Carney (1997) English Spelling

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/kt/, as in apt, act or voiced clusters /bd/, /gd/, as in robbed, begged, but you cannot mix voiced and voiceless consonants.
This

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makes it possible to use contrasting spellings *, *, for rapt, rapped, since there is otherwise no form ending
in *.
Occasional homographs, such as * for latterly and laterally, are not thought to be serious. On the other hand groups
of spellings which would become ambiguous by cutting are preserved: binned, chilled, finned, grinned, milled, willed retain
their letter doubling as * etc. to avoid confusion with bind, child, grind, mild, etc. Thumb, bomb, lamb, plumb, have
their cut to give *, etc., but climb, comb, tomb, womb keep their , somewhat oddly, as a marker of the
long vowel.
Cutting often applies to the vowel letters of unstressed syllables. Operate becomes * and military *. It
may prove difficult for the reader to cope with resulting compressed strings of consonant letters, such as the * of
*, or * for implementing.
The overall saving in written letters seems to be about 10 per cent. This is, naturally enough, thought to be worthwhile.
However, the basic assumption of economy needs to be tested and explored. One of the striking features of human
language is its high redundancy, which allows it to operate in adverse conditions. Not every part of a written or spoken
message needs to be consciously monitored by the listener or reader. But if CS takes out some of the slack in the system,
then more attention and conscious effort may be required as a result. How is that to be costed?
It is tempting to cut out the in the adjectival ending to give *, *, *, *,
but that gets rid of a marker which separates the of adjectives from the of nouns (radius, citrus). It is
tempting to reduce tea, fee, key, to *, *, *, but then we have lost a marker of the difference on the printed
page between stressed lexical words and unstressed function words such as be, me, we (p. 76).
The redundant letters, naturally enough, have been identified as redundant by people who are already highly literate. They
ask themselves Are these cuts possible for a skilled reader like me? But a learner who is dependent on reference back to
speech is not necessarily going to find * as easy to tackle, in either reading or writing, as ,
which clearly has its four syllables marked by vowel letters. Similarly, anatomist spelt as * may be read from cold
as , on the lines of columnist. People in general have no problem at all with counting syllables. They will tell you
that implementing has four syllables and forwardly has three. Faced with an unfamiliar word, they will usually find in the
traditional spelling a useful syllabic framework for their attempted reading. But there is no indication in * for
megalopolis that the word has more than three syllables.
An initial learner will be expected to master CS as a new and independent writing system. This is claimed to be easier than
learning traditional spelling, because the text has been stripped of redundant letters and hence should have greater
regularity.

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14.2 Here are a few words for you to respell in the CS system by getting rid of surplus letters. Obviously you will find it
difficult after only a short introduction to the scheme. The odds are that your versions will not match the proposed version
very well, since you have not had time to learn the system properly. But the point of the exercise is to bring you face-to-
face with the design problems.
acknowledgement boutique broadening connoisseur
excelsior flummoxed kippers kneaded
language origin phosphorus psychology
roughage spherical wholesome wriggling
14.3 What is the basic idea underlying the completely different approach shown in the following specimen? Here, too, look
carefully at each respelling and ask: what do these changes achieve?
Agaen, let us not forget huu form dhe graet majorrity ov dhoez dhat lurn to reed and riet. Dhae ar dhe children dhat atend
priemary skuulz; dhaer tiem iz limited. We hav noe riet to impoez on dhem a kaotik speling for dhe saek ov posibly teeching
dhem a litl historrikal gramar.
(from New Spelling; see Further reading , p. 95)
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