The problemI'm sure I don't have to point out that the current system of spelling
makes no sense. There are rules, but they are for many different systems used randomly by different words, and therefore there are no working rules for the one system.
The "air" sound in the following words
sounds the same but has 5 different
spellings:
"Where's their rare bear's lair?"The same goes for:
"Her bird hurts earth worms?"The "ough" in the following words has the same
spelling but has 6 different
sounds:
Through the rough cough though, he fought the drought.In
Matish:
"Whair'z dhair rair bairs' lair?""Her berd herts erth werms?"Thru dha ruf kof dho, he faut dha drout.The English language is made up of just 40 sounds, but these can be spelt in more than 1000 different ways.
I hear you say, "But I have no trouble with spelling being so inconsistent. It's easy to read."
Obviously
you can read, because you're reading this. 46% to 51% of U.S. adults cannot read and write well enough to hold an above-poverty-level-wage job. 1 in 5 English speaking adults cannot read or write at all. 75% of U.S. prisoners cannot read or write (
81% of UK prisoners cannot write), and those released from prison are more likely to go back to a life crime if they still cannot read or write. If you still think it's not a big deal,
test yourself for awareness. I dare you! And then see how
you're not alone.
Perhaps you've never noticed just how difficult it would be to learn these words from scratch. Perhaps you don't remember the first time you ever learned each of these words. Perhaps you were one of those schoolchildren whose left occipito-temporal area of brain developed early, or you just learned these words out of sheer memorization and it never occured to you how little sense they made.
Perhaps you think that:
It's normal to spend 12 years learning to read and write and still have 1 in 5 students not able to.
It's normal to spend so much of your time and effort at school learning to read and write and to have
spelling bees.
It's normal for people with dyslexia and similar disabilities to have so many problems with reading and writing.
It's normal for English to be difficult to learn.
Well it's not normal!
Children in most other countries (98% of languages other than English) learn to read and write in less than 3 months.
Children in most other countries then (in first grade) begin studying most subjects of which English speaking children now start in fourth grade or later.
Dyslexia is not a significant barrier in learning to spell in other countries even though it is in english ones. In other countries diagnosis is usually not even important, and many who are diagnosed with dyslexia are not affected. In English countries though, Dyslexics are more likely to end up in prison and children with
dyslexia (
note on link) are also more likely to drop out of school, withdraw from friends and family or attempt suicide.
English as a language is a far simpler to learn when compared to other important ones such as French, German, Russian, or Spanish. Foreigners complaining about the difficulty of learning to read English more than other languages are really complaining about the spelling, or they learn to read and write in English, but are not sure how to speak it.
Is spelling reform the answer?English countries are an embarrassment and the government is pouring money into solving illiteracy with little effect compared to countries with phonemic spelling.
Languages such as German, Dutch, Spanish, Russian and Czech, have reformed their spelling systems in the last century, which resulted in much higher literacy rates. The Netherlands, Portugal, Israel and Turkey have also reformed their spelling with positive results.
A lot of research and testing has been poured into English spelling reform and the results have been better than hoped for, but literate people who think they are the vast majority don't want to let go of a system that was so hard to learn in the first place.
Many who think about it for the first time also have the following objections:
1. Books would have to be republished to be accessable to future generations.
2. Etymology and history would be lost.
3. Homophones would become homographs.
Consider these things:
1. Books are being republished all the time. Also, most classics are in the public domain and therefore in electronic form.
Project Gutenberg has over 19,000 free electronic books. Software for converting these to Matish is easier than a spell-check (I'm currently writing such software). Also, more publishing companies are using the new
POD technology where books are published as people buy them and are stored electronically and don't go out of print when they go out of popularity. Actually, for certain reasons, many books that are republished in Matish will not need to be republished as often as they are in Old Spelling.
2. Etymology is not represented in Old Spelling as well as some may think. And the history of a word is usually baffling even in Old Spelling. Such information is not important to education, and anyone with this particular interest can look up the word in the appropriate dictionary which can be done just as well in Matish. Matish actually restores the consistency to the more important etymological elements, and helps elliminate a lot of the pseudo-etymology.
3. It is not a bad thing for homophones to become homographs. If you are relying on such spellings to make your text unambiguous, then it cannot be said the same way out loud. May I also point out that Matish actually distinguishes a lot of homographs that are not homophones. For example:
bow (boe, bou)
mow (moe, mou)
row (roe, rou)
sow (soe, sou)
close (cloes, cloez)
excuse (ekskues, ekskuez)
house (hous, houz)
use (ues, uez)
aged (aejd aejed)
blessed (blesd, blesed)
beloved (b'luvd, bluved)
learned (lernd, lerned)
lead (leed, led)
read (reed, red)
live (liv, liev)
tear (tair, teer)
wind (wind, wiend)
wound (wuund, wound)
primer (primer, priemer)
Quoting from
Reports of experiments conducted in sixteen schools, using a spelling system very similar to Matish, it was found that:
1. "children learn to read fluently matter in a simple phonetic spelling, and to write correctly according to the system, in the course of a few months" (just like in countries such as Spain, as opposed to more than 12 years with the Old Spelling)
2. "as a consistent spelling presents no bar to free expression, the original compositions of children who use a phonetic spelling are markedly superior in matter and manner to the compositions of children of the same age who use the traditional spelling"
3. "in reading aloud, the children who use a phonetic spelling acquire a clearer enunciation than children taught to read throughout in the current orthography;
4. "
contrary to expectation, the transition from the Phonetic to the ordinary spelling is attended by no difficulty, and indeed, that children who pass from the former to the latter, acquire something like proficiency in the ordinary spelling sooner than children do who are familiar with no other" (this is my favourite result)
5. "the better mental discipline introduced into the reading and writing lesson leads to improved work in other subjects of the School course." (yes, studies have shown that following the patterns and habits of stupid people can lower the IQ).
Imagine teaching your child to read by simply teaching them the basic rules of Matish and handing them a book.
Do you remember asking you teacher how to spell a word and they said, "look it up in the dictionary." and you said, "How can I look it up if I don't know how to spell it?" Imagine children having the ability to spell any words they can say and use a dictionary just for their meaning or to prove it's a word (or to find the Old Spelling).
Imagine if books taught children and foreigners to speak properly and clearly and maximise their vocabulary. And adults in their field - there are literally hundreds of words I don't know how to pronounce, but I know how to spell them, what they mean and how to use them everyday in emails and assignments. I'll bet this has happened to you too (although I will know how to say a lot more of them by the time I've finished the research for my 70,000-word Matish dictionary).
Imagine if everyone had the chance to learn to read the Bible.
If you think there will be room for the Old Spelling, there will for a while. But even experts in Shakespear don't bother with the original spelling. Imagine if books went through a phase where they were published with the two spellings on opposite pages. Parents who still think it's posh for their children to learn the thousands of archaic Old Spelling words could even use such books for teaching the Old Spelling such as for pronunciation and still be far more effective than if they just taught them Old Spelling from scratch (see
result 4 which I quoted in bold). Everybody wins!
So why Matish? Why not use the IPA (
International Phonetic Alphabet)? There are several reasons:
1. Different English accents would need different spellings. Matish is compatible with Recieved English, American, Aussie, Kiwi, and I'm sure many I haven't looked at yet, I'm aiming for the biggest collection possible for compatibility.
2. The IPA uses many symbols that are not accessable to most keyboards.
3. The IPA uses symbols that are too similar to each other, and some are just a small cap of the other. This is especially bad in handwriting and higher levels of punctuation (you could't use capitals for much else).
4. The IPA is simply not simpler. It is more complicated. Most people do not achieve anywhere near that level of phonetic awarenes, and there is no need to represent so much detail of how an individual person speaks. For example, in English we usually pronounce something as simple as the "p" sound as [p
h].
There are many systems that have been suggested for reform, and I believe mine is the best.
Some use different alphabets. This is fine for new systems of phonetics, writing or shorthand, but not for spelling reform, because the change has to be swift and universal to be standard and usefull and therefore not requiring any special technological extras such as fonts which won't work on all devices.
Some systems (such as
Cut Spelling) simply make words shorter and easier to write if you already know the spelling. This does not solve the problem of illiteracy and I believe just complicates things further.
Some systems are only designed for one English accent, such as
Truespel which only works for Americans. Truespel also uses "th" for "dh" and "thh" for "th" and tries to show the stress by doubling the first letter. Thus you are confused with trying to recognise the difference between "th", "tth", "thh" and "tthh" very quickly in reading. It appears that Truespel also tries to represent schwas with an "i".
New Spelling is the closest to mine, but has the disadvantage of a lot of short words becoming longer, "mee" for "me" etc. and the next step suggested in New Spelling is to make exceptions to the rules for a growing list of words, called "word-signs". This is just starting the same problem all over again as with the Old Spelling. Matish uses the End-Of-Words Rule to make sure that it is still simpler than the Old Spelling in such small words, but there are still no exceptions to the rules either.
Matish also tries to restore and preserve etymology without making words sound different.
Matish standardises words by expanding shwas to the longest vowel they will make in the word so they will not change spelling when used in different situations and will not lose their pronunciation. Eg. "obey" sometimes begins with a schwa, but not in the song, "Trust and Obey" which starts "Trust and o-bey...". Therefore in Matish, "obey" is spelled "oebey" and not something like "ubey". This way, the one word never changes spelling when used elsewhere.
I know you're afraid of change, but if you're worried about something, research it. You will see that the facts are on my side and every
reasonable objection to spelling reform has been completely disproven.
Do it! If you won't do it for yourself, do it for the children. Do it for the disabled. Do it for the poor. Do it for the criminals. Do it for the world.
English is fast becoming a/the universal language. Let's not impose our unique useless massive stupidities, which cause so many problems, on the rest of the world which is ahead of us in that most have sensible spelling or have already reformed it.
