Does the quirky spelling in English actually make it easier to read?

Question

I just finished reading the question asked by Bobnix, in which RegDwight referred to another question with an interesting answer by Kosmonaut. Kosmonaut refers to the great number of pictograms (Kanji or Hanzi) available in Japanese and Chinese, and mentions that the task of memorizing our weirdo spellings pales in comparison to learning vocabulary in one of those languages.

That got me to thinking. When I first started studying Japanese, I first learned the two written versions of the syllabary, hiragana and katakana. And when faced with the formidable task of memorizing thousands of characters and their various readings, I wondered why, given the phonetic language, Japanese still stuck with all those originally Chinese characters. Were they just masochists?

But I dug in, and as I learned more and more kanji a strange thing happened. I realized it was actually easier to read the language with the kanji than without them, because so many Japanese words sound alike (or at least their parts do) and to render them in hiragana would force me to slow down and try to figure out which ほう (hou) they meant: 保, 俸, 倣, 剖, 報, 方, 法 or any of the others. Learning the more complicated writing method actually let me read faster, and to understand words almost pre-apprehensively. By that I mean something a little like looking at the hands of an analog clock and understanding the time without relating it to a numerical equivalent.

Now for English. We have sound-alike words like to, two, and too (or even tu, if you count Shakespeare's imagining of Julius Caesar's dying line). If we went to a strict phonetic spelling system, all those would be spelled the same. I think there are cases where such a thing would actually slow us down. And it may be that the more difficult and idiosyncratic the spelling is, the more likely we are (as Kosmonaut said) to remember it. Further, having remembered it may mean we are more likely to recognize it more easily. Or something like that.

This is just a supposition on my part. It has plausibility and feels right to me, but that doesn't mean it is right. I'd be interested if anyone knows of any information or research done on either side of this argument.

Answer 1

Your assumption is correct. Natural languages are extremely redundant and compressible in sound as well as in orthography, and this has significant and obvious benefits: you can understand obscured speech, read obscured text, and, yes, get the sense of a word based on a quick visual hook rather than relying on a purely phonetic transcription.

English orthography reflects its countless generations of development. The spelling of a word may not correspond perfectly to its pronunciation, but to select a spelling that does correspond to a specific pronunciation naturally excludes some others. I've heard native speakers, for instance, who have different pronunciations for all of "to", "too", and "two".

Further, since the orthography often reflects the etymology, you can often make an educated guess about the meaning of a word you don't know based on the union of its visual and phonological components. If they were collapsed into one, you'd lose that extra information. This is just like how in hanzi there's often a phonetic component as well as a semantic component, and this does carry over somewhat to kanji even though the pronunciation is adapted to Japanese phonology.

These are all reasons why English spelling reform has never caught on, and likely will never do so. It's too widespread, and there are simply too many factors to take into account. Every language has its idiosyncracies, and to see them as flaws or try to fight them is sheer folly.

Answer 2

We have sound-alike words like to, two, and too (or even tu, if you count Shakespeare's imagining of Julius Caesar's dying line). If we went to a strict phonetic spelling system, all those would be spelled the same. I think there are cases where such a thing would actually slow us down.

This seems like a red herring to me, for several reasons.

First, most of the bizarre spelling in English is not that useful for disambiguating homophones.

Second, even if your point stands, does it really argue that spelling irregularity is good? Or does it argue that homophones/homographs are bad?

Third, I very seriously doubt that English homophones and homographs are really all that inconvenient in the first place. Note that to already has two apparently unrelated meanings: 1) the infinitive-marking to in to err is human; and 2) the preposition to in to the store. You used both senses in your question. How much do you think that slowed readers down? I don’t think it slowed me down at all. I seem to have disambiguated each one subconsciously and instantaneously. It is hard to imagine what could have gone smoother.

By contrast, irregular spelling is a clear and present pain in the butt. It happens that my kids are learning to spell right now, so I am biased, but I think English spelling carries a lot of historical baggage that really serves no purpose whatsoever.

A comparison. In Spanish, to pluralize a noun, you add an s at the end. In English, it’s exactly the same... unless the singular ends with a consonant followed by y, in which case you drop the y and add ies, or it ends with s, x, z, sh, or ch, in which case you add es (unless the ch does not actually make a sibilant sound, as in stomach or loch, in which case just s will do), or it ends with a consonant followed by o, like potato, in which case you also add es (unless it is Italian or Spanish in origin, like piano or flamingo, or it just happens to be one of those words like bozo or banjo, in which case just s will do), or it’s irregular, like child, in which case you just have to know it. Your position, as far as I can tell, is that maybe people therefore have an easier time reading English plurals than Spanish ones. That makes no sense to me.

Answer 3

There are a couple of points to consider in this question. You mention Japanese in your question; I'm familiar with Chinese so I'll use that but the parallels are the same.

First, "easier to read" has to consider what is meant by "easier", and who is supposed to benefit from the increased ease. An expert might be really proficient with a more complex system, but a novice might be less proficient than normal. Is there overall benefit? The computer analogy would be writing HTML code by hand, or saving a Word document in HTML format. Anyone who can type can do the latter, but an expert with HTML can do much more with the former. Should all language users be experts? My Spanish-speaking friend complains to me that English spelling is very complicated. Given that so many native speakers have problems with it, I'd have to agree.

There are some things that can be accomplished when spelling is not the same as pronunciation. You can use words with less context (in Chinese, this is often the case when they use short forms or classical forms; one character might be used to represent a meaning which in spoken always takes two or more characters). You can combine words or re-spell words in a way that gives new meaning to old sounds. For example, if you switch the words "sun" and "son" in a word, you can inject new meaning. "Rising sun" -> "Rising son". This juxtaposes the old sense and the new sense. This sort of thing isn't possible if there's only one way to spell those sounds.

Second, it is a fallacy that the Hanzi or Kanji are needed for meaning. Otherwise, people speaking the language wouldn't be able to understand each other. What I've found, and what is probably happening with you, is that my learning of Chinese is incomplete, and this is why Hanzi are sometimes helpful. When I am reading Hanzi, I can recognize certain characters because I don't recognize them, or because this particular character is unique to me, and thus I can read it without having to remember how it sounds. However, when listening, I can hear new vocabulary words and understand them without remembering how they are written. However, once I have fully internalized certain vocabulary words, I find that when I come across them in a Pinyin sentence I have no problem at all reading them.

Third, it's a matter of training to be able to read a language in any given alphabet. The Chinese people I know often can't read Pinyin at all. Even if they understand the system but are completely befuddled by a simple sentence on a page and they have to sound it out loud to be able to make sense of it. Yet anyone who practices can easily become proficient in it in a short time. It's similar to how children use Pig Latin or other code languages; with a bit of practice they can speak and listen very quickly, while to others their speech is gibberish, even though it's based on English.

For a Western linguist's take on the Chinese-character debate, see Homographobia by John DeFrancis.

Anyway, to sum it up, spelling variations cause confusion for novices but allow experts a bit of freedom to do things that can't be explained in oral language.

Answer 4

I find this very interesting. Great question (+1).

You might find this interesting. It is a satirical proposal by Mark Twain for a spelling reform to remove these inconsistencies and supposedly make reading English easier.

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.

While this is meant to be humourous, I think you can see that the English language, while it may seem complicated to new learners, could not really survive a standardisation through orthographical spellings.

We have so many rule-breakers in our spelling patterns largely because of different origins. Words that came to English from French, German, Latin, etc. will each observe different rules.

This also results in us having several different words with the same meaning. Likewise, it would seem silly to enforce the removal of synonyms just because they create a chance for confusion (many second language learners are amazed by the number of synonyms we have in our language and do indeed find it confusing).

Answer 5

In theory you might save space by keeping different spelling for homophones since you could omit some parts of the sentence that in oral form might be needed. But in practice I don't think it does save much space. And if the writing system is detailed enough (including stress and tonal differences etc.) only homophones that are truly homophones would be spelled the same, and since it works when spoken it should work just as well when written phonetically.

Another argument for keeping silent letters and other archaic spellings, is that keeping it would help understand the etymology, but this really only of interest for linguists (which would be able to see the relations anyway), and of no use for a novice trying to learn to read and write.

One of the big problems of proposing either minor or radical spelling reforms for English, is that it's no longer "one" language, but it still uses the same spelling (mostly) for the different flavors of English. If we tried to make it more phonetic it would end up as different languages (or at least very different dialects). I actually think that would be a good thing, if the English speaking countries could cooperate in making a phonetic spelling system for the different sounds, different English variants would still be about as mutually understandable as it is in the spoken form, although looking very different.