Simplified spelling lesson from former president of the American Literacy Council

Ed Rondthaler, age 102, gives a very cool lesson about how odd the written English language is. Andy Cruz of House Industries says:

We had the privilege to spend a day filming Ed Rondthaler, the founder of Photo-Lettering, Inc., former president of the American Literacy Council and author of The Dictionary of Simplified American Spelling. Another living legend, writer/director Erich Weiss, is in the process of editing down all of the film we shot. Click here for the “trailer” he put together for us.

Ed Rondthaler

• [Ugly Canuck]

  What strange, rare animals and long-decayed stumps one can find in the swamps of the English language. Every once in a while somebody says they would like to drain it and regularize its channels. It could be done – I like to think of the example of Urdu, which started as a man-made and -created secret code language for the use of the Mogul court, IIRC, but is now spoken by millions. But the swamp has a great charm about it, and those familiar with it will decry any attempt.
  Language constantly changes – as its speakers must, so too must it. As English is so widespread that a National body comme L’academie Francaise is unachievable, the tongue will continue to develop ‘in the wild” so to speak. No censor, no judges, for new English words, usages or phrase.
  To quote Philip K. Dick (his dictum being more apt in this case than others, perhaps), ” The mainstream through the ghetto flows.”
  That will always disturb the pedants, who aren’t comfortable in that kind of ghetto, the actual ghetto. (Literary ghettos are another matter.) As to the “swamp” I referred to above, the pedants and grammarians seem to have mixed feelings about “draining” (ie standardizing and ‘simplifying’) it as their present expertry in its navigation tends to give them some advantages, although they would IMO love dearly to have greater “control” over English forms and their “proper” uses.
  Oh-oh I hear my trouble & strife calling…

• [Ugly Canuck]

  Ah yes my trouble & strife
  That’s what I call
  My dear little wife.

• [more2life]

  It’s a fun act. But surely it’s us, and our own world, not just the literary world, that stands to suffer most by subjugating our own language by such narrowly defined lineal thinking.

  There’s something enormously enriching about grasping words that tell its history by its makeup; its cultural lineage, its age or its modernity by its spelling; its relationships by its Latin composition, all in one sitting.

  “Fat” and “phat”, for instance, how would a phonetic system differentiate the world of difference between the two words, their similarities, their implications, their cultural references. Yet clearly, our language has grown because we have both.

  Clearly, we’ve grown because we have both. The difference, the subtlety, the irony, the complexity of so few letters has enhanced our language as it has enhanced our society and our lives. It’s the beauty of being a living organism.

  There’s sophistication to how we spell. It’s not something you can learn by rote. It’s not something you can plug into a formula and just spit it out. We have to work at it. We have to nurture it. We have to define it.

  Yes, it changes. Yes, it shifts. And yes, it’s elusive, even troublesome.

  But so too, is life.

  And yes, it does fail us at times. Or perhaps, it’s we who fail it. Either way, it’s hardly reason enough to spite it.

  It’s entirely conceivable that a thousand monkeys might one day write “Hamlet”, possibly even recite it through the use of phonetics. But conceptualizing it, creating it, and understanding it, is something else altogether that goes far beyond anything phonetics could possibly offer.

  And yes, all of that is inherent in its spelling. Try re-writing Shakespeare in phonetics to capture the same meaning. It’s an impossibility that stretches beyond visual recognition, because there’s a world of cognition behind those confusing jumbles of letters that we constantly take for granted, or simply ignore.

  The difficulty of the English language is part of its beauty, and part of ours as well. It’s the same reason why the Mona Lisa will always be more beautiful than the paint-by-numbers kit you send away for from the back of cereal boxes.

  It always saddens me to hear people bringing this argument back again and again, to hear people dismiss complexity as wrong and useless in favor of something simplistic and far less meaningful, for no better reason than that, it’s easier.

  The English language is ironic and full of quirky little idiosyncrasies. It meanders its way into countless cultures through century after century. It offers both choice and diversity in staggering proportions to any reader, or writer, willing enough to plumb its depths.

  It’s given us Chaucer, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Emerson, Jefferson, Hemingway, the Brontes, Kerouac, Salinger, Blake, Eliot, Shakespeare, the Bible, the Constitution, Elvis, Sinatra, Fitzgerald, Grunge, Punk, Beat, Dawkins, Hawking, Sagan, Kubrick, Scott, Asimov, Clarke, mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, sports, politics, geology, commerce, NASA, the Hubble, the Challenger. It brought us Everest, the Arctic, the Antarctic.

  Where do you start? Where do you stop?

  It even gave us Shaw, one of phonetics biggest proselytizers, who oddly enough published his plays in English, not phonetics.

  The best part is, much of what’s so utterly and exponentially wonderful about English is it’s free for the asking at any local library. In fact, few things in life are as free, freeing, and empowering, as English well learned. And there’s rhyme and reason enough behind it for anyone willing to engage it for all it’s worth, even the difference between “comb” and “tomb”, or “cum” and “come”.

  English is anything but dumb, and to willfully dumb it down by bludgeoning it into submission through the use of phonetics is not about to make English, English literacy, or English-using people, any better.

  But one thing might.

  Try harder. The struggle is worth the effort.

• [felsby]

  “A purely phonetic system (there aren’t really any–even Korean, which was designed to be phonetic, is no longer because pronunciations drift in time, but spellings don’t)”

  My turkish friends say that their written language is purely phonetic.

• [error404]

  And George Bernard Shaw coined this item

  What does this word say?

  GHOTI…?

  Why Fish of course.

  The GH from CouGH, the O from wOmen, and the TI from staTIon.

  GH… O…Ti = FISH.

  Of course none of this simpleton spelling actually cover anything to dop with the regionality of the words or the roots or the cultures or the history, or indeed any of the underlying sense.

  I love the fabric of the language, and it appals to see it all disrgarded this way.

  It is also ENORMOUSLY insular.

  Here’s the thing.

  The reason why so many words in English have odd spellings is that they are French, they are German , they are Fresian they are Italian, they are Romany the are Punjabi,hindi,greek,armenian, Gaellic,UlsterScots,Doric, and ahundred other tongues.

  And in this melange there exist the possibility of understanding.

  You can trace the origins of words to places and languages that you didn’t expect.

  But if EVREE Thing iz az simpul az posibul, den yoo get a lan gwidj dat iz 4 idiotz. It sep-ratez yoo frum yoor histree N yoor kulchir.

• [error404]

  @ # 12 JOHAN LARSOn.

  your opening line naikled it Johan.

  It’s immaterial, as it’s never goign to happen.

  There is a reason why English is , pardon the joke, the lingua Franca of the world.

  It is the biggest fastest moving Scrubber of a language.

  While French whithers on the vine, with it’s ridiculous Ministry of New French Worsds, English has a tete a tete, at a bijou rendesvous adn then a pukka plate of scran and nicks off to take the world up the tradesman’s.

  It works coz it adapts and aadds, never deletes, and never simplifies.

  There is no level of meaning in Esperanto.

  I go to my bedroom to sleep.

  I crash out in me scratcher for 40 winks.

  I’m off tae ma w*nkin’ chariot fir a spell.

  One retires to one’s boudour for a petite repose.

  All mean the same thing but communicate them in entirely novel but perfectly english ways.

  I love this language.

• [Kyle Armbruster]

  #9 nails it to a certain extent (I have my linguist hat on now).

  The beauty of the English spelling system (yes, I said the beauty) is that it mixes phonetic and etymological systems.

  A purely etymological system like Chinese (there’s a guy at U of Hawaii who has published a lot trying to argue that this classification is Western ethnocentrism and that it’s actually phonetic, but I am wholly unconvinced–just because you usually have a radical that has the same reading in the character, that radical, by itself, still has a meaning) is a major hassle to learn because you have to learn each word and you can’t predict from listening how to write a word (okay, you can at the morphological level, but only after you have learned the necessary characters in order to form compound words). The Chinese system’s parsimony is great once you learn your 15k characters, but that is a fantastic feat of memorization, and if you encounter a new character, you’re kind of up to guessing how to pronounce it. The benefit lies, however, in the ability to read text very quickly, without activating your speech centers much, if at all, because what you’re looking at is pure meaning.

  A purely phonetic system (there aren’t really any–even Korean, which was designed to be phonetic, is no longer because pronunciations drift in time, but spellings don’t) is easy to read, but you actually have to run that visual input through your speech center to decode it into speech, due to the large number of homophones in most languages (e.g. we do spell /kλm/ as “cum,” but it means something very different from “come”). Japanese’s syllabic writing system is very, very phonetic, but the preponderance of homophones basically requires the sort-of troublesome use of kanji to tell you which one of the seemingly millions of /kyo:/s or /ŝu:/s you’re dealing with.

  English, however, has what I think is a very elegant middle ground. The spelling system is not entirely phonetic, but allows a few ways of spelling most sounds. This means that when you encounter a new written word, you can usually guess the pronunciation correctly. You don’t have to look it up only to find that you know the word already, but just didn’t know how to write it. It also preserves the morphology of the word. We make up new Greek words all the time in English, by putting together Greek morphemes. Greek morphemes have distinct spellings, so when we write them down, our readers know that they need to parse this new word morphologically, and that each morpheme has a very fixed meaning. When you spell phonetically, you don’t have that level of detail and specificity.

  The English spelling system offers enough of the benefits of phonetic systems, while keeping the benefits of an etymological system. There is some memorization to do at the beginning, but once that’s done, you don’t need to study spelling anymore.

  Finally, this argument that low literacy rates are due to difficult spelling is preposterous. Japan has one of the highest literacy rates in the world, and they have one of the most difficult writing systems, using two phonetic syllabaries as well as etymological Chinese characters, but unlike the characters in Chinese, they have multiple readings (at least 2, but as many as 8) which just have to be memorized. It’s a terrible system, yet everyone learns it and can read.

  I honestly think that this whole English phonetic spelling contingent is mostly about this guy’s age. I don’t think it’s even considered anymore. Gone, thankfully, the way of General Semantics and these other goofy utopian theories of language.

• [shMerker]

  It’s certainly not very practical. Learning to spell like this might create a level playing field for reading and writing in the present, but it would cut people off from hundreds of years of literature.

• [BijouxBoy]

  Re #11

  Pam I am a Kiwi. I think you may be referring to the SYDNEY habit of saying “sex” instead of “six”. Although we do have our own irritating way of saying “sux” instead of ‘six”…..could that be what you mean? We’re a funny lot down here.

• [scaught]

  I’m glad I didn’t have liquid in my mouth when he got to “cum”.

  OK, ok, I have the sense of humor of a 15 year old. It keeps me young.

• [pentomino]

  I’ve seen Gallagher do this same bit, twice.

  Once was on an HBO special, where he just read the letters out loud. The other time, I think, was at Celebrity Theater, where he used a prop very similar to the one in this video. It wasn’t exactly the same, because POEM was one of Gallagher’s words, but he sequence was very similar, including HOME, SOME, and NUMB. But he didn’t propose the new spellings, even if it would have produced CUM.

• [EtaWat]

  There are still several phonetic languages around, Icelandic gives it a fair go although it’s not 100% phonetic.

  French however is even worse than English, in any given word you are lucky if they actually pronounce half of the letters, sometimes a 10 letter word sounds like a single syllable.

• [romwell]

  #10, do you realize that if English had a phonetic alphabet, there would be no need for Spelling Bee ? Everybody could just write down the words from sounds.

  Imagine a state of the universe where the music scores are not written as they are (i.e., with a precise correspondence between symbols and sounds), but where there’s ambiguity. Would you argue that no simplifaction is needed because the cultural legacy buiried in scores that musicians have trouble reading and writing ?

  To give an example of why the abscence of phonetic alphabet is not so good: (Wiki)

  “Rabbi (pronunciation: [rÉ™b.biː], although in English usually [ˈɹæ.baɪ])”

  The historical background of the word in this case is obstructed by ambiguity of pronunciation, for in no way it was ever spoken with “ai” in the end in the original languages.

  Same goes with Pi and Phi (I bet you read it as Pai and Fai, should be Pee, Fee)

  Etc.

• [offbook]

  PBS’ The Electric Company is coming back to help with the literacy problem.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kC62Qm66V0o

• [monstrinho_do_biscoito]

  language (esp. english) is an evolving system. simplify it now if you like, but in 50 years time it’ll be the same mess as new words are adopted and adapted.

• [Beard of Bees]

  The reason why spelling reformists and other busybodies should be told to take a hike is quite simple. The lunacy of the English language, illogical, inconsistent, and difficult as it is, means it is prime for puns and jokes; poetry, lyrics and rhymes. Go listen to a German try to tell you a joke…

  Actually, here’s a German language joke, but it’s more about the transition between English and German itself than strictly a joke told in German. It makes the point nicely, either way.

  The story goes that some German dignitry is visiting their English hosts. Sensing some general unease over dinner, the host tries to break the ice with some chit-chat . She has a stab at the language and asks the German guest:

  “Was haben sie am Derby Day gemacht?”.

  The guest stiffens and replies, “Es ist nicht DER Bidet sondern DAS Bidet.”

• [JIMWICh]

  Wow! Ed Rondthaler! I love that guy!

  But I didn’t know his background. I’d just seen him in those television commercials last year.

  “I’m Ed Ronthaler, and I built this house…”

• [Joshua Rappeneker]

  @17: “It works coz it adapts and aadds, never deletes, and never simplifies.”

  To be fair, part of English’s success could be attributed to the extreme grammatical simplification it underwent during its period as a ‘peasant’ language.

  The loss of almost all inflection helps us import words from other languages – there’s a nice balance between grammatical simplicity and lexical complexity.

• [LSK]

  He doesn’t look a day over 80!

• [jungletek]

  Not familiar with Mr. Rondthaler before seeing this…

  Cute little presentation, and it made me chuckle, which is always appreciated.

  He does raise a good point though, at least from a purely logical standpoint.

• [justi121883]

  I actually enjoy the strange spelling of English: a lot of history is preserved in each “ti” or “gh.”

  The root cause of difficulty here is that English doesn’t use a phonetic system (like, say, German (for the most part) or Korean) but rather an etymological system (like Chinese). Ideally, each word in English contains references to its past forms and meanings, and this preserves a lot of nuance that would be lost with reformed spelling. This means that, when you try to convert etymological systems (like Chinese characters) to phonetic systems (like pinyin), you get a lot of ambiguity because so much information has been lost.

  Now, English doesn’t depend on its writing system to avoid confusion quite as much as Chinese does, but a phonetic spelling system would erase a lot of the history, the variety, and the fine distinctions in meaning between similar words that make English such a terribly fun language to play with.

• [Uncle_Max]

  I agree with 5 and 9, the history of words paints an interesting picture of their origins. That’s how spelling bee champs can spell words they’ve never heard or seen before. They give it a listen, and by focusing on the country of origin, they can determine the most likely structure of the word.

  That won’t happen if everything is “simplified”.

• [frankieboy]

  What a delight to see Ed here. He lived in my town until just recently, when he moved out West, I think to be closer to family. Just about every week he wrote a Letter to the Editor of our weekly paper, The Croton-Cortlandt Gazette. His letters are usually short and pretty funny. For many years he would write every couple of months about ‘simplified English’. A regular Don Quixote, I thought. After awhile I sensed that this guy must be a character, so I called him and asked if my daughter and I could pay a call. He was most gracious, and welcomed us into his home, and told us about his life. He showed us the very same demonstration with the letters flipping over on the wire spiral bound cards. I guess he packed them for the trip! My girl was about 12 at the time, and he made an impression, I can tell you. He was involved with the early photo typesetting equipment, that replaced hot lead, and that has now been replaced by digital technology. It was a wonderful experience to meet this fine gentleman.
  PS: I’m happy to say he’s taken to mailing his epistles to the paper, so we still get our chuckle from his musings.

• [BuildUupBuzzKill]

  love to see people still active after a century of living life, hope he see’s 150 in good health

• [Pam Rosengren]

  Something Americans forget all too often is that there is a world out there beyond the US borders.

  English is from England, and is spoken in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other places as a first language; and in many former colonies such as India as a second language.

  Retaining International English (i.e. unsimplified) spelling means we can all communicate. Imagine how Balkanised the language would be if every English-speaking country or region had its own phonetic spelling.

  And think of the potential for communication breakdown. I mean, listen to what New Zealanders do when they pronounce the number six. How would they spell that? What would NetNanny do with that?

• [Johan Larson]

  Arguments for and against phonetic spelling are a waste of time, since it’s never going to happen. To make that kind of fundamental change happen requires a powerful regulating entity, such as a national government. The Chinese government, for example, was able to impose a revision of written Chinese characters and introduce a new new romanization system, both of which were widely adopted.

  The closest equivalent for English would be the US federal government. Unfortunately, it has neither a tradition of nor any evident interest in regulating the language. It also governs only a fraction of English speakers, whereas the Chinese state governs nearly all Chinese speakers. So for good or ill, English spelling will continue on its merry way.