The American Literacy Council supports a movement to make spelling American English easier. Apparently this is not a new movement. The desire to simplify the American language allegedly began in 1908 when Andrew Carnegie helped to create the Simplified Spelling Board, now called the Simplified Spelling Society. Members of these groups and others want to simplify our system of spelling to spell words like they sound. For example the word “said” would be spelled “sed” and I suppose spell would have to be changed to spel.
The American (English) language has not had a good overhaul in over 400 years when some dangling “e’s” were dropped from the ends of some words, leaving us with many words and spellings that are difficult to understand and memorize. According to the Simplified Spelling Society: “There are 3,500 words in English that contain exceptions to the spelling ‘rules’. And some of the rules have hundreds of exceptions.” Those exceptions can make learning difficult especially for a child with dyslexia or other learning disability.
Some countries like France Italy and Spain do not even include spelling as a core elementary school subject. In Italy it takes a child only 2 years to learn to read and write well. In America and England it takes approximately 12 years.
I can see good points on both sides of the argument. A Detroit News Article notes: “Those in favor of simplified spelling say children would learn faster and illiteracy rates would drop. Opponents say a new system would make spelling even more confusing.” I think both could happen. It would be extremely confusing for the entire country, not to mention my good friend-the spell checker to change the entire system. Over years I think that potentially illiteracy rates would drop. I am not sure that having children learn faster is really beneficial, unless they have the resources to learn more, which will continue to be important in our information driven society.
Other people think that this is just another step in dumbing down our nation and think that if we move toward simplified spelling, we will again be an international joke. Since proponents of the simplified spelling idea have been at this for nearly 100 years and Americans still have not converted to the metric system, I think it is safe to believe that America adopting a different way of spelling is still a long way off.