Economist - English spelling

The following letters to the editor on this economist article on English spelling are interesting. http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11920829

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SIR – I am surprised you think that the suggestion we use variant spellings in English is “too tolerant”. This idea surely resembles a free market in spelling. I for one am glad that the English language does not have a governing body such as the Académie Française. The language is fortunate that no linguistic politburo has ever arisen to bully English-speakers and impose its conformity on us all.

Matt Simon
Boston

SIR – Amending English will be welcomed by children who cannot cope with the spelling of, for example, “cycle”, which sounds different when in “bicycle”. Such easy corrections were made to the German language a century ago. Perhaps this may explain why the Germans lost two world wars—they were too logical.

Giorgio Perversi
Massimeno, Italy

SIR – You didn’t consider French, which has a wealth of silent letters and homonyms and is an inspiration for punsters as well as poets. And the relationship between spelling and pronunciation in Portuguese and the Scandinavian languages is hardly simple. What about Russian, with its Byzantine grammatical case endings mostly sounding the same but spelt differently? The development of English into the world’s lingua franca suggests that spelling is not an insuperable barrier.

Jonathan Lynn
Geneva

SIR – I wonder just how many words in the English language have a superfluous u between the letters o and r, as in the word “enamoured”. Though I suppose the existence or non-existence of the u is helpful in determining whether the author is American or not.

Robert Carlton
Professor of history
Chaffey College
Rancho Cucamonga, California

SIR – American spelling is not only easier but more phonetic than the British system in large part because of reforms introduced by Theodore Roosevelt. The president issued an executive order in the summer of 1906 mandating simplified spelling in all government administrative documents.

Tim Nixon
Iola, Wisconsin

SIR – I disagree that double consonants are “bereft of logic”. A little titivation would soon bring honnour (or honner, or onner) and schollar (or scholler or skoller) into line with the double-consonant/short-vowel rule. The difficulty with spelling reform is where does it end? Shudd “about” be “abowt”, and shud “however” be “houever”? If “father” duzn’t need an r, must we keep the one in “farther”, wich only the Scots pronounse differently? If George Bernard Shaw cudn’t get ennywere with refawm, I faw wun giv upp.

Hilary Potts
London

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