J. C. Wells (part of a talk originally given to the Simplified Spelling Society (henceforth SSS), and now made available in revised form (2003) on the author’s website, see below)
Apart from being the editor of the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, John Wells (emeritus Professor of Phonetics at University College London) is perhaps best known for having written the massive standard work on English pronunciation varieties Accents of English (1982). He is also an enthusiastic advocate of spelling reform and is currently President of the SSS. In this extract from a talk which he originally gave to that organisation, Wells examines the need for a reformed alphabet to take account of the ways in which pronunciation varies from one accent to another. The full version of this text can be accessed on: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/accents_spellingreform.htm
An ideal spelling system, we all know, will have one symbol for one sound, one grapheme for one phoneme. But this principle throws up certain difficulties in practice. If we confine ourselves to consideration of the Latin alphabet, one major difficulty is that it is an arbitrary list of 26 letters which do not necessarily correspond to the sound systems of the languages which have to use it. In particular, they do not correspond to the sound system of English. On the one hand, the Latin alphabet provides us with no unambiguous way of spelling English sounds that Latin lacked (e.g. the sound we often spell sh, the two sounds we spell th, and many of our vowels and diphthongs); on the other, it contains at least two letters, q and x, that were unnecessary even from the point of view of Latin. In this article, however, I am concerned not so much with the deficiencies of the alphabet and how we might remedy them (the ‘grapheme’ part) as with the problems arising from the fact that we English speakers do not all pronounce our language in the same way (the ‘phoneme’ part).
As my eminent predecessor Daniel Jones pointed out in his article about phonetics and spelling reform (1944),1
people in different parts of the country speak differently […;] what is a phonetic representation of a word for one person is not necessarily phonetic for another.
In raising these problems I do not want to detract from the fact that there are large numbers of words in our language where they do not arise. All speakers of English, no matter where they come from, pronounce friend so that it rhymes with bend, send, tend. So a reformed spelling frend ought to be uncontroversial. Everyone pronounces sight, site and cite identically, so it is absurd (except for advocates of etymological spelling) that we have to learn to spell them all differently. Everyone distinguishes the verb to advise from the noun the advice, so we can see the justification for distinguishing them in spelling – yet we all make the same pronunciation difference between to use, to house, to excuse and the nouns the use, the house, the excuse where we make no spelling distinction.
The sounds of any language can be viewed as a system of contrasting phonemes. The pronunciation of any word can be specified in terms of the string of phonemes that represent it, together perhaps with information about relevant prosodic features (in the case of English, about stress placement). In designing a scheme of spelling reform, we face a certain danger of insularity or parochialism, of assuming that everybody has the same set of phonemes, and uses the same phonemes in particular words as we do ourselves. Unfortunately this is not the case. What seems obvious and normal to one speaker may be exotic, unusual, subtle and strange to another. There are all sorts of little facts about how English is pronounced round the world by native speakers which may give us pause in our reforming zeal. Here is a simple example. The traditional spelling of the words any and many conflicts with the way most of us say them. It may seem obvious to most of us that they rhyme with penny and so ought to be spelt in the same way, perhaps as enny and menny. In making such an assumption, however, we are ignoring the awkward fact that many southern Irish people pronounce them to rhyme with nanny, so that they would see nothing strange about writing them with the letter a. Maybe they would want to write anny and manny rather than any and many, but that is not my point. I concede that in English as a whole the preferences of the southern Irish may have to give way before those of the vast majority of other English speakers – but we should be aware of what our proposals imply.
Ought mist and missed to be spelt identically because they are pronounced identically? Or should we give the past tense a consistent spelling shape with d, even when, as in missed, it is pronounced /t/? In deciding this issue, we should perhaps consider the Nigerians, who do not usually pronounce missed like mist. This is because – under the influence of traditional orthography – they typically use a /d/ sound in missed, and in fact usually assimilate the /s/ sound to a /z/, so saying /mizd/, with voicing throughout. For them kicked, likewise, tends to rhyme with rigged rather than with strict. I am not necessarily saying that we have to let our reform proposals be determined by how Nigerians pronounce English, even though they do constitute a substantial body of users of English. But I am saying that we should at least be aware that a reform that makes spelling more logical for one group of speakers may make it less logical for another.
From New Spelling (Ripman and Archer, 1948)2 onwards the importance of catering for accents other than Received Pronunciation has been clear from the treatment of historical r. Like most English people, in my speech I don’t distinguish stork and stalk. If spelling reform proposals do make a distinction, as they usually do, then the reason is (a) historical and (b) because they are pronounced differently from one another in other accents. Historically, stork had /r/, and stalk did not. In many varieties of English (Scottish, Irish, west of England, most American, Canadian – the rhotic accents) the distinction is still made in speech. Similarly pairs such as larva – lava, rotor – rota, homophonous for English people like me, are distinct in the rhotic accents. This justifies our keeping the distinction in spelling, even though the task of learning which words to write with r and which without will impose some burden on those of us whose English is non-rhotic. And those of us who pronounce intrusive /r/, saying perhaps rotar of duties, will have to remember not to write r in some positions where we pronounce it, as well as sometimes writing it where we do not pronounce it. Faced with this problem, spelling reform has little alternative to accommodating the rhotic speakers, even if the consequence is that we non-rhotic speakers must learn by rote when to write r and when not.
A similar problem arises with ng. Consider the pair singer:finger. For most speakers these words do not rhyme exactly, because finger has a /w/ sound after the nasal. It seems logical to write singer but fingger (Ripman 1941).3 The trouble here is that people in the trapezium linking Birmingham–Manchester–Liverpool make these words rhyme, with /w/ in both. So if we show a difference in spelling, some Midlanders and Northerners will have to learn an extra arbitrary distinction. Alternatively, I suggest, it is a distinction we might well decide to ignore – so incidentally also simplifying the spelling of the comparative and superlative of long, strong, young, whose irregular pronunciation in most accents would otherwise be reflected in reformed spelling as longger, longgest etc.
A complication with the northern pronunciation which merges the vowels of cut and put is that it bears considerable sociolinguistic value. As everyone knows (in England), the vowel sounds you use in the STRUT set tend to flag your social class and to symbolize educated versus uneducated speech. The same is true of many other pronunciation variables. A reformed spelling that seems to buttress a low-prestige pronunciation will encounter resistance.
Aware of social prejudice, northerners not uncommonly attempt to use a southern- or RP-style vowel in STRUT words – but may do the same thing in FOOT words (since they do not natively distinguish the STRUT and FOOT vowels). Hence the phenomenon of northerners pronouncing sugar to rhyme with RP rugger, and pudding like RP budding. Phrases like good luck are particularly problematic: northerners attempting to sound posh may easily change the first word as well as the second, or indeed sometimes the first word but not the second. The word gas-mask gives rise to the same problem: if your basic pronunciation is with a short vowel in each word, and you later discover that it is considered better to use a long vowel in mask and grass, you might well lengthen the vowel in gas as well. If people have these problems in hitting the intended target in pronunciation, they would obviously have similar problems in reformed spelling if it were to follow RP too slavishly.
Spelling reformers have to confront sociolinguistic facts of this kind. Many ways of pronouncing are liable to be condemned as ugly and uneducated and not to be encouraged. Though this may well depend on the unfavourable stereotyping of the social groups who pronounce in these ways, we have to recognize that such stigmatization exists. If in a spelling reform we make provision for the such stigmatized pronunciations, we could be seen as bolstering vulgarity and ignorance. The objective, scientific observer of course discounts these social views and refuses to make such value judgments, but a reforming movement does have to take such prejudices into account.
A case in point is h-dropping. Millions of English people do not pronounce /h/ consistently: they omit it most or all of the time. We can still understand them. So it might seem logical to omit the letter h from our reformed spelling, and write pairs such as harm and arm identically, in line with that pronunciation. But no! That would go against the social attitude that it is incorrect to drop /h/ and that therefore the spelling ought to reflect its presence; and it would shock all the Scots, Irish, and Americans who are strangers to h-dropping. Obviously we should not continue to write h in the words honest and hour; but it would certainly be wise to continue to write it in harm and house, to reflect the prestige pronunciation that does distinguish harm from arm – even if this is going to constitute a spelling problem for h-droppers.
So with some of the other phonetic variables we have considered. These prejudices might well say that we must retain the difference between the STRUT and FOOT vowels in our reformed spelling, perhaps by writing u and oo respectively. This is not the only vowel-sound contrast which some people don’t make, despite a widespread feeling that it would be better if they did so. Another example is the vowel contrast between the lexical sets SQUARE and NURSE. Liverpudlians,4 for example, typically have these vowel sounds merged, so that fair and fur are not distinguished, and the name Mary is pronounced to rhyme with furry. Again, perhaps we ought to keep the distinction in a reformed orthography, despite the problems that Liverpudlians will then face in remembering the correct spelling. That is to say, we ought to reflect the vowel-sound contrasts that everybody makes except northerners. This is hard on the northerners, but maybe that’s life as it is – unless we can somehow remove these prejudices about accents.
Similar considerations apply to the ending -ing. Almost everywhere where English is spoken there is a rivalry between a relatively high-status pronunciation with a velar nasal (as in sing) and a relatively low-status pronunciation with an alveolar nasal (as in sin). The low-status variant is reflected in our current orthographic conventions by writing n’, thus runnin’ rather than running. Again, I think there would be general agreement that we have to keep the ing spelling, to reflect the prestige pronunciation.
I have the impression that reform proposals this century – those originating in Britain, at least – have been very firmly based upon RP, together with some nods in the direction of archaizing tendencies (which is why historical r is reflected). It is clear that in the last quarter of a century in England the position of RP has been very seriously eroded, in that RP no longer enjoys the unquestioned status that it previously did. There are now many people who not only don’t speak it – that was always the case – but who also don’t aspire to it, and who would regard it as quite unrealistic to aspire towards it. In fact I think what has changed is the perceived model of beautiful or ideal speech, which is for many people no longer RP. This can be seen in all sorts of ways. Teachers of English as a foreign language, for example, get increasingly dissatisfied with the transcriptions the phoneticians offer them as the models for foreigners to imitate. This is what lies behind the change in the phonetic transcription of the final vowel in words like happy. Until the 1980s it was identified with the vowel of bit. But now [2003] the many people who use a final beat-like vowel no longer feel it as lacking the prestige that formerly attached to using only a bit-like vowel. Current pronouncing dictionaries (EPD 1997; LPD 1990, 2000)5 write it with a compromise symbol, to accommodate the many speakers whose vowel is more similar to that of beat.
I have yet to discuss various technical phonological questions like the phonemic principle. It is clear that where we have allophonic differences, that is, realizational differences within a phoneme, we can ignore them. This means that essentially where two sounds are used in such a way that we can predict from the surrounding sounds which will be used, then we can ignore any such difference. This is why we can ignore the difference between an ordinary t-sound and a glottal stop: whichever way you say that is, not only but also, the meaning is the same and your choice of pronunciation should not influence your choice of spelling. Contrary to popular belief, there are certain positions in a word where a glottal stop is by now the norm, as in department or atmosphere, and many other where it is very widely used, as in network, football. Another example is the really rather sharp difference between the o-sound that many people use in most cases (go, show) and the o-sound they use before /l/ (goal, shoulder). As long as we can set up a rule that our long o-sound has a special pronunciation before /l/, there is no problem: the two sounds are just allophonic variants of the same phoneme. They may sound a bit different but the difference is predictable, and so it may be ignored in an orthography.
American intervocalic t is an interesting case, because it is moving from being allophonic to involving a neutralization and therefore becoming phonemic. As you know, in words such as city, waited, and in phrases such as right away, Americans tend to use a d-like sound. Indeed, increasingly it is identical with their d-sound, so that atom and Adam are pronounced identically. Or there may be a subtle distinction, perhaps more in the mind of the speaker than perceptible for the hearer. In 1961 Webster’s Third International6 was the first American dictionary to transcribe these words with /d/. For this it incurred considerable criticism: the /d/ pronunciation was said to be slovenly speech which should not be admitted to the dictionary. Nevertheless, it is a fact; and I have even encountered reverse spellings: I read an American novel in which somebody gave an ‘involuntary shutter’, shutter and shudder for the author clearly not being distinct. But we shall not want to admit this to a reformed spelling scheme. Americans will have to learn by rote which words are written with t and which with d. That would accord with their prejudices in many cases anyhow, so is not yet a problem; but it may be so in a hundred years’ time, particularly if this sound-change spreads, as seems likely, to all other accents of English. Already it occurs in Australia, South Africa and England, being heard as a stylistic variant even in RP. I don’t see a major problem, particularly since in most cases the pronunciation of related words (wait, atomic) will make it clear whether the spelling should be t or d.
What I hope I have done is to highlight the dangers of parochialism in designing a reformed orthography for English, of being unaware of the varying patterns of contrast in different accents. But even with this awareness, it is impossible to satisfy all of the speakers all of the time; the best that can be hoped is that a proposed reform will satisfy most of the speakers most of the time.
1Daniel Jones was Wells’s predecessor in two ways; he was the first professor of phonetics at London University, and was also a previous President of the SSS.
2New Spelling: a publication first produced by the SSS in 1910 under the title Simplified Spelling. The 6th edition was revised by the same authors and brought out in 1948 retitled New Spelling.
3Ripman 1941: the Dictionary of New Spelling also published by the SSS.
4Liverpudlian: popular term for an inhabitant of Liverpool.
5EPD: see Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (Jones 2011); LPD: see Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (Wells 1990, 2008).
6Webster’s Third International: the 1961 edition of the most authoritative dictionary of American English.