{"id":869,"date":"2014-02-13T02:33:43","date_gmt":"2014-02-13T00:33:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/?p=869"},"modified":"2015-07-19T21:09:56","modified_gmt":"2015-07-19T19:09:56","slug":"we-need-more-letters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/we-need-more-letters\/","title":{"rendered":"We need more letters!"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, under way since February 7, have taught us a big lesson: Russia may lag behind<\/span> English- and German-speaking countries in winter sports, but it is far ahead of us in orthographic efficiency.<\/p>\n

Russian needs only four letters to spell the name of the host<\/span> city: \u0421\u043e\u0447\u0438<\/b>. English needs five, while German \u2014 for shame! \u2014 needs seven (Sotschi). Why do we need combinations of letters for common sounds? They make spelling more difficult, they take longer to type, and they make it harder to learn the language.<\/p>\n

I say it’s time to close the spelling gap<\/span> and catch up to Russia.<\/p>\n

Now, you might say it’s unfair to compare the Latin alphabet to Russian. The Cyrillic alphabet was invented (by followers of a guy named Cyril) precisely so that there would be letters for all the sounds. That’s the only way a name like Khrushchev<\/span> (10 letters in English, 13 in German) could be brought down to a manageable length (6 letters, as \u0425\u0440\u0443\u0449\u0451\u0432).<\/p>\n

German, to its credit<\/span>, sorted out its vowels<\/span> by inventing umlauts<\/b>, and elegantly turned two letters into one with the invention of the eszett (\u00df)<\/b>. English, however, went in the opposite direction, making words longer instead of shorter.<\/p>\n

When the printing press was invented, English printers were too lazy to cast their own type<\/span>, so they bought German fonts<\/span> instead. These used the German alphabet, not the alphabet English used to have, with a couple of very useful extra letters in it, namely thorn (\u00fe)<\/b> and yogh (\u021d)<\/b>.<\/p>\n

Without the full alphabet at hand, the printers began changing spellings as they saw fit<\/span>. Thorn was rendered<\/span> first as “y” (“ye olde …”), then as “th” (“the old …”); yogh, which stood for several sounds, was spelled “gh” or “z”, and sometimes “g”, “w”, or “y”. English started to become a mess.<\/p>\n

Back in the day, when “through” was spelled “\u00ferou\u021d”, every letter in it was pronounced; “ni\u021dt” (“night”) was pronounced like the German word nicht<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Although, particularly in America, “through” and “night” are now sometimes spelled “thru” and “nite”, these alternative spellings are almost universally rejected because no one wants to obscure<\/span> their etymology. English could be extremely efficient if it were spelled phonetically, but it would be very hard for learners, including native-speaker children, to discern<\/span> the meaning of an unfamiliar word.<\/p>\n

There is an alternative, and that’s to keep the etymology, but add some letters, including some extinct<\/span> ones, to the alphabet in order to shorten the words.<\/p>\n

Not all extinct letters would be useful. The letter wynn (\u01bf)<\/b> was replaced by “uu”, which became “w”; and ash (\u00e6)<\/b> was either written out as two letters (ae) or replaced by “a” or “e”. We did have eth (\u00f0)<\/b>, however, which was interchangeable<\/span> with thorn. It would be nice to improve upon that and use eth for one “th” sound (the \u21d2 \u00f0e) and thorn for the other (thin \u21d2 \u00fein).<\/p>\n

Reintroducing<\/span> thorn, yogh and eth to the Latin alphabet would have us covered on words of Latin and Anglo-Saxon origin. The other main source of English vocabulary \u2014 and alphabet (alpha-beta) \u2014 is Greek<\/b>. Again we could simplify<\/span> things while preserving<\/span> etymology if we took a few of their letters. Wouldn’t it be much more elegant to write “\u03c6otogra\u03c6” or “\u03c8y\u03c7ology”?<\/p>\n

The biggest and most obvious change, however, would be to have one letter for “sh” and one for “ch”. The Czech letters \u0161 and \u010d would work, but it would be much simpler to use the symbols $<\/b> and \u00a2<\/b>. The dollar sign is on the German keyboard, too; it could go straight into use.<\/p>\n

If our spellings were reformed, Britons could save space when writing about fi$ and \u00a2i\u03c8 or \u00f0e late Barone\u00df \u00dea\u00a2er. Americans could enjoy similar benefits<\/span> when writing about \u00f0e Congre\u00df or Michael \u03a6el\u03c8. Germans from $waben to $werin would save loads of time when writing almost anything. And we journalists could all get \u00ferou\u021d the ni\u021dt much more easily when writing about So\u00a2i.<\/p>\n

Now can I have that Nobel Peace Prize<\/a>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, under way since February 7, have taught us a big lesson: Russia may lag behind English- and German-speaking countries in winter sports, but it is far ahead of us in orthographic efficiency. Russian needs only four letters to spell the name of the host city: \u0421\u043e\u0447\u0438. English needs five, while German \u2014 for shame! … >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[110],"tags":[22,16,123,90,125],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/869"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=869"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2058,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/869\/revisions\/2058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}