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SoundSpel is one of the many English language spelling reform proposals. Its origins date back to 1910.
SoundSpel has been endorsed by the American Literacy Council because English speakers can easily read it.
A sample of SoundSpel text
1. The Star (HG Wells)
It was on the ferst dae of the nue yeer the anounsment was maed, allmoest siemultaeniusly frum three obzervatorys, that the moeshun of the planet Neptune, the outermoest of all planets that wheel about the Sun, had becum verry erratic. A retardaeshun in its velosity had bin suspected in Desember. Then a faent, remoet spek of liet was discuverd in the reejon of the perterbd planet. At ferst this did not cauz eny verry graet exsietment. Sieentific peepl, however, found the intelijens remarkabl enuf, eeven befor it becaem noen that the nue body was rapidly groeing larjer and brieter, and that its moeshun was qiet diferent frum the orderly progres of the planets.
Background
The history of SoundSpel goes back to 1910, what is now known as "Classic New Spelling". Philologist Alexander John Ellis played a major role in developing the system. Walter Ripman and William Archer wrote the first dictionary of the system, "New Spelling" (NuSpelling), which was republished in 1941 by the Simplified Spelling Society.
In 1969 Godfrey Dewey improved upon Ripman's and Archer's work, producing "World English Spelling". Dewey and Edward Rondthaler, a prominent typesetter, CEO of International Typeface Corporation, corresponded from 1971.
In 1986 the book "Dictionary of Simplified American Spelling" written
by Rondthaler and Edward Lias was published by the American Language Academy. Its full title was "Dictionary of American spelling: A simplified alternative spelling for the English language : written as it sounds, pronounced as it's written". This called for improvements to spelling, with clearer rules and better grapheme/ phoneme correspondence. It was slightly less strict than Classic New Spelling, allowing "the" rather than "dhe", for example.
The system was further reformed from 1987 on and became SoundSpel (TM).
Advantages
- SoundSpel does not introduce any new letters or symbols, unlike the radical proposals of the Shavian and Deseret alphabets
- SoundSpel relies upon familiar digraphs
- SoundSpel does not introduce diacriticals (accents), which are not favoured by North Americans
- SoundSpel does not dramatically change the appearance of existing words
- SoundSpel increases regularity of the spelling rules
- SoundSpel improves consistency in the way the vowels are sounded
Disadvantages
- The phonetics is primarily based upon "General American" and differs slightly from the British "Received Pronunciation." There may be other small differences from Australian, Indian, South African, Canadian and other regional accents.
- Approximately half of the words in common use are respelled.
- It is easy to read, but significant effort is required to learn to write it directly. Computer software is currently available to perform the respelling.
- It is one of many proposals. There is no common agreement upon which proposal should be adopted.
Adoption
Spelling reform is currently stalled between many competing proposals, including the no change option. This is similar to the classic VHS versus BETA Video Cassette Recorder tape format war of the 1980's. The format adopted by the most users becomes the successful one.
See also
External Links
Conversion Software:
Available from: BTRSPL (http://www.diac.com/~entente/btrspl.html#DL)
Select download #1, and change the dictionary to ALC-American (a predecessor name to SoundSpel) by running the DCHANGE program.
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