It is easier to learn to read and write with 15 to 50 alphabet letters than to rote-learn thousands of characters. The Phoenicians used a consonant alphabet for trading, and then the Greeks added vowels. Writing with single characters for syllables is easier still, but the English language has too many different syllables for this. As linguistics professor Vivian Cook and many others before him have pointed out, an unfair number of ‘correct’ English spellings began life as mistakes. English spelling began with an Anglo-Saxon script that was submerged by the Norman-French conquest of 1066. When the English language re-surfaced in writing, it had become mongrel English-French. Printing helped to stabilise its spelling in the 15th century, but printers and scholars were like too many cooks. The revival of learning set off a vocabulary explosion, with much derived from Latin and Greek. Scholars tried to make English words look as if they came from the classics too, so now there were three spoons in the pudding. Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755 and Webster’s in America later set standards for spelling. Both men were reformers in their way but Webster moderated his radical aims, and Johnson tried to base spelling on presumed derivations of words because there was then no prestige English dialect to follow. The British Empire next trawled in vocabulary and spellings from all over the world. ‘Correct’ spelling came to serve as a quick screening test for privilege, diligence, intelligence and even moral virtue for 18th century aristocrats and Victorian middle-classes, to keep out the aspiring vulgar mobs. The Swedish sociologist, Thorsten Veblen, in 1899 described English spelling as an example of ‘Conspicuous Consumption’ that elites use to show off their status, and it is still pretty much that way. The result from all this burden of history is that many words are hard to spell, and many are hard to read too. We have bad spellers, but many more poor readers and failed readers. However, TXTMSGs and the Internet show that winds of spelling change are blowing in places where the young do not fear to tread.
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