Liabilities

The three features just described are undoubtedly of great advantage in facilitating the acquisition of English by non-native speakers. On the other hand, it is equally important to recognize the difficulties that the foreign student encounters in learning our language. One of these difficulties is the result of that very simplification of inflections which we have considered among the assets of English. It is the difficulty, of which foreigners often complain, of expressing themselves not only logically, but also idiomatically. An idiom is a form of expression peculiar to one language, and English is not alone in possessing such individual forms of expression. All languages have their special ways of saying things. Thus a German says was für ein Mann (what for a man) whereas in English we say what kind of man; the French say il fait froid (it makes cold) whereas we say it is cold. The mastery of idioms depends largely on memory. The distinction between My husband isn’t up yet and My husband isn’t down yet or the quite contradictory use of the word fast in go fast and stand fast seems to the foreigner to be without reasonable justification. It is doubtful whether such idiomatic expressions are so much more common in English than in other languages—for example, French—as those learning English believe, but they undoubtedly loom large in the minds of nonnative speakers.

A more serious criticism of English by those attempting to master it is the chaotic character of its spelling and the frequent lack of correlation between spelling and pronunciation. Writing is merely a mechanical means of recording speech. And theoretically the most adequate system of spelling is that which best combines simplicity with consistency. In alphabetic writing an ideal system would be one in which the same sound was regularly represented by the same character and a given character always represented the same sound. None of the European languages fully attains this high ideal, although many of them, such as Italian or German, come far nearer to it than English. In English the vowel sound in believe, receive, leave, machine, be, see, is in each case represented by a different spelling. Conversely the symbol a in father, hate, hat, and many other words has nearly a score of values. The situation is even more confusing in our treatment of the consonants. We have a dozen spellings for the sound of sh: shoe, sugar, issue, nation, suspicion, ocean, nauseous, conscious, chaperon, schist, fuchsia, pshaw. This is an extreme case, but there are many others only less disturbing, and it serves to show how far we are at times from approaching the ideal of simplicity and consistency.

We shall consider in another place the causes that have brought about this diversity. We are concerned here only with the fact that one cannot tell how to spell an English word by its pronunciation or how to pronounce it by its spelling. English-speaking children undoubtedly waste much valuable time during the early years of their education in learning to spell their own language, and to the foreigner our spelling is appallingly difficult. To be sure, it is not without its defenders. There are those who emphasize the useful way in which the spelling of an English word often indicates its etymology. Again, a distinguished French scholar has urged that since we have preserved in thousands of borrowed words the spelling that those words have in their original language, the foreigner is thereby enabled more easily to recognize the word. It has been further suggested that the very looseness of our orthography makes less noticeable in the written language the dialectal differences that would be revealed if the various parts of the English-speaking world attempted a more phonetic notation on the basis of their local pronunciation. And some phonologists have argued that this looseness permits an economy in representing words that contain predictable phonological alternants of the same morphemes (e.g., divine~divinity, crime~criminal). But in spite of these considerations, each of which is open to serious criticism, it seems as though some improvement might be effected without sacrificing completely the advantages claimed. That such improvement has often been felt to be desirable is evident from the number of occasions on which attempts at reform have been made. In the early part of the twentieth century a movement was launched, later supported by Theodore Roosevelt and other influential people, to bring about a moderate degree of simplification (see § 231). It was suggested that since we wrote has and had we could just as well write hav instead of have, and in the same way ar and wer since we wrote is and was. But though logically sound, these spellings seemed strange to the eye, and the advantage to be gained from the proposed simplifications was not sufficient to overcome human conservatism or indifference or force of habit. It remains to be seen whether the extension of English in the future will some day compel us to consider the reform of our spelling from an impersonal and, indeed, international point of view. For the present, at least, we do not seem to be ready for simplified spelling.