Anyone Can Read Now | The extent and seriousness of English functional illiteracy exceeds your worst NIGHTMARE, |
As you go from page to page, the page you are presently viewing is black (not linked) below. | 8. Characteristics of NuEnglishAfter spending about nine months in frequent email communication with dozens of spelling reform advocates in 2008-2009 and communication with other spelling reform advocates since that time it is obvious that spelling reform advocates react very negatively to any claims that a spelling reform proposal they have not seen before is superior in any way to spelling reform proposals they are familiar with. Most spelling reform advocates have seen several (or even many) spelling reform proposals and have already chosen one that they endorse. That being the case, it is difficult — if not impossible — to get spelling reform advocates to honestly examine any new proposals. Most spelling reform advocates really want spelling reform to occur because they are much more aware of the problems caused by traditional spelling than the general public, but most of them have become so disillusioned by the difficulty of implementing spelling reform that they are not really interested in expending the effort to find an "ultimate" or "best" spelling reform. For them, spelling reform has become nothing more than an interesting diversion or hobby. That is one of the problems in getting spelling reform implemented. The general public is not interested in spelling reform to begin with and if they learn that hundreds or thousands of spelling reform advocates are advocating a dozen or more different spelling reform proposals — instead of determining and advocating the ultimate system — they are even less interested. For the sake of an estimated 600 million English-speaking people around the world who are functionally illiterate in English (including more than 93 million in the U.S. alone), please do not allow your experience in spelling reform advocacy to convince you that some unknown "interloper" — who has spent far fewer years (only since 1985) than you in advocating spelling reform — cannot develop the ultimate spelling system. Any fifth-grade student can pick fault with NuEnglish, but someone who is honestly trying to find the best spelling system will carefully read this page and find the reasons why details about NuEnglish that they do not particularly like are needed by beginning readers and why NuEnglish is, in fact, the ultimate spelling system. After coming to this conclusion, please urge other persons of influence to carefully, honestly evaluate this page. If people who are most knowledgeable about spelling reform cannot agree among themselves, how can we expect the general public to pay any attention to proposed changes that we know are very seriously needed by all English-speaking people? After studying dozens of spelling reform proposals which have been proposed since the 1800s, no known proposed spelling system has more than three or four of the following ten beneficial characteristics of NuEnglish. Concerning items (1) and (2) below: having more than one way to spell a phoneme (the smallest sound in a language or dialect used to distinguish between syllables or words) or more than one grapheme representing a phoneme (a grapheme is a letter, a combination of letters, or a symbol used to represent a phoneme, syllable, or word) not only requires additional learning but also adds a confusing ambiguity to the spelling. Many proposed systems have several of these two problems. Remarkably few proposed spelling systems, other than NuEnglish, has only one spelling per phoneme and graphemes representing only one phoneme. No other proposed spelling system has the choice of spellings of the phonemes based upon finding the most-used spelling or the expected spelling based upon a large study of English common usage, as in item (7). This will ease the problem of learning for present readers. Some of the spelling systems are based upon frequency of appearance of a phoneme's spelling in a dictionary instead of according to frequency of usage in common English prose. For example, the dictionary has far more words with the TH phoneme as in the word thin than in the word then, but because of the common words this, that, these, those, then, and there and a few others, based upon frequency of usage, the TH as in then is more common. The use of double letters to represent a single phoneme is perhaps the cause of more misspellings than any other in traditional spelling and is a characteristic of some of the proposed spelling systems, as well. Only one spelling of the phonemes in NuEnglish is unlike any traditional spelling, and that is because the two TH phonemes, as in the words thin and then, are spelled the same in traditional spelling. The lesser-used TH phoneme, as in the word thin is spelled TT. The only other double letter in NuEnglish used for a single phoneme is the OO as in the word good. This is the most-used spelling of this phoneme in traditional spelling. If macrons are not used, the EE is used for the phoneme as in the word need. The use of an indication of the primary accented syllable is very valuable because it will enable easy reading. When learning traditional spelling we must not only memorize the spelling of the word but also memorize which syllable has the primary accent. Very few proposed spelling systems, other than NuEnglish, also indicate the primary accented syllable. A very large portion of the proposed spelling systems, other than NuEnglish, were designed to be similar in several respects to traditional spelling in order to increase the acceptance of the system by present readers. NuEnglish was scientifically designed to be as simple as possible for beginning readers, who will be able to learn to read NuEnglish in less than three months — some of them in much less than three months. This explanation of why NuEnglish is superior to all other proposed spelling systems is longer than the NuEnglish spelling rules themselves , which can be seen on page 10. Learn to read now! in the left-hand column. Ten Beneficial Characteristics of NuEnglish(1) No phoneme is ever spelled with more than one grapheme. (2) No grapheme ever represents more than one phoneme. (3) There are no silent letters. (4) There are no double letters which represent only one phoneme except OO and TT — and EE, if macrons are not used. (5) Every sound in every word is represented (except the NG sound in words such as bank and jinx) and is represented in strict first to last order. (6) An asterisk (pronounced "star," when spelling aloud) precedes the vowel in the primary accented syllable unless the accent is on the first syllable, the English syllable which is more likely to be accented than any other. (7) The maximum number of phonemes possible are spelled as they are most often spelled in traditional spelling (30 of the 38 phonemes, 79% of them, used in NuEnglish), based upon Godfrey Dewey's landmark 100,000 word study of numerous representative prose samples of English usage. The vowel phoneme, as in the word say, must be spelled AE or A with a macron over it because all other choices conflict with another phoneme spelling. The other seven are spelled as they are expected to be spelled.
(8) There are 14 vowel phonemes, five of which are spelled with a single letter grapheme (a, e, i, o, and u), five are spelled with a digraph (ae, ee, ie, oe, or ue) or with a macron, and four others are spelled only with digraphs (au, oi, oo, and ou). There are 24 consonant phonemes, 18 of which are spelled with a single letter grapheme and six are spelled with a digraph (ch, sh, th, zh, ng, or tt). Traditional spelling has many three or four letter graphemes and even some five letters graphemes (e.g. wEIGHEd, brOUGHAm, and plOUGHEd, a British spelling — it is plowed in American English spelling. These three words are spelled waed, or A with a macron instead of AE, bruem, and ploud in NuEnglish). (9) There is a free computer program on our http://nuenglish.org website which will quickly convert up to about 25 pages of traditionally spelled material at a time into NuEnglish. The program has an English word database of more than 600,000 words and provides NuEnglish spelling in either General American or British dialects. It was prepared by my colleague, Gary Sprunk, who has a masters degree in English Linguistics, and who formed the NuEnglish, Inc. corporation. He also wrote and published Beginner's NuEnglish Workbook, based upon his experience as a teacher of English as a Second Language in an elementary school in Korea and a university in Thailand. His websites are http://nuenglish.org, http://nuenglish.com, and http://nuenglish.net. He is presently preparing a NuEnglish dictionary. (10) Due to the simplicity and logic of NuEnglish spelling, people who already read traditional spelling can learn to read NuEnglish in less than ten minutes and return to previous reading speeds after only two or three months of using NuEnglish, and beginning readers can easily learn to read NuEnglish in less than three months. Some of the better students may be able to read NuEnglish fluently after only a week, as Dr. Frank Laubach believed. Many other beginners can easily learn to read NuEnglish in only four or five weeks. Beginning readers will be able to read fluently after learning nothing more than the grapheme used for each phoneme (spelling rule 1), learning how to blend the phonemes into words, the use of the asterisks for showing primary emphasis (spelling rule 7) and the use of numbers (spelling rule 10). The other seven rules are for providing the consistency needed when writing and can be taught after the students are reading fluently. Many of the beginning students can learn the grapheme used for each phoneme if they are thoroughly familiar with these two memory aid sentences:
The first sentence has the 14 vowel phonemes in the order of five long vowels, five short vowels, (long and short are commonly-used terms not phonetic terms) and the four other vowels. The first sentence also has the GR, BL, and ND consonant blends. The second sentence has the seven consonant digraphs: ZH, NG, SH, HW, CH, TH, and TT representing six consonant phonemes and the HW consonant blend. The two sentences combined contain all 18 of the consonants represented by a single letter. Fourteen vowel phonemes, six consonant phonemes represented by digraphs, and 18 consonant phonemes represented by a single letter totals 38 phonemes to be learned. Although strictly speaking a vowel followed by an R phoneme produces a diphthong (which many phoneticists consider to be a separate phoneme thus claiming the English language has more than 38 phonemes) beginning students can easily learn these additional phonemes by blending the vowel and the R phoneme in the same way as they learn all the other blends. Learning the grapheme to represent 38 phonemes and learning how to blend them into words is quite obviously much easier than learning every word in a person's reading vocabulary one-at-a-time by rote memory or by repeated use. Most people have a reading vocabulary of at least 20,000 words. Many people have reading vocabularies of 70,000 words or more. Learning traditional spelling is complicated by the fact that it is so illogical, inconsistent, and chaotic. There is not even one spelling rule that does not have exceptions — and some of the exceptions have exceptions! A computer programmed with all of the spelling rules was able to correctly spell only about half of a long list of common English words. Not only are there far more graphemes used in traditional spelling than are needed (26 single letters, 184 digraphs, 131 trigraphs, 22 tetragraphs, and 4 pentagraphs, for a total of 367 graphemes), but there are 1768 or more ways of spelling 40 phonemes in traditional spelling, an average of over 44 each. The very worst is the phoneme U as in the word nut: it is spelled at least 60 different ways, with the letters a, e, i, o, u, m, and y, with 33 digraphs, 19 trigraphs, and one tetragraph (OUGH in the word thoroughly). Four of these 60 graphemes represent another phoneme in addition to the U phoneme. For comments, go to the bottom of the home page. |