Wunse apon a tyym, English wurdz wur speld the wey thay sownded.
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Wunse apon a tyym, English wurdz wur speld the wey thay sownded.
Thehr wuz no suhch thyng az a mysspeld wurd. Over tyme, tho, as the
langwage evolved, how wurds were spelt became standardized, largely
due to the invention of the printing press, and later, dictionaries. Ever
since the late 1700s, there have been consistent calls in the English-
speaking world for a simplified system of spelling, but these attempts at
reform have been misdiagnosing the problem: the entire notion of
“spelling words correctly” is an outdated, unhelpful element of English,
and one that we should rid ourselves of entirely.
Writing is supposed to transcribe the spoken sounds of a particular
language, and this function once was true of English—it explains why so
many of our words cannot be “sounded out,” as we are often advised to
do by well-meaning but unhelpful teachers. Contemporary English
spelling is largely and most unhelpfully frozen in the spoken language of
over 400 years ago—in the spoken language of London, England in the
1600s, to be precise. This fact explains why words
like knight and folk and enough are spelled the way they are: those are
the sounds—every kuh and ell and guh—people in London made when
they said these words in the seventeenth century. The pronunciations
got frozen in the spelling because this was also the time that printed
books began to be sold in (relatively) large numbers, leading to the new
idea that the way the words appeared in print was the way they
were supposed to be spelled. And to make matters worse, those who
were seeking to increase this trend of standardized English throughout
the 1600s and 1700s—mainly classically-educated writers and
academics—often changed the spelling of perfectly straightforward
words like rime and det to reflect the Latin roots of these words, in an
attempt to refine the supposedly unsophisticated words
into rhyme and debt.
All of which leads us to the mess that English is in today, at least in terms
of spelling. Those teachers who tell us to sound out words we cannot
spell are really doing us no favours past about the second grade: far too
many words are spelled nothing like they sound, so we must learn the
“rule” for spelling certain similar-sounding words, and then the
exceptions to the rule (which would seem to suggest that it was never
really a rule in the first place). Remember learning the mnemonic rule-
and-exception-to-the-rule “i before e, except after c, or when sounding
like a as in neighbor and weigh”? It’s helpful for remembering how to spell
words like friend and receive, but what about other common words
like ancient or beige or science? And really, if a child writes something like
“palleontolagy is the study of anceint life on earth,” he or she is not
wrong in terms of ideas, only in spelling. And which, in this “u-txt-me ill-
txt-u” world, is most important?
We don’t need to merely simplify English spelling; we need to return it to
what it was in the days of Shakespeare, who in fact, never spelled his
name that way himself: in his will, he spelled it Shakspere in one place
and Shakspeare in another. We need to return to a time when what the
words meant was more important than how they appeared on the page,
when the expression of ideas was unhindered by attempts to remember
the antiquated, irrelevant letter-order of the words themselves, when
we could write in our own, true voices. Imagine a world—or rather, your
potential in a world—where if you didn’t know how to spell a word, you
really could just sound it out.
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