English Spelling Made me Cry, You Won’t Believe What Happened Next (Shocking!) II

This is Part 2 of the story. Read the First Part Here.

The Good Old Qualitative Approach

Hmm, how to even go about doing this? A somewhat straightforward approach would be to simply ask people if they think English is hard to spell or not. But who knows why people have any opinion? And who to ask? (The age-old problem of qualitatively investigating anything alas).

But never mind all that boring stuff, let’s set the stage and at least try to find an approach here. English is spoken by about 1.3 billion people, out of which approximate one billion have another first language. These speakers are distributed over at least about 50 countries where English is an official language, and many more where it isn’t. So, who gets to vote?

Will people who grew up reading and writing Mandarin Chinese, Tibetan, or Thai think that English is just disproportionately hard to spell? Well, I don’t know because I haven’t asked, but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that someone who spent over a decade and a half rote memorizing pictograms just to be able to read the newspaper will not be very impressed by the historical spelling idiosyncrasies in English. I mean sure the Tudors were weird… but not that weird, right? (Yeah yeah they shifted all the vowels I know I know, but still)

The qualitative approach is proving to be a rabbit hole of its own, so let’s just acknowledge that there is a group of English Teachers out there who feel that English Spelling is very hard.

So now what? Well, I have to concede that although English is by no measure the most difficult language to spell, it’s also undeniably not the easiest one. That prize goes to, I don’t know, Georgian maybe? Or Finnish. One of those.

So what we can say for certain is that some languages spelling systems are easier than others. But we knew that already. The question is, what does this actually tell us? Or, what does it mean? In other words, so what?

So What If It’s Difficult? Growth Requires Struggle

After all many things in life are difficult, is that necessarily bad? After all there is the cliche that “anything worthwhile in life is gonna be hard”. Or something like that.

A quick google search gives us any number of these wisdom words:

• Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.” — Napoleon Hill
• “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.” ― Theodore Roosevelt

We get the picture. Maybe another way to put this is: Are things that are easy always better than things that are hard? Or on a more general level, is it preferable to lead an easy life free from any struggle, rather than a life of struggle and overcoming obstacles? I’m sure different philosophers will have different answers here. At the same time I have the feeling that the Stoics might tell us to embrace struggle, for through it we will grow. Or something to that effect.

Another way to approach this issue is to pose a question that’s related to that of spelling, namely that of grammar. Let me explain. If we should becry the difficulties in a spelling system, should we then not also becry the difficulties of grammar? That is to say, in practical terms, whenever we need to learn a new langage and we’re presented with two choices, should we give preference to the language that has the easiest grammar? For example:

• Swedish over German because German has case-marked articles?
• Mandarin over Turkish because Turkish has a complex system of affixes?
• English over Finnish because Finnish has so many cases and verb engings?

Even if we accepted my shallow analysis above at face value, it would make no sense. But let’s say we do accept this line of reasoning, for the sake of the argument. Then we run into the next problem, complexity of the sound system. Again, should we always prefer a simpler sound system over a complex one?

• Hawai’ian over Berber?
• Japanese over Amharic?
• Swahili over Dutch?

Again, it makes no sense. And it makes even less sense when we consider that a language with an extremely bare-bones morphology and a relatively simple sound system, like Mandarin Chinese, has an extremely demanding writing system. And that a language with a simple sound system and an extremely straight-forward spelling, like Finnish, yet has a highly complex morphology with a huge array of endings for both verbs, nouns, and adjectives. And so on. What should we do? Force everyone to learn Toki Pona?

Interlude 2 — For The Love of God (The Reader…)

At this point it has probably become clear that the whole question of how difficult something is to spell is not a very good one. I’m tempted to end my inquiries here by just saying, “you know, languages have the writing systems they have for all kinds of historical reasons, and actually most languages don’t even have a writing system at all so stop complaining and be grateful already, ok!”. And I would say that, if it weren’t for one reason.

The modern world is complicated. A consequence of our highly complex existence is that all languages are not the same. An alphabethized world language with hundreds of millions of speakers who use it for international communications, negotiations, trade and culture cannot be compared to a local language that was spoken by a small group of a couple of thousand speakers 20 000 years ago. I’m not saying one is better than the other, just that they’re not equal.

This puts the spotligth on writing. This highly unnatural passtime is nowadays not just popularized all over the world, but is in many places absolutely crucial in order to survive, not to mention thrive. Most if not all modern high-end jobs require some kind of theorethical education, which in turn requires writing to accomplish.

Which means that it’s potentially a democracy problem. To simplify: people who can write will have a huge advantage over those who can’t. And the bigger the investment it takes to master writing, the harder it will become for people without access to resources such as free time and tutoring to learn it. Which then becomes a roadblock to further education and so on.

(Yes there’s also dyslexia, which I’m guessing might also be linked to the complexity of the writing system, at least in some cases).

In other words, no matter how easy or hard spelling is, it’s simply a fact that one thing is exceedingly important in the modern world — Literacy!

— End of Interlude —

It’s All About Literacy, Baby!

Ok, so what’s the summary so far. Let’s see:

What I argue:

1. Is your language difficult or easy to spell? Well, it’s all about perspective. If you’re a native English speaker, stop complaining
2. And even if your writing system is exceptionally difficult, get over it, just as you get over so many other challenges in life
3. Just be glad your language even has a writing system, most don’t you know
4. Illiteracy, on the other hand, is potentially a big problem
5. Literacy potentially ties into democracy and fairness insofar that tha harder the writing system and the spelling is to learn, the harder it will be for everyone to master it, and that would tip the scale in favor of those who already have a lot of resources in a quite unbalanced way

As you have already figured out, the million-dollar question now is: What factors contribute to high literacy?

For example, what connection (if any) is there between a language’s difficult-to-spell value, and the literacy of the population in a country where that language is the dominant language? In other words, can we see any clear trend of the type: The more difficult the national language is to spell, the higher is the illiteracy in that country?

I’m gonna guess that there will be many factors at work here, not least including the overall wealth and level of stability and peace of the country in question. But I’m also gonna guess that, yes, ease of spelling is probably gonna be a facilitating factor to some extent.

So there we go, we have maybe finally found a truly good reason to promote easy spelling systems over difficult ones! It just doesn’t have anything to do with us as individuals per se, but rather emerges as important on a societal level.

And even so, I said maybe. I just don’t know how much of a difference it makes. According to The World Bank, China has a literacy rate of 97%, compared to Chad that has 22%. Now, even if we don’t take these numbers at face value it’s probably fair to assume that literacy is indeed higher in China than it is in Chad. The national language in China is Mandarin Chinese which requires you to rote memorize tens of thousands of pictograms in order to read and write it. The national languages of Chad are French and Arabic, who use the Latin script and the Arabic script respectively. Needless to say, it seems like other factors than the difficulty of the writing systems influence the rate of literacy in these two places.

So yeah, that’s gonna wrap it up for today. See you next time, bye