing a fine job of compromising between transcribing spoken language and preserving a record of the language’s history and origins.