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Simplified (English) Spelling

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:

IMG_20210115_121809804.jpg

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.
 
One interesting thing here is how this impacts the English language as a whole. Of course if this does come through then it will be seen as an American oddity at first, and British power will ensure that it doesn't really impact English in most places. But if things go like OTL, where America ends up becoming the dominant power and the UK subsides, American power will mean that a good chunk of the world, when learning English, will probably learn American English rather than the Standard UK English. Those who lived in formerly British colonies (so a good chunk of the overall human race) will learn British English at first but will then find it necessary to learn American English if they wish to get a good job, which is the case with English IOTL. In fact, assuming America becomes the leading superpower ITTL how much does will this "American English" seep into the Anglosphere? I can't imagine it'll be used much in the UK, in fact the UK being a bastion of "Standard English" will probably be a point of national pride, and maybe not in Oceania as well, but as for Canada and English-speaking countries in the Caribbean go it does have a big chance of being used in some capacity. What does everyone else here think?

A bit off topic but "ng" being written as that reminds me of a thing which happens in the Devanagari script, when consonants combine. I wonder if there would be a specific rule for when "ng" is written like that and when the two are separated, or maybe it'll always be like that.
 
The big problem is that even if Roosevelt makes this a cause celebre it's not something that's going to interest ordinary people. I think the big reaction to TR fighting Congress over spelling reform would be "Why is Teddy wasting time on this?" Carnegie actually thought that such top-down reform was doomed to fail, and advocated for a gradualist approach. In his mind the Board should have taken a small number of words and worked for them to get adopted, then kept at it until eventually the language changed. He figured that if the people were to organically adopt the new spellings eventually those in power would end up recognizing them. This seems like it would be more likely to be successful than the government imposing new spellings, but also it's a long, hard road to convince people to change. The best case scenario for that approach is probably that after decades of work we eventually see a new spelling fully emerge.

If we can bring up other language's reforms then I'd like to talk about how the Soviet Union proposed latinizing the country's various languages, which meant creating a Latin script to replace Cyrillic and other systems. In total 50 out of 72 written languages in the USSR were given a Latin script, but the process was reversed in the 1930s (when most languages were given a Cyrillic script). A couple of thoughts for if they kept on it (I'm assuming here that Stalin is the one that keeps it going, because a Soviet Union without Stalin creates way too many butterflies for our purposes):

1. This would lead to a standardized Latin spelling of Russian, Ukrainian, etc. IOTL there's a couple of competing standards, but if the Russians had a standard system we would obviously all use that.

2. Outside of the former Soviet Union Cyrillic is used in Mongolia, Bulgaria, and the former Yugoslavia. Mongolia probably goes along with the script change in the 1930s or 40s, and Bulgaria would probably follow along after WWII. I think that Yugoslavia would make a point of keeping Cyrillic after the Tito-Stalin split, to emphasize their independence. I can also see anti-Communist dissidents like Solzhenitsyn trying to revive Cyrillic as a symbol of resistance/nostalgia for the old order.

3. That annoying trend of English-speakers using the backwards R symbol (which is actually Ya) to spell Russia wouldn't happen, greatly improving our world.
 
The big problem is that even if Roosevelt makes this a cause celebre it's not something that's going to interest ordinary people. I think the big reaction to TR fighting Congress over spelling reform would be "Why is Teddy wasting time on this?" Carnegie actually thought that such top-down reform was doomed to fail, and advocated for a gradualist approach. In his mind the Board should have taken a small number of words and worked for them to get adopted, then kept at it until eventually the language changed. He figured that if the people were to organically adopt the new spellings eventually those in power would end up recognizing them. This seems like it would be more likely to be successful than the government imposing new spellings, but also it's a long, hard road to convince people to change. The best case scenario for that approach is probably that after decades of work we eventually see a new spelling fully emerge.
I think you might be able to see something like Gough Whitlam introducing a Ministry of Helth stick around, but it'd only be one or two changes compared to OTL spelling now.
 
One interesting thing here is how this impacts the English language as a whole. Of course if this does come through then it will be seen as an American oddity at first, and British power will ensure that it doesn't really impact English in most places. But if things go like OTL, where America ends up becoming the dominant power and the UK subsides, American power will mean that a good chunk of the world, when learning English, will probably learn American English rather than the Standard UK English. Those who lived in formerly British colonies (so a good chunk of the overall human race) will learn British English at first but will then find it necessary to learn American English if they wish to get a good job, which is the case with English IOTL. In fact, assuming America becomes the leading superpower ITTL how much does will this "American English" seep into the Anglosphere? I can't imagine it'll be used much in the UK, in fact the UK being a bastion of "Standard English" will probably be a point of national pride, and maybe not in Oceania as well, but as for Canada and English-speaking countries in the Caribbean go it does have a big chance of being used in some capacity. What does everyone else here think?

I'm sure it would become a point of differentiation in the Anglosphere. In Canada and Australia I could see spelling being a less politically significant cousin of the debate over a republic - a sort of culture-war proxy for broader questions of Commonwealth identity.

The big problem is that even if Roosevelt makes this a cause celebre it's not something that's going to interest ordinary people. I think the big reaction to TR fighting Congress over spelling reform would be "Why is Teddy wasting time on this?" Carnegie actually thought that such top-down reform was doomed to fail, and advocated for a gradualist approach. In his mind the Board should have taken a small number of words and worked for them to get adopted, then kept at it until eventually the language changed. He figured that if the people were to organically adopt the new spellings eventually those in power would end up recognizing them. This seems like it would be more likely to be successful than the government imposing new spellings, but also it's a long, hard road to convince people to change. The best case scenario for that approach is probably that after decades of work we eventually see a new spelling fully emerge.

Oh yeah, I very much doubt any normal American administration would make it a priority. A cultural movement pushed in private institutions by reform-minded elites is much more likely. I'd be interested to know what other institutions adopted it IOTL; I'm sure Reed wasn't the only one. (Although it might be a hard topic to find information on - I only know Reed did it because I went there and read a lot about its institutional history.)

I think you might be able to see something like Gough Whitlam introducing a Ministry of Helth stick around

Huh, I didn't realize that happened! Do you know if there was there any broader uptake of those "SR1" reforms or was it a pretty fringe issue?
 
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