Dialogue: Of fopdoodles and fonetik speling

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

I resently reseevd a leter from wun of thos peepul hu brush asiide the grayt corzes and spend their liives obsesivly advokating sum revolushonary chanje almost no wun els can be botherd tu suport.

Yes, that's right, my correspondent is another in the long, thin line of people who have tried to foist upon us a strictly phonetic spelling system. It's not going to happen. It's not a dog that will have its day. Anyone who spends years pleading this cause is like someone obsessed with tennis who never wins a game.

One is tempted to write off such a person as what Dr Samuel Johnson would have called a "fopdoodle" (fool, or insignificant wretch), but the truth is that in the world of serious hustle we live in today, it's nice to know that some people are still out there swimming vigorously up the stream.

The letter was from Peter Johnstone, of Wyndham in Southland, who wrote, enigmatically, beneath his signature: "el-tango-solo."

Assuming it was a phonetic message, I have tried saying this holding my nose to get a nasal phonetic effect. I've tried singing it quickly and then drawing it out. I've tried saying it while shivering after a swim to get the ambience of Wyndham on an autumn morning. No luck. It still sounds like el-tango-solo and seems to mean that Johnstone dances the tango on his own.

But that's by the way. Johnstone heard me talking about language on the radio one morning. "Not more than half an hour previously," he wrote, "I had posted a letter to the Simplified Spelling Society's local representative, Allan Campbell, in Christchurch."

So it's pretty clear that we have cells of these revolutionaries flung all around our country. It may be that they were bad spellers at school and despite years of remedial courses have become hardened recidivists.

Anyway, here is a brief sample of Johnstone's spelling system: There are some few who object strongly to prizes of any sort whatsoever. "Virtue for virtues sake," say they. "Knowledge for the sake of knowledge." Theer ar sum fyu hu objekt strongle to priizes ov ene sort. "Vertyu for vertyus saak," sa tha. "Nolej for the luv ov nolej" Whadaye reckon?

One point that seems to have escaped Johnstone and Campbell is that before you can have phonetic spelling you must have uniform pronunciation. It has not escaped you I'm sure that they have Scottish names; so I would like to ask them whether the capital city of Southland should be spelt "Invecargil," which is how most of up here say it, or should be simplified for the Johnstone and Campbell clans as "Inverrrcarrrgil."

Take that common Glaswegian phrase "Up your nose with a rubber hose." Should that be rendered phonetically as: "Oop yerrr nus wi a ruba hus"?

Johnstone says in his letter to me: "I have a website, with Onest English on it. (Shouldn't that be Onest Inglish?) This is a formula by which Standard English can be converted to phonetic spelling, staying within our alphabet.

"I am promoting it currently by posting out adverts. Not that I have money enough to afford to do much. My interest is in consistency rather then simplicity (which is a bi-product). (If there is 1/4 to learn, it should be four times faster.)"

Most people seem to think that the mind has a finite volume like a pot and that learning what they consider useless things means less room for more valuable information. I'm not sure that's true.

Maybe the more you learn when you're young the more you can absorb later. Think of the Japanese, Koreans and ethnic Chinese. They have no phonetic guide at all towards the correct way to write. They simply have to learn, as children, hundreds of symbols by rote.

Perhaps it's this early cramming that makes so many of them such retentive learners later in life.

The first roughly phonetic alphabet, the father and mother of our present one, developed in the Middle East around four millenniums ago with just 22 consonants. I'd imagine there would be a lot of hawking, spitting and hissing going on without vowels which, by the way, were introduced by the Greeks about three millenniums ago.

English writing is based on a phonetic alphabet but the sounds and the spelling have parted company over the years, and many attempts have been made to remarry them.

George Bernard Shaw, whose shadow loomed over the intellectual life of Britain in the first half of the 20th century, wrote his plays in Pitman's shorthand for transcription by a secretary. After his death in 1950, his will provided for a competition for a new alphabet.

A bloke with the highly satisfactory name of Kingsley Read won it and his work has since disappeared from public view. So I think we can say this kind of writing revolution is a non-starter.

But I love the thought of Johnstone, holed up in Wyndham for the winter, and Campbell there in Christchurch, and maybe dozens of others around the country, beavering away on a programme to change the writing of the English-speaking world and make their bad spelling respectable.

Perhaps we could convert some of the screaming pro and anti-abortionists, and scathing pro and anti-market economists, and other clamouring public campaigners to this much more interesting, civilised, fruitful and harmless cause.