OHC
deep green blue collar rainbow
- Location
- Little Beirut
- Pronouns
- they/she
Organized English spelling reform has been around since at least Noah Webster, but the closest it came to programmatic adoption, as far as I know, was in the Progressive Era USA. The Carnegie-funded Simplified Spelling Board was a typical project of the era's drive for efficiency, and it had the backing of English-language authorities like Mark Twain and Melville "Melvil Dui" Dewey. Its recommendations were adopted by private institutions across the country. Reed College, run by technocratic idealist William Trufant Foster, used Simplified Spelling in its early years. (In fact, a vestige of it actually existed at Reed up until just a couple years ago. When I went there, there was a sort of all-purpose student organization called the Reed Kommunal Shit Kollectiv - a name inspired by, although not strictly conforming to, the SSB's rules.)
The SSB's zenith came in 1906, when Theodore Roosevelt signed an executive order mandating the Public Printer to begin using Simplified Spelling for all government communications. This lasted all of a few months before a unanimous resolution of the House endorsing traditional spelling, at which point Roosevelt gave up, figuring it not worth spending political capital on.
Since then, the only spelling reform with any mainstream success that I'm aware of was the Pitman Initial Teaching Alphabet, a phonetic alphabet designed to be easier for children learning to read. The obvious issue was that learning two alphabets was more confusing than just learning one, so after being tried for a few years in the sixties, ITA went down the memory hole. It is fun to look at, though:
Is there any way the Simplified Spelling Board could have had more success? Could Roosevelt have maintained it for government use, at least? Are there any other viable movements for English spelling reform I'm overlooking? The answers are probably "probably not," but I thought I'd bring it up as a novel AH topic for discussion. Y'all are welcome to bring up other languages' spelling reform movements, some of which I believe have been more successful.
As I believe @Thande pointed out in a blog article, this is an idea of limited utility for literary alternate historians - I don't think any of us would want to be subjected to an entire book written in reformed spelling - but I could imagine it working as window dressing in a hypothetical technocratic, Progressive-punk setting.
The SSB's zenith came in 1906, when Theodore Roosevelt signed an executive order mandating the Public Printer to begin using Simplified Spelling for all government communications. This lasted all of a few months before a unanimous resolution of the House endorsing traditional spelling, at which point Roosevelt gave up, figuring it not worth spending political capital on.
Since then, the only spelling reform with any mainstream success that I'm aware of was the Pitman Initial Teaching Alphabet, a phonetic alphabet designed to be easier for children learning to read. The obvious issue was that learning two alphabets was more confusing than just learning one, so after being tried for a few years in the sixties, ITA went down the memory hole. It is fun to look at, though:
Is there any way the Simplified Spelling Board could have had more success? Could Roosevelt have maintained it for government use, at least? Are there any other viable movements for English spelling reform I'm overlooking? The answers are probably "probably not," but I thought I'd bring it up as a novel AH topic for discussion. Y'all are welcome to bring up other languages' spelling reform movements, some of which I believe have been more successful.
As I believe @Thande pointed out in a blog article, this is an idea of limited utility for literary alternate historians - I don't think any of us would want to be subjected to an entire book written in reformed spelling - but I could imagine it working as window dressing in a hypothetical technocratic, Progressive-punk setting.