Gabe Henry
speaker
42 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Gabe Henry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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There were early efforts. People were proposing spelling words like laugh, L-A-F, though, T-H-O. The story of simplified spelling, the story of spelling reform is really a history of failure.
English is unique in its spelling inconsistencies. French is a little bit inconsistent. It's probably second to English in terms of its inefficient use of letters. But English really is on its own in terms of the unreliable pronunciations, the unreliable spellings, the sheer number of pronunciations of the letters O-U-G-H. Though, tough, cough, bow. We're really alone in that.
The reason being is we, England, was really subject to a lot of invasion over thousands of years. Viking conquests, new settlements, dialects, spellings, pronunciations. And we're just really trying to manage that.
And we're really an accidental language that came together from many different regions, many different histories, many different peoples, and trying our best to pretend to be one homogenous language. Well, what a mess.
There were early efforts. As early as the 12th century, there was one man named Orman. He was a monk. And his problem that he saw in English was the inconsistent ways that we denote long and short vowel sounds. So he came up with a solution of denoting short vowel sounds in which he doubled the consonant that follows it. So you take a word like... Sir, S-I-R, and he would spell it S-I-R-R.
And he tried to get this to be picked up. He wrote a whole book of poetry in this new spelling. Ultimately, it was just too much of a sprawling lengthening of the language and what people really craved was something a little shorter. But his effort was the first to try to bring consistency to it.
Then there were efforts in the 1500s, the 1600s, and it was in the 1700s that it really became the domain of America and American intellectuals to try to simplify the language they were speaking. And it seems like they failed. They generally failed. The story of simplified spelling, the story of spelling reform is really a history of failure. It's a history of futility.
It's a history of radical-minded, eccentric people highly committed to one singular idea and kind of blocking out everything around them, tunnel visioned on this one thing.
so people were proposing spelling words like laugh l-a-f though t-h-o and these weren't just nobodies these were people like noah webster who was responsible for webster's dictionary he had radical ideas for simplifying every english word to its most pure phonetic essence and yes generally i'd say about 99 of these efforts failed
There is a version of the simplified spelling movement that still exists. It doesn't have momentum, but there is a community of people that are continuing to try to simplify it.
There were profit values, there were profit motives for this, specifically among businessmen in the late 1800s. They viewed simplified spelling as, something that would increase productivity and efficiency in their workforce. Let's say you owned a publishing company or a newspaper or even a factory.
You would look at simplified spelling and see it as a way to save time, save money, because these words are shorter to write.
you would save ink you would save paper and all in all you would be able to accelerate the productivity of your workforce that drove a lot of these people noah webster made some calculations back in 1789 and he concluded that his version of spelling reform which was actually kind of a more moderate
he calculated that it would save printers about one page out of every 18, which doesn't sound like a lot, but for a 180-page book, that's 10 pages. For a 360-page book, that's 20 pages. And this is the kind of marginal profit calculation you're trying to make if you're running a business. So there was money in it, but I think the aesthetics of simplified spelling were always working against it.
There are languages with silent letters. French has silent letters. The problem or the distinction between those languages and English is that You can learn a set of rules for those languages and the rules apply in most cases. So you can teach a child that in this word, you're going to have a silent letter after your S. In every case, you're going to have this following this.
And once you learn these rules, you will know and understand spelling. In English, we don't have a set of rules that apply in every case. We have mnemonics like I before E except after C, but even that has so many exceptions it's probably not even worth calling a rule.
We depend more on photographic memory of how a word is spelled as opposed to appealing to your knowledge of the overall rule system.
That's a great question. I tell you that the people I've spoken to that speak English as a second language, they found it relatively easy to learn the grammar and syntax of spoken English, but very difficult to learn our spelling.
There's a stigma surrounding poor spelling. So children that are growing up, six, seven years old, if they're told once that they're a bad speller, I think they carry that sense of inferiority into their life. I think it's the first intellectual merit assessment of how their brain works. I think it's the first time that
an authority points to you in your life and says, you're not quite good enough for this thing. And I think that you carry that stigma for a while.
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