Orwell’s Newspeak mates words without any hyphens as courting preliminaries. The mutations mean whatever the official view wants them to mean. What is needed is common sense ? common-sense ? commonsense. If you go dashing around, take care. Who is the antitrade unionist? What was the silk stocking-tax? A superfluous hair-remover is not needed. A hyphen might have helped the headline ‘PEACE MEETING RIOT’.
The spelling adventures of Don Quixote Taking up the challenge of the impossible I dont know why people bother climbing Everest, or sail round the world alone, or quest for gold medals, running millisecs faster. These have all been done. The Guinness Book of Records has had enough pie-eaters. They could thrill to a greater challenge. Try to do something that everybody still says cannot be done. What still cannot be done? Make English spelling userfrendly to suit everyone, with the combination of visual clues to meaning for readers, links to the spoken language for learners, more predictability for writers, closer to international vocabulary shared across the world, and yet barely disturbing for present readers and maintaining access to our heritage in print. Here is the opening chapter of The Adventures of Don Quixote as this famously eccentric Spanish knight might have written it himself, in quest of this ‘impossible’. It changes 1.96% of letters in text, and cuts out 4.9%. Eighty-three per cent of words have no letter changes. Unlike present spelling’s hundreds of rules and thousands of exceptions, eight principles make this spelling predictable spelling without traps. It can be used in three versions. One is for everyday readers, the second, shown here, also for readers, includes accents as a guide to pronunciation for lerners, including lerners of English, and the third, for beginners and spellers, starts with the basic alfabetic prinsipl which is then modified by the other prinsipls, and does not include the single-pronunciation alturnativ vowel spellings that are no problem for readers 78