atw: Spelling Society centenary

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 often 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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