Brits and Yanks struck with embarasment embarrassment

Or....

Or the Yanks could quit calling their language English and call it something else, like French or whatever? That'll solve the difficult question of how to spell Embarrassment!

What they fail to point out...

...is that people who speak English as a second language, and lets face it, there are many, are usually better at it then native Egnlish speakers.

The problem is not the complexity of the language, just the laziness of the speakers and also the asbolute failure of our education systems.

The English language hasn't got harder over the last 100 years so there's no other explanation for the drop in literacy other than a drop in standards.

title.

Really.

Could the problem be that most people are so used to "txt spk" that they can't spell? That's my guess, because its what it looks like from emails I receive.

Still, I can't complain really. Senior management tend to be from an older generation and take you more seriously when you can write in the same language as them.

embarrassment is not the problem

when it seems that half my compatriots can't spell such long and complex words as "too" and "its".

Oh and this was such a cracker it deserves repetition: "English is the world's numero uno lingua franca". :-)

No pp in Apple

Did you know that the word 'apple' has no 'pp' in it? The noise you think is a 'pp' is actually just a combination of the end of the 'a' sound and the start of the 'le' sound. If you want to write it down you need the 'pp' because otherwise you'd just be saying 'ale'. However, if you wrote a**le, and asked someone to name the fruit, everyone would know what you meant.

In other words, correct spelling is a necessary evil forced upon us by the practical need to associate written words with spoken noises. The 'right' way to say a word is merely that which people can understand. Sure, uniformity helps everyone understand the language, but variation allows the evolution of language, which is an inevitable side-effect of social development. If all spelling was eternally fixed, language would be stilted and a lot less fun - however, if you ignore the rules altogether you end up with new dialects (and eventually languages) that make communication accross social groups impossible.

I don't think 'embarrased' or 'embarased' is really an issue as everyone knows what you mean if you write it the wrong way. Text speak is different, as poor use of text speak can make it impossible for a non-expert to understand what is being said, and if it is not formalised or banned, could easily become a seperate language. One day, kids may have to learn English AND Textspeak at school!

Its not the language, its the people.

As Anthony said up above. The language is not getting harder. Its over-reliance on spell checkers among other things. Why spell right when the PC can fix it for you? I work in a school, if you want to know how someone spells don't look in the file, look at the file name.

One year 11 (15/16 year old) had a perfectly spelled comic life document, then saved it as "Carton Stripe"

not Millennium

not Millennium, but Mile Endium. I always said that Greenwich was the wrong place for that Dome thing

Who can spell...

...ironic?

English is a very robust language

I worked in Germany for a time, and what I found there is that if you pronounce something even slightly wrong, nobody has any idea what you're talking about! Many other languages are the same.

English on the other hand is very robust in this regard - you can speak is extremely badly with very poor pronunciation, missing words etc, and it is STILL possible to understand.

Poor spelling isn't really an issue at all in this respect - it hardly matters at all in terms of being able to understand it. An example is the "take a sentence and remove all the vowels" test. It's amazing how much of the sentence you can still read and understand with half the letters missing.

I'm not saying spelling doesn't matter - it's just that ...well ...in a practical day-to-day way, it's not THAT important. Of course, everyone knows the yanks can't spell, but that's another issue, and one that I wouldn't care about except that it's been polluting proper English for years now with "Drive Thru's" and "Center" and "Color" (something I deeply resent when I'm writing HTML). Shudder....

Umm

1. So, when we settle on phonetic spellings, does for example "about" get the US "abowt" or the Canadian "aboot"? I think that a bit of reflection will show that this is not going to work.

2. One should distinguish the purposes of different communications. Something that has gone through several drafts ought to be better spelled and structured than a text message, or a quick response to one of El Reg's stories. I'm sure that the poster above knows "than" from "then", can spell "absolute" and can apostrophize "let's" with the best of us, given time. Heaven knows I find reading some of my own emails embarrassing.

Oxbridge English

A good reference for the history of the English language is 'Mother Tongue' by Bill Bryson.

In it he documents how pronunciations change over time. So for example 'knight' didn't always have a silence K. Which is not to say that we should remove the first letter, as that would make it indistinguishable from another word. Any phonetic spelling would make knight and night, which and witch and dozens of other words indistinguishable.

A good modern example would be ‘hiccough’, which almost everyone pronounces and most people spell as ‘hiccup’. There was a time when it was spoken as hic-cough and thus spelt accordingly. It isn't any more and a closer spelling is becoming the norm.

These changes have been happening since the time of Chaucer, and the one thing that we do know is that they occur naturally. There are few occasions (Noah Webber's dictionary being the most famous exception) when a small group has imposed new spellings on the population.

Finally, whose phonetic spelling is correct? I am from Birmingham (UK, not Alabama), but should my home city be renamed Burmingum, as we locals pronounce it? What about words that are pronounced in quite radically different ways across the country? Oxbridge phonetic English would be no closer to how most people speak than the current spellings.

Is like dikshun annat innit?

I is well up for mekkin me inglish more wikkider.

blame the yanks

If thick americans would stop fucking with the spellings in their wrongheaded attempts to simplify, things would be much easier for everyone.

Some of the double letters are there as indicators about pronunciation you know...learn the rules, and you'll be able to spell the words and correctly pronounce words you've only ever seen written down.

If you can't blow your own trumpet...

...who's can you blow, but I'll do so anonymously.

"Congratulations! You spelt all the words correctly."

But I think I got it easy, can anybody seriously not know how to spell input, march or trap.

So I had another go and managed an adjusted 15. I discounted two errors, bleak which I listened to 3 times and was sure it said bleep and plumped for witch instead of which. I did mess up on caucous with the unnecessary 'o' but reckon anaesthetic was worth two words so it's back to full marks.

Be warned

Germany saw several spelling reforms over the last decades, and while many of the changes actually do make sense on a logical level, it also produced a number of aesthetic monstrosities that anyone educated under the old standards can only shudder over, including some dumbing down. In the end, you start to rely on spellcheckers much more as you just cannot be sure that what you think is correct is still correct after the latest reform. I do not even want to start calculating the cost of having all official documents as well as textbooks refreshed. People writing end up in a mess, but it must be golden days for publishing houses. And that is just for German, natively spoken by only 105 million people, maybe about 200 million overall, compared to 1,8 BILLION speakers of English. It is not to say that spelling reforms are a bad thing per se. Language is dynamic and in constant change, so it cannot harm to have the official rules reflect the status quo every now and then, yet it is an enormous endeavour that has to be approached with a lot of caution.

I'd be happy...

...if they simply did away with silent "ough". I mean, for example:

though

tho

through

thru

It's a small change, but one that's long over due. Of course if we were *logical* (which, for better or worse we aren't) we'd all start speaking a language like Spanish. A very well behaved language indeed.

My real sympathy is for a non-English speaker who has to learn the *written* language. Spoken English isn't too bad, but my God! The horrors of our spelling should not be inflicted on damned souls, much less people just trying to communicate!

@Sarah

"kill that bit of it with beer. How hard can it be?" Well, it depends on the beer.

@Nev

I'm a product of 80s and 90s education, and don't have many problems with spelling. However, one of my colleagues is the same age and can't spell for toffee, frequently confusing where / were; they're / their / there, etc.

So this seems to be more an issue of individuals rather than the education system itself. Furthermore, there's nothing stopping people who know they can't spell just picking up a book and learning.

Well put

why is I have to study English? I speaks da bitch

It would help me...

I can 'get by' in 5 languages and honestly feel that English is pretty irrational compared to the other European/Semitic languages I see. I reckon only French is more confusing but then, when you look at English, it's almost always the French loan-words that cause problems. The Germanic core of Ænglish is, like German itself, pretty straightforward when it comes to spelling.

Most people I know & work with are not native English speakers, it is usually their second to fourth tongue - they certainly do not speak or write better English than natives but they generally try harder, are not overconfident and have a wider, more flexible view of language.

It is pretty daft that Americans are worse than Brits at spelling because many American-English words are simpler and more logically spelt (colour - color, defence - defense etc.).

Personally I think the language is long-overdue for an overhaul and I think the growth of 'txt' spelling will probably speed-up the rationalisation of English. Sadly it would also probably hasten the process of making the world a less rich, narrow-minded and monoglot place.

PS I didn't check my spelling/grammar so I apologise for any errors.

@Sarah

Can we take it that "beleagured" was a typo? Please? As with Tom's '"I had to look twice at "consistantly" as I wasn't sure if it was spelt "consistently."'

Spelling Proposition

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.

Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

The cost?

Think how much it would cost to translate all the books from the "old" english to the new. Or would we not bother and end up splitting the country into those who can read both and those who can't and thus are denied access to that wealth of information?

Well, At Least English is Secure

Well, at least English is a secure language. Little chance Al Qaida will cleverly infiltrate without their minions being native speakers and spellers. Sometimes you have to look for the good in things.