Cut Spelling
The (Cut Spelng) Proposal

A Streamlined Writing System for English:
Modernizing English spelling by removing redundant letters

| Rules | Background | Hanbdbook | Spelling and a Social Invetion | References |
Why reform English Spelling Regularizing English Streamlining Savings

The simplest form of clipped spelng simply removes the silent letters - letters that provide no clue as to the pronunciation of a word. Next, double letters and letters standing for the neutral unstressed vowel (or schwa) are eliminated (or as in YS, replaced with an acute accent). The word little becomes litl and the word turn becomes trn.

Additional Steps Toward Ryt Rytng
More complex forms of CUT SPELNG remove letters that provide an unreliable guide to pronunciation (the becomes th) and make a few substitutions to eliminate ambiguity and confusion: flight becomes flyt, write becomes ryt, and register becomes rejistr.

In YuroSpel, the y is related to /i:/ or the vowel in eel. A y shape is available associated with the /ai/ where the alternate form of the /ah/ sound is the grave accent [` ]. flight /fl`it [or fl`yt] and write r`it [or r`/t or ryt]

Cut spelling is not phonemic but it is more phonemic than traditional English orthography. Phonemic spelling looks a little strange to those brought up on a steady diet of irregularly spelled words.

The phrase "A high chair can be painted green" would be spelled

using the highly regularized Portuguese orthography. This spelling system is consistent and would be easier to learn from scratch than the traditional spelling system. However, it is not one that English readers would find easy to adjust to because it does not retain the word patterns of traditional English orthography:

The removal or omission of redundant letters reduces the amount of text by 8 to 12%. This combined with a more regular pattern of spelling can increase reading speed. Because the basic pattern of English is retained, readers have little difficulty in adjusting to the new orthography. Within a couple of hours, most people can be reading streamlined semi-regularized English as fast as traditional English.

The Basics of Cut Spelling

Cut Spelng (CS) is a simplifyd, partialy regulrized orthografy wich omits thre categoris of misleadng letrs:

  1. Letrs irelevnt to pronunciation (eg, ‘debt’ becoms CS ‘det’).
  2. Letrs standng for shwa with l, m, n, r (eg, ‘bottle’, ‘bottom’, ‘button’, ‘butter’ becom ‘bottl’, ‘bottm’, ‘buttn’, ‘buttr’); simlrly in inflections and som sufixs (eg,‘waitd’, ‘waitng’, ‘fishs’, ‘eatbl’, ‘edbl’).
  3. Most dubld consnnts ar ritn singl (eg, ‘bottl’, ‘bottm’, ‘buttn’, ‘buttr’, ‘accommodation’ becom ‘botl’, ‘botm’, ‘butn’, ‘butr’, ‘acomodation’).

Othr rules simplify th use of capitl letrs and apostrofes.

Aditionly, thre rules of letr-substitution aply:

  1. Th sound /f/ is spelt f (eg, ‘fotograf’, ‘enuf’, ‘fon’).
  2. Th sound /j/ is spelt j (eg, ‘jymnast’, ‘jinjr’, ‘juj’).
  3. ig pronounced as long y is spelt y (eg, ‘sigh’, ‘sight’, ‘sign’ becom ‘sy’, ‘syt’, ‘syn’).

Readrs unfamilir with CS ar advised to ignor unusul spelngs at first and read as fluently as posbl. With a litl practis, CS becoms esy.

RULES OF CUT SPELLING

Cutting rules

Rule 1 Letters irrelevant to pronunciation

Rule 2a Unstressed vowels before < l, m, n, r >

Rule 2b Vowels in certain suffixes

Rule 3 Doubled consonants simplified

Substitution rules

Cut Spelling Handbook 2nd Edition - 1996
The simplification of written English by omission of redundant letters"
306pp, Simplified Spelling Society, 1992, £10 or US$20    how to order

    Part I. Rationale and Main Features

    Part II. Analysis of the present irregularities of English spelling

    Part III. a dictionary of over 20,000 of the most common words with
    redundant letters, giving their simpler CS equivalents

    Bibliography


What ideas will people buy into?

Would it be a good idea to simplify and rationalize the spelling of English? Those who don't know how to write English would support such a change. Those who have spent 8 or more years learning TO (the traditional spelling system) are typically not ready to adopt a program that would help others but might create more work for themselves.

There are some 80 rules that govern the spelling of 80% of the words in English. The remaining 20% are so irregular that they don't seem to follow any rule.  What this means is that few people can spell without a dictionary or spell checker close at hand.  (Judge for yourself after taking the spelling test)

What if the number of spelling rules could be reduced from 80 to 10 or less? What if this changed not only made English easier to spell but also easier to write and read? Would you support such a reform?

Hwats rong with spelng w'rds the wey they sound? There are some benefits to standardized spelling, namely speed reading. It is difficult to quickly adopt a new standard. The change over would probably take ten years and there would still be a mix of traditional and reformed spelling.

Ther ar svm ben'fits tu standardaizd spelng. It is' dificult tu kwikli adopt a nu standard. Th' cheinj ov'r wud prob'bly teik ten yirz and ther w'wd stil be: a miks 'v tradish'n'l and reformd spelng. (New Follick)

 Spelling is a social invention

Valerie Yule, Ph.D. (We are waiting for a real picture of Valerie, this one is just a place holder --ed.)

The challenge. In proportion to what is spent and invested in education, English-speaking countries have the greatest problems of illiteracy and semiliteracy in the world. Many multilingual third world countries have attempted to use English as the medium of education and government; English is the language of books and international contacts, and was often their colonial heritage. But these countries have been driven to using pidgin (with simplified English spelling) or the major indigenous language more because of English spelling than because of nationalism. English has to be learnt as two languages - the spoken and the written - while most foreign languages can be learnt with books to help learn the spoken language, and speech to help with the written language.

Most of the 700 million people using English today are not English-speakers born - and could not care less about Norman-French etymologies. They want a writing system that is user-friendly. For English to remain the international language of the world, an internationally usable English spelling is essential.

Less than 5% of Britains and Americans (and Australians) can spell in English without mistakes, or without dictionaries or computer spell-checkers - but the big and serious problem is not their inability to write - it is the high proportion of the population who cannot learn to read properly.

Thousands of spelling reform proposals have been put forward. Even Samuel Johnson tried to improve spelling according to his own ideas. The big bugbears have been:

'People fear they would have to go through the whole awful process
of learning to read and write again'

(1) People who have been through the process of learning to read and write already, often with such trouble because the spelling is such a barrier to learning to read as well as to write, fear they would have to go through the whole awful process again. This is not so.

(2) Reform campaigns have been conducted on the assumption that 'spelling as you speak' would solve everything, and without research to observe what the abilities and needs of users and learners really are.

What can be done?

The possibilities for change. Every major modern language except English and French has had a minor or major reform of its writing system in the last hundred years - and even French may be changing. We can learn from what they have done - and recognise that change is possible as well as necessary. If others can do it, even across continents and many dialects, as with Spanish and Portuguese, Brits can - or can they?

Today principles of human engineering are applied to make our technology 'user-friendly' - except for spelling. Yet spelling is technology, not culture, not the English language itself. (The rare occasions you want to know etymology or the history of words, it is risky to guess from the spelling - look up a dictionary.)

Unless there is some breakthrough to a writing system that can cross language barriers like Chinese, but without its difficulties, English spelling must continue with the international roman alphabet, and be sufficiently like present spelling for those who are literate to adapt without training, and for our heritage of print to remain accessible.

Ninety per cent of what we read today has been printed or reprinted within the past ten years, and computers make it possible to completely retool house rules for spelling with no difficulty, so change is not impossible.

Is literacy necessary?

When computers first came in, it was believed that spelling improvement woud be forced by the need for a simpl spelling to enable computer speech-print transliteration. Howevr, computers hav one-trial lerning and error-free memories - which humans do not - and computers cannot distinguish language out of sounds in the way that humans lern to do. So as Nicholas Albery points out, computers with bilt-in spelling chekrs coud rigidify English spelling aftr all.

The conseqences of this rigidity woud be that th 'havs' who can lern to read and who hav computers (who ar not 'almost everyone' as N.A. has imagind) wil retain their advantajge over th great mass of 'hav nots' who find it hard to lern to read and who wil not hav convenient access to computers for all their writing needs. As these outnumbr th 'havs' to an ordr of milions, it wil turn out to be to th disadvantage of the 'havs' too. English is alredy losing ground as the intrnationl language of th world.

Let evryone who thinks that computer spelling chekrs ar going to solv th problem of English spelling try to use a computer spelling chekr to chek everything they write for a week and imagin everyone els they see doing th same. I am reminded of a sene from Gulliver's Travels which involvd the constant application of pig's bladrs on stiks to facilitate everyday comunication.

'When computers ar almost as cheap as a paket of crisps, solar-powerd, distributed world-wide, if yu can't read, th computer coud read th text to yu.'

  • Becaus of English spelling, ther hav been moves in education to try to teach reading by 'Look and Say' typ methods that ignor th spelling. These fail, unless students somehow work out th relation of letrs and language themselvs. Th next expedient was to hope that print literacy is not realy needed, and some qite respectabl authrs hav ritn (yes, ritn!) that only an elite needs to be able to read - th rest can get by with TV and other forms of 'media literacy'. Others think that when computers ar 'almost as cheap as a paket of crisps, solar-powerd, distributed world-wide, if yu can't read, th computer coud read th text to yu.' As for riting, yu speak th text in and it does th rest.

    • Supose computers do become crisp-cheap, environmentaly frendly in manufacture and operation, able to transliterate any text into speech (relativly esy) and anyone's speech into ASCII (stil not feasibl). Computers and video ar betr than BOOKS in comunicating information and How to Do It - but B.O.O.K.S. (Bodies of Organised Knoledg) wil remain superior for th getting of wisdom and knoledg, for substantial reading in sience, history, literature, filosofy. A paperbak of 40,000 words is much esier, qikr and mor plesant reading than 40,000 words scroled. And it is much esier and mor plesant to read computer screen than to lisn to a human reading 40,000 words if yu can't read. To lisn to 40,000 words red by a computer woud be worse stil. On my desert iland I want books, rather than a mor vulnerabl computer and disks.

    We alredy kno th difrence between what can be lernt from books and what can be lernt from television. With print literacy th posibility of civilised behavior is greatr. Rathr than be prepared to plunge our culture into iliteracy, it woud be betr to improve th tecnology of spelling to be mor user-frendly, now.

    Letrs surplus to representation of meaning and pronunciation of words make up mor than 5% of text, wasting forests, time and money. Work out how much extra typing is involvd per day, how much extra paper is reqired in newsprint and a print run of books. It was estimated that Russia saved 90 tons of paper per annum when they spelt Komunist with one m.


    A 'demotic' spelling for lernrs, international and popular use coud even run along with present spelling retaind for the present literat elite, similar to the strategies in Greece and Israel, and to some extent, Korea, Japan and China.

    This may seem too simpl a Gordian solution. It does not solv all stupid spellings. But it woud solv enough to greatly benefit those currently disadvantaged, children, forinrs, and the less able in th population. Since it only drops surplus letrs, literat reders woud reqire no retraining, soon adapt, and coud becom mor eficient becaus so much clutr was removed. For riters, 'when in dout, leve it out', solvs problems of dubld letrs, useless silent letrs, and how to spell unstressd vowels. Silent letrs ar not dropd if they woud altr meaning or pronunciation - including in some words that reqire actual change of inconsistent letrs in spelling. (e.g. greatly, language, once, photograph, disadvantaged, coud be improved by consistent letr change.)

    Implementation. No proposals shoud be put into practice without extensiv reserch and pilot trials. Some of this reserch is now being carried out, but mor is needed to establish clearly which letrs ar realy unnecessary in words and how cutting them benefits lernrs, writers, lerning English as a second language, and reders as they became acustomd to it. Pilot trials which also familiarise the concept and th respellings can be made by:

    Furthr reding    (see the longer list in Simpl Spelng)

    * For furthr information, contact the Simplified Spelling Society

    Valerie Yule, 57 Waimarie Drive, Mount Waverley, Vic. Australia. 3159 (tel 03 807 4315).

    The above article first appeared in the 1993 Social Inventions Journal Contents:

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    The original posting of this article contained a reader response. What was interesting about this was the low marks this idea received relative to other social inventions. Not very many people bothered to read about spelling reform and over half of those who did thought it wasn't a good idea.

    The Background on Cut Spelling

    Why reform English spelling?

      English spelling is notoriously hard to master. It is a centuries-old writing system whose contradictions and eccentricities were never designed for a fully literate society. We all suffer from its clumsiness and inconsistency: it takes far longer to learn than more regular systems; it limits people's ability to express themselves; it causes mispronunciation, especially by foreign learners; most people acquire at best an erratic command of it (even skilled writers are prone to uncertainty and error); and many millions are condemned to functional illiteracy. It is therefore small wonder there is such concern about standards of literacy in English-speaking countries today. Yet many of those countries have in recent decades seen the benefit of modernizing equally antiquated systems of currency and weights & measures. Similar modernization of English spelling is badly needed.

    Is reform possible?

      Spelling reform is an unfamiliar idea to the English-speaking world, but other languages show it is feasible and indeed a normal way of preserving a writing system from obsolescence. The letters of the alphabet were designed to stand for the sounds of speech, but pronunciation evolves in the course of time, and confusion sets in when letters and sounds cease to match: the way we speak words now no longer tells us how to write them, and the way they are written no longer tells us how to speak them. That is the central problem of English spelling. In the past century many languages have modernized their spelling to improve this match between letters and sounds, and so aid literacy. To ensure continuity, only small changes are usually made, and while schoolchildren learn some new, improved spellings, most adults continue to write as before. It may therefore take a lifetime before everyone uses the new forms. Ideally, spelling reform needs to be an imperceptibly slow, but carefully planned and continuous process.

    Problems of regularizing

      Many schemes have been devised for respelling English as it is pronounced, but apart from some small improvements in America none has been adopted for general use. Several fully regularized systems have however been tried in the past 150 years in teaching beginners, with dramatic success in helping them acquire basic literacy skills, the best known recently being the i.t.a. (initial teaching alphabet). However, all these schemes have required learners to transfer to the traditional irregular spelling as soon as they can read and write fluently, and much of the advantage is then lost.

      Ideal though total regularization may ultimately be, the effect such schemes have on written English is so drastic as to be a major deterrent to their adoption. The following sentence, in the Simplified Spelling Society's New Spelling (1948), perhaps the best thought-out and most influential of these fully regularized orthographies, demonstrates the effect:"Dhe langgwej wood be impruuvd bie dhe adopshon of nue speling for wurdz". Less radical proposals have therefore been made since then, so as to avoid such visual disruption, suggesting for instance that at first only the spelling of one sound, like the first vowel in any, should be regularized; or a single irregularity, like <gh>, should be removed. However, the immediate benefit of such a reform would be slight.
      A new approach is called for if today's readers are not to be alienated, yet learners are to benefit significantly. (more)

    Streamlining

    Cutting redundant letters

    In the 1970s the Australian psychologist Valerie Yule found that many irregular spellings arise from redundant letters. These are letters which mislead because they are not needed to represent the sound of a word. Writers then cannot tell from a word's pronunciation which letters its written form requires, nor where to insert them, while readers are likely to mispronounce unfamiliar words containing them. A group within the Simplified Spelling Society therefore decided to explore which letters are redundant in English, and the effect their removal has on the appearance of the resulting 'cut' text. This Cut Spelling (CS) is now demonstrated.

    Esy readng for continuity

    One first notices that one can imediatly read CS quite esily without even noing th rules of th systm. Since most words ar unchanjed and few letrs substituted, one has th impression of norml ritn english with a lot of od slips, rathr than of a totaly new riting systm. Th esential cor of words, th letrs that identify them, is rarely afectd, so that ther is a hy levl of compatbility between th old and new spelngs. This is esential for th gradul introduction of any spelng reform, as ther must be no risk of a brekdown of ritn comunication between th jenrations educated in th old and th new systms. CS represents not a radicl upheval, but rather a streamlining, a trimng away of many of those featurs of traditionl english spelng wich dislocate th smooth opration of th alfabetic principl of regulr sound-symbl corespondnce.

    Furthr Advantajs

    Savings

    Th secnd thing one notices is that CS is som 10% shortr than traditionl spelng. This has sevrl importnt advantajs. To begin with, it saves time and trubl for evryone involvd in producing ritn text, from scoolchildren to publishrs, from novlists to advrtisers, from secretris to grafic desynrs. CS wud enable them al to create text that much fastr, because ther wud be fewr letrs to rite and they wud hesitate less over dificlt spelngs. Scoolchildren cud then devote th time saved in th act of riting (as wel as that saved in aquiring litracy skils) to othr lernng activitis. Simlr time-saving wud be experienced by adults in handriting, typng, word-procesng, typ-setng, or any othr form of text production. Th reduced space requiremnt has typograficl benefits: public syns and notices cud be smalr, or ritn larjr; mor text cud be fitd on video or computer screens; fewr abreviations wud be needd; and fewr words wud hav to be split with hyfns at th ends of lines. Ther wud also be material savings: with around one paje in ten no longr needd, books and newspapers wud require less paper (alternativly, mor text cud be carrid in th same space as befor), and demands on both storaj and transport wud be less. And th environmnt wud gain from th loer consumtion of raw materials and enrjy in manufacturng and from th reduction in th amount of waste needng to be disposed of.

    Targetng spelng problms

    Less imediatly obvius is th fact that CS removes many of th most trublsm spelng problms that hav bedevld riting in english for centuris. Ther ar thre main categris: ther ar silent letrs, such as <s> in isle or <i> in business, wich ar so ofn mispelt eithr as ilse, buisness, or as ile, busness; th latr ar th CS forms. Anothr categry is that of variant unstresd vowls, as befor th final <r> in burglar, teacher, doctor, glamour, murmur, injure, martyr, wich CS neatly alyns as burglr, teachr, doctr, glamr, murmr, injr, martr. Thirdly ther ar th dubld consnnts, so ofn mispelt singl today, as found in such words as accommodate, committee, parallel(l)ed; CS simplifys these to acomodate, comitee, paraleld.

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