Orthographically...
From ‘Schools to rethink “i before e”’ published on the BBC yesterday.
‘The spelling mantra “i before e except after c” is no longer worth teaching, according to the government. Advice sent to teachers says there are too few words which follow the rule and recommends using more modern methods to teach spelling to schoolchildren.’
As my grade eight English teacher used to say ‘Spelling is not an indicator of intelligence, but if you can’t spell properly, people will think you’re stupid.’ So why shouldn’t children be taught ‘i before e’ type tricks to aid in a task that essentially consists of memorisation? In fact, it’s clear from the comments section that many people can still recall the helpful spelling hints that they learned in school (or, better yet, made up themselves). I myself benefited from a mnemonic that my mother invented to help me learn how to spell my surname (which has 9 letters, including a deviant ei combination). Moreover, as a proponent points out in the article, ‘i before e’ could be a good starting point for a discussion: words that fit the rule, neighbour/weigh exceptions, exceptions that don’t sound like a, words like herein where the i and e are in different syllables, the different sounds that ie and ei can make, etc. After all, as much as the ‘i before e’ rule applies inconsistently, I doubt that would we refuse to tell children that the past tense of English verbs ends in -ed (not that they don’t figure this out themselves during language acquisition) because there are lots of verbs that have irregular past tense forms.
Some would argue, of course, that English spelling is just too difficult. For instance, chairman of the Spelling Society Jack Bovill (who should perhaps be rechristened Jak Bovil) apparently told the BBC that ‘it would be helpful if spelling was allowed to evolve’.
Language, of course, evolves all the time. Spelling, though it does change, is much more conservative (consider that we now say ‘nite’, but typically still write ‘night’). In essence, writing is secondary to speech: it is actively learned rather than acquired, and you don’t have to be literate in a language to know it. Orthographic variation is thus not accepted or disseminated* in the same way as actual language variation.
As it turns out, though, what the Spelling Society advocates is not spelling evolution, or even letting people spell as they wish, but standardised spelling reform. However, orthography, even if it is not language itself, can still tell us about the history of a language, and relationships between words that don’t necessarily sound alike, but have similar origins or meanings (such as sign and signature, as discussed by Steven Pinker in his book The Language Instinct). Any spelling reform might therefore actually impede our understanding of language in some respects. Furthermore, while it would perhaps be reasonable to give leeway to variant spellings (leading to true spelling evolution), systematically updating our orthography on a frequent basis would not necessarily cause less confusion than leaving it somewhat irregular. There is also not necessarily anything intrinsically more straightforward about one spelling or another: If, for example, we codified acomodate lots of people would then go and get it wrong by writing accommodate.
Alas, maybe I’m just too attached to my spelling mnemonics.
*I must admit that I had some hesitation over whether disseminated had one s or two, and checked a dictionary.
