atw: Re: Spelling Society centenary [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

Hmm,  I think John Gledhill ought to have called it something like 
"siekolojikal pane". 
Howard


Howard Silcock
Technical Writer
Zare Pty Ltd
Ph  02 6261 2073




Elizabeth Fullerton <Elizabeth_Fullerton@xxxxxxxxxxx> 
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atw: Spelling Society centenary [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]






Y'all might be interested in this - came through in Michael Quinion's 
WorldWideWords newsletter (link: http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/qrsw.htm
)

Just in case anyone feels like picking up the spelling debate again... 
(note that they don't seem to care about the psychological pain of poor 
spelling on good-spelling reviewers/editors.)



3. Recently noted
Spelling reform
Generations of experts have put forward ways to improve the notoriously 
chaotic and inconsistent spelling of English. This isn't the place to 
rehash the arguments on both sides but to note that the Spelling Society - 
founded as the Simplified Spelling Society in 1908, the British sister 
society of a US organisation generously funded by Andrew Carnegie - is 
celebrating its centenary in June by hosting a conference at Coventry 
University called The Cost of English Spelling. A first-year student there 
has worked out that some £18m a year is wasted teaching traditional 
spelling; the Society's secretary, John Gledhill, says that this is 
compounded by what he calls the "psychological pain" caused to poor 
spellers. The Society is not the force it once was, with membership having 
fallen from a high of 35,000 in the early days to 500 now, because the 
subject does not attract the interest it once did. The Society no longer 
advocates a specific system of respelling, though its members o
ften use simplifications such as Cut Spelling, which removes redundant 
letters from words and makes other substitutions to improve correspondence 
with the spoken word, leading to forms like frend, alfabet and scool. The 
result is text like "Th perenial complaint of oldr jenrations that ther 
desendnts fal short of ther eldrs has ofn been aplyd to languaj, and, 
within languaj, to yung peples spelng in particulr."




Regards

Elizabeth Fullerton
Business Solutions Architect
Infosys Australia
Ph: +61 3 9911 3507
Fax: +61 3 9911 3398
www.infosys.com<http://www.infosys.com>
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