UNILATERAL DECLARATION OF INTERNATIONAL
SPELLING DAY
October 9, 2001
Date matches the Korean Hangul 'Great Letters' Day
 
      • English-Spelling Day
      • Internationl Spelling Day
      • Spelling Waachers Day
      • Great Letters' Day
Coordinator Dr. Valerie Yule
Valerie_Yule@fc.ausom.net 
PO Box 2125 Mount Waverley,
Vic. Australia, 3149

 
Why do Koreans celebrate their own spelling day?
Hwai du korianz cellebreyt their own spelling dey?
Ritten inn spanglish   [wai dont wi?]
Why.don't we?
King Sejong the Great, the Fourth Monarch of the Yi Dynasty of the Choson Kingdom in Korea hundreds of years ago ordered his scholars to find a simple method of writing down spoken Korean so that even the common people would be able to express their thoughts in writing. 

They looked around overseas, but saw nothing they thought good enough, so they  made up their own - a set of symbols consisting of 11 vowels and 17 consonants that are arranged in syllables which block into words.  In 1933 this was standardized to ten vowels and 14 consonants, making it easier still.  Today the Hangul alphabet is acclaimed as one of the world's great literacy achievements and the most remarkable phonetic alphabet ever produced. 

When Korea was under Japanese occupation, using and maintaining the Hangul writing system instead of Japanese became a major tool of expression of Korean nationalism.  When Korea was liberated from Japan in 1945, Hangul Day was instituted as part of the celebrations, with a national holiday every year.  Today it is no longer a national holiday but it is still celebrated. 

Hangul Day is celebrated with a ceremony in which distinguished guests and scholars commemorate the Handle writing system and hold a conference to ways of keeping it as useful as possible.   Essay writing competitions are also organized throughout Korea. 

Hangul illustrates what can be done when a writing system is invented and adopted by decree. There are other examples such as Turkey's adoption of the roman character set to replace arabic. A writing system is just a code, a way of representing speech sounds.  Simple consistent codes are superior to complex inconsistent codes.  The easiest way to achieve universal literacy is to begin with a simple "user friendly" code. 

Russia has a real alphabet and the letter sound associations are taught at the rate of one letter per day.  At the end of a two month introduction, children  can write and spell every word in their vocabulary and read books appropriate for their level of vocabulary development.  A similar rapid development of reading and writing skills was found with i.t.a. [phonemic english].  While successful in teaching the concept of the alphabet and making it possible for children to write using their entire vocabulary, the i.t.a. approach only postponed the transition to the traditional orthography.  It takes most children 3 years to get where Russian children are in three months. 

Celebrating the traditional English writing system 
is like celebrating a curse.  Celebreiting the tradishanal English raiting sistam iz laik celebreiting a currs [kers].

It is difficult to celebrate the English writing system because it was not invented, refined, or simplified.  There was once a more or less consistent representation of old English developed mostly by Latin scribes and clerics.  However, when the way that words were pronounced changed, the scholar's neglected to change the way they were spelled.  Thus around 1400 the English letter-sound correspondences began to deviate from those used in the languages of continental Europe. 

Without a consistent way to represent sounds with letters, the English usually neglected to respell foreign loan words. Today, about 85% of English consists of loan words. 

The English writing system contains serveral consistent spelling systems.  For a given sound, one of four spellings will be correct over 75% of the time.  Unfortunately, when it comes to spelling a partciular word it is not clear which spelling pattern should be used.  Sometimes the same spellings are used for more than one sound.  In addition, English has other principles such as morphonlogical consistency which compete with the phonological principle. For example, plural endings are spelled -s and -es without regard to sound.

In the l7th Century, an attempt was made to standardize spelling at the word level. The needs of printers after 1460 led to the first attempt at standardized spelling.  What was codified were the spellings of Chaucer and earlier writers.  The initial standards were thus based on Middle English pronunciation conventions.

In 1755, with the publication of Johnson's influential dictionary, no attempt was made to standardize the spelling of sounds. Some units smaller than words, e.g., morphemes, were standardized. Thus [-s] represents a plural form but is usually pronounced as /z/ as in [dogs].  After 1760, educated people could no longer spell "dogs" as "dogz," "said" as "sed," or "goose" as "goos". The cult of correctness had been born. Spelling had to conform to the dictionary spelling, but this spelling did not have to conform to pronunciation.

If the English writing system was made as useful as possible, it could also be celebrated.  The downside would be the loss of the "Spelling Bee."  When spelling becomes as transparent as it is in Hangul, Spanish, Italian and many other languages, no special skill is required to spell correctly. It's no contest!

There is some tutorials on Hang [hungul]  but none similar to the one on Hotsuma a related script. Some of the shapes may be derivatives of Indian scripts.
 Find David Kelley's graphic

 
 
 
Hangul Links  haang..l    vowels & consonants
  • Kim, Tae Hee - provides information about Korea including its culture, language hangul, and food.

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Ways to Improve the 
English Writing System

The way one codes English speech sounds has no effect on the way that English is pronounced.  Everyone agrees that a more efficient way of coding is possible and desirable.

One could for instance start writing with the pronunciation guides found in English dictionaries.  Pronunciation guides are almost unique to English since most other languages are pronounced the way they are spelled.  Each letter is associated with one or two sounds.  In English, the typical letter is associated with over ten sounds.

What would English look like if written Korean style?
 Alternate Notations Compared
Cut Spelling - Noah Webster said that all superfluous letters should be eliminated.  There should be no silent letters in a word.  Yule's surplus cut spelling and Upward's Cut Spelling follow through on this recommendation.  The result is a streamlined writing system with less confusing clutter.  Cut Spelling does not do too much to improve the ambiguity of vowel spelling. 

The /u:/ sound in "ooze" can be spelled over 29 different ways in English words. After cutting out the silent letters, it can still be spelled over 8 different ways - but that is a 100% improvement. 

Spanglish reduces vowel options to two per sound. e.g., at= aet or att, bread = bread or bredd, flee = fli or flie, very=verry, air = eir or err,  merry marry = merry marry or maery, would=wd or wwd, herder = hurrder hrrder, or herdr, flew = flu or fluu, book=bwk or buk, buck=buck or bukk.  [500 words]

Saxon Spanglish [SS] - In English the short vowels are always checked, that is, always followed by a consonant.  If we put two consonants after each checked vowel, then there is an easy way to distinguish checked from free or long vowels.
Saxon [ca. 1000 ce] did this but the practice was not as consistent as in Norwegian after the 1955 reform.

Marking the checked vowel is a very efficient way of clarifying vowel sounds in a phonemic notation: e.g.,
Hi found the bir tu bi verry bitter.

Sinns therr aar no' spesshal kerakterz, it iz olso suutabl for running text. In a phonemic system, therr is wan annd ownly wan wey tu maark a vaul sound. Saxon-Spanglish iz an ASCII verzhan av IPA - international phonetic alphabet
 
Could English 
be written in Hangul?

Can English be written in Japanese Hotsuma?

 Yes and No.  Any language can be written in any orthography but there may be no way to represent some important speech sounds.  English with l2 uncombined vowels uses an alphabet designed for Latin which had 10 or less.  Two letter combinations (digraphs) were used to represent the missing sound signs.  Hangul has only 10 vowels so it would have an equally hard time representing every distinctive English speech sound or phoneme without adding at least two new symbols [phonograms].

The Japanese hotsuma script had a similar problem which was fixed in this notation - hotsuma for English.
Example English written in Hangul One example shows how English letters could be stacked in Korean style. See also Hotsuma which also stacks syllables.
For publicity, press releases, interviews, quizzes, radio dramas (scripts available), etc. 
Contact Valerie Yule

Collections of Spelling on the Internet and in emails which strike you as being more sensibl than what we hav now.

Prizes for individual collections: Booklets of Spelling Games and  Spelling Cartoon memo booklets.

Prize for the best school collection: A  take-home Teach Yourself  to Read and Spell video and manual.
Text sampel - [a simpler syllabary]

Closing Date for Entries: June 1, 2001

Mail to: Valerie Yule,  PO Box 2125 Mount Waverley, Vic. Australia 3149
Contributions may also be emailed: Valerie_Yule@fc.ausom.net

Some activities everyone can organize 
and enjoy for Internationl Spelling Day

  • Publicity, press releases, interviews, quizzes, radio drama (scripts available)

    •  
  • Spelling games (see the Spelling Games book, The game's up!) 

    •  
  • Sales of gimiks and gajets,

    •  
  • Spelling spotters and spelling watchers activities and competitions

    examples: 
- Look for and report mispelled words [here is a list from the NY Times]
- Collect spelling related limericks, quips, riddles, cartoons, 
- Make up your own jokes, poems, and drawings.
- Look for simpler spellings in ads, trademarks, signs, emails, children's writing
      Sudz & Dudz, Lite Beer, Drive Thru, 

What spellling improvements can you recommend?

What impact does irregular spelling and a trickly writing system have on illiteracy rates?

How do other countries retain alphabetical spelling?  What happened to our alphabet?

Write an essay of up to 500 words on writing system reforms in another country or countries Contributions without prior copyright may be included in publications in aid of literacy innovations, unless entrants prefer not.

* This year's competition for Spelling Day closes on June 1, 2001

A joke in a reform notation

PRIZES

Prizes for individual collections: Booklets of Spelling Games and Spelling Cartoon memo booklets.
Prize for the best school collection: A  take-home Teach Yourself to Read and Spell video and manual.
The usual competition rules apply. Entries returned only if sent with stamped addressed envelope.
All contributions without prior copyright may be included in a Spelling Jokebook being compiled in aid of literacy innovations.

Send your jokes and other contribution to the International English spelling competition to

Valerie Yule, c/- PO Box 2125 Mount Waverley, Vic. Australia 3149 or email

vyule@labyrinth.net.au

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Reformed or Regularized Spelling Links

Simpl Spel Newsletter - ssn-jun01.html
Simplified Spelling Society
Spelling Reform Ring
Polyvalence
Ozy-Ideashttp://www.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/spelling.htm
ALC - American Literacy League     fyi@americanliteracy.org
Spelling reform discussion groups:   saundspel phonology forum
Truespel  http://www.unifon.org/truespel-1.html 
Saxon Spanglish  http://www.unifon.org/saxon-spanglish.html
RITE spelling
Quick Reference - dictionaries and other resources
Ask Dr. Alphabet
Spelling Link Page   http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vangogh/555/Spell/sitemap-l.htm
Do we have a dyslexic writing system? http://www.unifon.org/dyslexia-msj2.html
Pijin and Creoles and their significance for the design of simplified spellings for English
 

When did the alphabet begin?  Was it invented only once?  How was it spread?
How did we come to spell the way we do in English?   History
What is wrong with English spelling?  TWS