How do you spell...

One of the primary problems with the English language is its spelling system - if, indeed, you can call it a "system".

Even if you ignored regional variations in accents, three different letters can make the same sound, and one letter can make three different sound - perhaps more, depending on the word and the speaker. Sometimes, the same letter can make a variety of different sounds within the one word. It's what we in the business call "ridiculous".

There is no way a person running on nothing but logic and reasoning will be able to tell how to spell a word by the way it is pronounced - or how to pronounce a word by the well it is spelt.

Take the following words, for example: rough, cough, bough, through, thorough, thought.

Essentially, our written language isn't phonetic so much as pictographic (and the pictures don't look like anything). It's no wonder our kids have difficulty learning it.

I blame the French, myself. We could have survived quite happily with Germanic spelling conventions if the Normans hadn't taken over from the Saxons and pushed French on top of an already tense linguistic situation.

Well, the French and Johnson. I mean, surely he would have realised that in creating a dictionary he wasn't actually "observing" the language so much as creating a model for people to follow? Couldn't he have tidied things up a bit before jotting them down for posterity?

I can't believe I'm going to say this, but... the Americans were onto something when they created their own spelling system. It makes sense to get rid of a couple of extra letters that aren't actually adding anything to the sound - and to use a 'z' for voiced alveolar fricative and an 's' for voiceless one (that actually is phonetic).

I don't want to do this, but I think we need to follow the American example and tidy our written language up a bit. Start with what they've already done, but go further. We need to narrow down to one symbol per sound.

Now, this may mean bringing in diacritics, but quite frankly that's how I learnt to read anyway. I don't know about your school, but my teachers started me out on learning the different sounds of vowels by putting breves over the "short" sounds, macrons over the "long" sounds (actually, often not really long sounds but rather diphthongs), and so forth and so on. Then as we "advanced" we were supposed to learn without these crutches.

Bring back the crutches, I say! Let's see what happens to our literacy levels when reading English becomes something reasonably straightforward, rather than a Herculean challenge.