Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary
Or Why Can't Anybody Spell
Chapter: Introduction
Should We Worry About Spelling?
Many people argue that English spelling is terrible. George Bernard Shaw reckoned that the English "spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like." It is easy to find words like their/there/they're with the same sounds but different spellings. Some words have unique spellings all of their own, such as colonel and yacht. Fifteen-year-olds can't write ten lines without making at least one spelling mistake, and adults struggle with words such as accommodate and broccoli all their lives.
By contrast, Noam Chomsky, the greatest linguist of our time, claims the current spelling of English is "a near optimal system." He feels that spelling that departs from the pronunciation sometimes helps us to understand what we are reading. Silent letters like the "g" in sign connect one word to other words in which the letters are not silent, like signature; the fact that the past tense ending "-ed" is said in three different ways, "t" (lik ... read full excerpt from Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary: Or Why Can't Anybody Spell? ebook
