According to Yahoo News, a group of four people protested a spelling bee in Washington DC. The cause for the dissatisfaction? The complication of the English language:
Roberta Mahoney, 81, a former Fairfax County, Va. elementary school principal, said the current language obstructs 40 percent of the population from learning how to read, write and spell.
“Our alphabet has 425-plus ways of putting words together in illogical ways,” Mahoney said.
The protesting cohort distributed pins to willing passers-by with their logo, “Enuf is enuf. Enough is too much.”
According to literature distributed by the group, it makes more sense for “fruit” to be spelled as “froot,” “slow” should be “slo,” and “heifer” — a word spelled correctly during the first oral round of the bee Thursday by Texas competitor Ramesh Ghanta — should be “hefer.”
Logically speaking, these protesters have a point. The English language is indeed needlessly complex. The extent to which it hampers people from learning the language is something that I can only guess at…however, through the benefit of hindsight (or hindsite?), they can plan out how to optimally structure language. The problem is, language (verbal and written) is something that evolves in real time…and it’s almost impossible to control.
The problem that I have with the protester’s intent is that the English language is very robust because of it’s lack of planning, and inefficiency. The English language includes a lot of words, and a lot of ways to structure words that allow new concepts to have interesting (to say the least) naming conventions. This is a feature of evolution, and a feature that you would be hard-pressed to find in real-time planning.
The complexity of the English language is what makes the network resilient. Which is why I was happy to continue reading the article to find this paragraph:
Meanwhile, inside the hotel’s Independence Ballroom, 273 spellers celebrated the complexity of the language in all its glory, correctly spelling words like zaibatsu, vibrissae and biauriculate.
Cheers to you, novel spellers!
P.S. Matt Yglesias offers a different (decidedly pro) perspective.
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Saturday ~ June 5th, 2010 at 1:47 pm
Niklas Blanchard
Something to think about, however, is the importance of “proper spelling” vs “relaying concepts”. I think relaying concepts is much more important than proper spelling (even though I’m obsessive about spelling and grammar).
I think proper spelling has more to do with signalling than anything regarding learning.
Saturday ~ June 5th, 2010 at 2:10 pm
teageegeepea
Niklas Blanchard blogs here as well? You guys are on the verge of becoming an Evil Empire!
Teddy Roosevelt was apparently an early supporter of the Simplify English movement.
Nikolas Lloyd defends the Imperials measurement system because they are so many sub-multiples.
Sunday ~ June 6th, 2010 at 10:47 am
Niklas Blanchard
I was unaware that you read my other blog
.
I think a successful ‘simplify English’ movement would increase the returns on investment in terms of status of learning how to “properly spell” words — or maybe it would just make people that have too much time on their hands learn a “dead language”?
One thing I am certain of, however, is that artificial planning of the standards of language would make the language thin, and frail. Eventually, the language would break into multiple languages that would take possibly different courses (like the Vietnamese language, maybe? I guess I’d have to ask Noam Chomsky if this is correct
).
In any case, I think on net, planning language is not desirable…and I think teaching language should be an adaptive process to the natural evolution of language (even though there is definitely niche construction going on).
Monday ~ June 7th, 2010 at 12:40 am
Modeled Behavior is the new Evil Empire « Entitled to an Opinion
[...] Posted by teageegeepea under Uncategorized Leave a Comment Let the record show that I warned everybody first. It’s only a matter of time before their internet Death Star has assimilated all the [...]
Monday ~ June 7th, 2010 at 1:03 am
Unsolicited Flattery « It Don't Mean Much, These Seats are Cheap
[...] intelligent and prolific comment extraordinare (and blogger, too!) TGGP: Let the record show that I warned everybody first. It’s only a matter of time before their internet Death Star has assimilated all the underrated [...]
Monday ~ June 7th, 2010 at 11:01 am
Barbara
There’s an online joke that’s been making the rounds for decades and is, I rather think, the key to understanding the problems (and joys) of our near-impossible language:
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary.
—James Nicoll, can.general, March 21, 1992
Sunday ~ June 13th, 2010 at 4:47 pm
1000niaz نیازمندیها اگهی رایگان
Posted by teageegeepea under Uncategorized Leave a Comment Let the record show that I warned everybody first