Puush for simpler speling perzists

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?

I couldn't say it any better. Why spelling is a skill that you need to get good at is beyond me. Spelling should follow from the sounds. If you know how to speak, you should know how to spell. The fact that there are contests to see who can spell the best reflects just how poorly English was designed.

I am a horrible speller. If it wasn't for the Google Spellchecker, this blog would be loaded with spelling errors. But really, I think the fact I am a bad speller reflects more on the idiocy of how English words are spelled then of me personally.

"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.

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.

I have read that dyslexia is more common in English as well due to its complexity.

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.

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.

Those are a lot of smart minds that thought we need to fix up this language of ours. Is it too much to hope that the Gates Foundation will pick up the gauntlet as part of their drive to improve education?

via CNN