Elizabeth, we protesters ar not advocating fonetic spellings so much as reggular spellings. For instance, our present rules (perhaps better termd 'conventions') state that i should hav added an 'ed' to 'term' to change it to past tense. But if the convention is alterd to say 'ad "ed" when it creates a seprat sillable, and only "d" when it dusnt' that would make sense. Then 'lerned' would be a two-sillable adjectiv, and 'lernd' a single-sillable verb. 'Days' would stay that way, if another convention remaned, tho pronounced 'dayz'.

The ame is to hav spelling logical rather than haphazard, making it eesier for lerners to know and aply the rules, and thus becum litterat. Italians lern to spel in the first scool yeer or two, and then they can reed and rite with little anguish.

There ar mor than 'a few difficult words [reed 'spellings'] in the English language,' and most of them ar in rellativly common words, those that children strike in lerning to reed and rite. Thees turn about one in five off litteracy, and also lerning, for life.

This is worth remmedying!

Elizabeth,

The problem you had spelling *terrific was because it had other plausible spellings. *teriffic also seems plausible as does tarifik and tirifick.

We may know that the word came from the Latin word terrēre to frighten - the same root as terror.

The spelling society's regularized spelling is *teriffic where the double f marks a short stressed vowel.

This shows the difference between an etymology based spelling and a rule based spelling.

The dictionary key says /t&'rif-ic/ where the schwa [&] can be speld at least 4 different ways in the traditional writing system. It is also plausible to double any of the consonants other than the first.

Knowing the pronunciation helps but it does not greatly reduce the ambiguity or take us directly to the traditional spelling.

t&riffic would be the spelling recommended by the spelling society. It has only one ambiguity: what letter to substitute for schwa.

*terror would be spelled terr&r, again with only one ambiguity. The regularized spelling has one vowel ambiguity. The traditional spelling has in addition three ambiguous consonants. Traditional spelling can also add a silent surplus character to a word.

If you had trouble with terrific, the number of extremely difficult words would probably be more than a few.

The first stage reform would not be a phonetic or even a phonemic reform. It would be one where the ambiguity was reduced by removing all surplus letters and by distinguishing some long and short vowels.

Elizabeth,

President Roosevelt (is that how you spell his name?) was not wrong, or even innovative, when he tried to spell past-tense verbs with -t instead of -ed.

If you look at texts from the eighteenth century, when the American colonies where at their most vigorous, and yearning to slip the leading-reins which held them close to Mother England, those -t endings were rife. When pronunciation called for a -d, it was often printed preceded by an apostrofe, thus: "reign'd".

Furthermore, on the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean we are no strangers to past tenses ending in -t: as well as 'wept', 'slept' and 'kept' (for '*weeped', '*sleeped' and '*keeped'), we have 'leant' (/lent/) for 'leaned', learnt for 'learned', 'dreamt' (/dremt/) for 'dreamed' and 'spelt' for 'spelled'.

So, why not 'kist' for 'kissed' &c.?

Learn all the rhulles of spellin and eff the word still duz nit look rite, put an "e" at the end

Hi,

It's Elizabeth.

I want to thank sbettlycos. My Latin teacher will be ashamed that I couldn't spell terrific. I've taken Latin for four years now, and I find its expanded my vocabulary, but hasn't made me a terrific speller yet (in fact, I just spelled terrific wrong twice.)

Mizeki- thanks for the history lesson. I'm writing a paper right now on the evolution of language and will definitely do more research on this.

Thanks for reading!
Elizabeth

don't beat yourself uppp! i found one here:

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