One may wonder why English sticks to such a complicated spelling system. Indeed, Italians do not meet with the same problems. Their spelling is trans­parent: every letter maps onto a single phoneme, with virtually no exceptions. As a result, it only takes a few months to learn to read. This gives Italians an enormous advantage: their children’s reading skills surpass ours by several years, and they do not need to spend hours of schooling a week on dictation and spelling out loud. Furthermore, as we shall discuss later, dyslexia is a much less serious problem for them. Perhaps we should follow Italy’s lead, burn all our dictionaries and desine a noo speling sistem dat eeven a three-yia-old chaild cood eezilee reed.

There is no doubt that English spelling could be simplified. The weight of history explains a lot of its peculiarities—today’s pupils should lament the loss of the battle of Hastings, because the mixture of French and English that ensued is responsible for many of our spelling headaches, such as the use of the letter “c” for the sound s (as in “cinder”). Centuries of academic conservatism, sometimes bordering on pedantry, have frozen our dictionary. Well-meaning academics even introduced spelling absurdities such as the “s” in the word “island,” a misguided Renaissance attempt to restore the etymology of the Latin word insula. Worst of all, English spelling failed to evolve in spite of the natural drift of oral language. The introduction of foreign words and spontaneous shifts in English articulation have created an immense gap between the way we write and the way we speak, which causes years of unnec­essary suffering for our children. In brief, reason calls for a radical simplification of English spelling.

Nevertheless, before any revisions can be made, it is essential to fully understand the hidden logic of our spelling system. Spelling irregularities are not just a matter of convention. They also originate in the very structure of our language and of our brains. The two reading routes, either from spelling to sound or from spelling to meaning, place complex and often irreconcilable constraints on any writing system. The linguistic differences between English, Italian, French, and Chinese are such that no single spelling solution could ever suit them all. Thus, the abominable irregularity of English spelling appears inevitable. Although spelling reform is badly needed, it will have to struggle with a great many restrictions.

First of all, it is not clear that English spelling, like Italian, could attribute a single letter to each sound, and a fixed sound to each letter. It would not be a simple thing to do because the English language contains many more speech sounds than Italian. The number of English phonemes ranges from forty to forty-five, depending on speakers and counting methods, while Italian has only thirty. Vowels and diphthongs are particularly abundant in English: there are six simple vowels (as in bat, bet, bit, but, good, and pot), but also five long vowels (as in beef, hoot, bird, bard, and boat) and at least seven diphthongs (as in bay, boy, toe, buy, cow, beer, and bear). If each of those sounds were granted its own written symbol, we would have to invent new letters, placing an addi­tional burden on our children. We could consider the addition of accents to existing letters, such as ã, ä, õ, or ü. However, it is entirely utopian to imagine a universal alphabet that could transcribe all of the world’s languages. Such a spelling system does exist: it is called the International Phonetic Alphabet and it plays an important role in technical publications by phonologists and lin­guists. However, this writing system is so complex that it would be ineffective in everyday life. The International Phonetic Alphabet has 170 signs, some of which are particularly complex (ɓ, ɐ, ɮ, ɲ, or η). Even specialists find it very hard to read fluently without the help of a dictionary.

In order to avoid learning an excessive number of symbol shapes, lan­guages with a great many phonemes, such as English and French, all resort to a compromise. They indicate certain vowels or consonants using either special characters such as ü, or groups of letters like “oo” or “oy.” Such peculiarities, which are unique to any given language, are far from being gratuitous embel­lishments: they play an essential role in the “mental economy” of reading, and have to find their place in any kind of spelling reform.

Although we cannot easily assign a single letter shape to each speech sound, we could perhaps try the opposite. Many spelling errors could be avoided if we systematically transcribed each sound with a fixed letter. For instance, if we were to avoid writing the sound f with both the letter “f” and with “ph,” life would be much simpler. There is little doubt that we could easily get rid of this and many other useless redundancies whose acquisition eats up many years of childhood. In fact, this is the timid direction that American spelling reform took when it simplified the irregular British spellings of “behavior” or “analyze” into “behavior” and “analyze.” Many more steps could have been taken along the same lines. As expert readers, we cease to be aware of the absurdity of our spelling. Even a letter as simple as “x” is unnecessary; as it stands for two phonemes ks that already have their own spelling. In Turkey, one takes a “taksi.” That country, which in the space of one year (1928-29) adopted the Roman alphabet, drastically simplified its spelling, and taught three million people how to read, sets a beautiful example of the feasibility of spelling reform.

Yet here again, great caution is needed. I suspect that any reform whose aim would be to ensure a clear, one-to-one transcription of English speech would be bound to fail, because the role of spelling is not just to pro­vide a faithful transcription of speech sounds. Voltaire was mistaken when he stated, elegantly but erroneously, that “writing is the painting of’ the voice: tile more it bears a resemblance, the better” A written text is not a high-fidelity recording. Its goal is not to reproduce speech as we pronounce it, but rather to code it at a level abstract enough to allow the reader to quickly retrieve its meaning.

For the sake of argument, we can try to imagine what a purely phonetic writing system would look like—one that Voltaire might have considered ideal. When we speak, we alter the pronunciation of’ words as a function of the sounds that surround them. It would be disastrous if spelling were to reflect the obtuse linguistic phenomena of so-called coarticulation, assimila­tion, and resyllabification, of which most speakers are usually unaware. A matter of context would end up having the same word spelled differently. Should we, for instance, use distinct marks for the various pronunciations of plurals? Should we spell “cap driver,” under the pretext that the sound b, when followed by a d, tends to be pronounced like a p? At one extreme, should we factor in the speaker’s accent (“Do you take me vor a shicken?”). This would be apsurd (yes, we do pronounce this word with a p sound). The prime goal of writing is to transmit meaning as efficiently as possible. Any servile transcrip­tion of sounds would detract from this aim.

English spelling often privileges the transparency of word roots at the expense of the regularity of sounds. The words “insane” and “insanity; for instance, are so deeply related to their meaning that it would be silly to spell them differently because of their slightly different pronunciation. Similarly, it is logical to maintain the silent n at the end of “column;’ “autumn;’ or “con­demn:’ given that these words give rise to “columnist:’ “autumnal;’ or “con­demnation.”

Transcription of meaning also explains, at least in part, why English spells the same sounds in many different ways. English words tend to be compact and monosyllabic, and as a result, homophony is very frequent (for instance “eye” and “1:’ “you” and “ewe”). If these words were transcribed phonetically, they could not be distinguished from each other. Spelling conventions have evolved with this constraint in mind. Distinctive spelling for the same sounds complicates dictation, but simplifies the task for the reader, who can quickly grasp the intended meaning. Students who complain about the countless forms of spelling the sound u as in “two:’ “too:’ “to:’ or “stew” should under­stand that these embellishments are essential to the speed at which we read. Without them, any written text would become all opaque rebus. Thanks to spelling conventions, written English points straight at meaning. Any spelling reform would have to maintain this subtle equilibrium between sound and meaning, because this balance reflects a much deeper and more rigid phe­nomenon: our brain’s two reading routes.

Excerpted from ‘Reading in the Brain’ by Stanislas Dehaene Page 31-34