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History should not overcome simplicity

When I visited Bulgaria, it was hard for me to make my way through everyday interactions like finding a restaurant because Bulgarians don’t use the same alphabet we do.

When I visited Bulgaria, it was hard for me to make my way through everyday interactions like finding a restaurant because Bulgarians don’t use the same alphabet we do. They use the Cyrillic alphabet, the one with a backwards capital R as a regular letter. I didn’t even know how to sound out the words. I mean, what does a backwards ‘N’ sound like? Or an upside-down ‘h’?

I bought a Bulgarian-English dictionary, got some help writing down the order of the letters, then learned how to pronounce the letters. I found out the symbols for sounds such as ‘p’, ‘ee,’ ‘t,’ ‘s,’ and ‘uh.’ Suddenly I could see words on signs, words such as ‘pizza’ and ‘Internet.’

Thankfully, Bulgarians spell phonetically, so there was no mystery to sounding out words. The symbol that looks like a Roman numeral two with no line on the bottom always sounds like ‘p.’ It doesn’t matter what other letters are next to it. It’s refreshingly logical.

Some people might think that it would be embarrassingly simplistic to spell pizza as peetsa. I don’t see why simple is bad. Is complexity for its own sake really so great? It seems silly to want things to be more complicated than necessary just so that we can proud of ourselves for memorizing spelling rules.

I once posted a comical “Petition to drop the first ‘d’ in Wednesday” on my Facebook page. Someone protested, saying that history is encapsulated in the spelling, which shows that Wednesday was named for the God Wotan and used to be Wotan’s Day. If that historical connection is so important, why is the change from Wotan’s Day to Wednesday acceptable, but the change from Wednesday to Wenesday or Wensday isn’t? How effective is that method of documenting history? How many people know, from looking at the spelling, that Wednesday is named for the god Wotan?

We mustn’t stop changing things just because people might forget. History is for history books.

I favour American spelling. I use Canadian spelling because my editor insists on it. But American spelling makes more sense. If a huge portion of our national identity rests in our use of useless letters in certain words, then our national identity is embarrassingly weak. Just because I want to spell more phonetically doesn’t mean I want to scrap public health care or have irresponsible foreign policy. Also, if you hate American spelling so much, stop putting a ‘z’ in organisation: Americans use a ‘z.’

I prefer logical thought to blind patriotism when it comes to something as important as communication. I’m Canadian because of my desire to rationally weigh the benefits and risks of all choices, then decide on what offers the most benefit. Ask anyone who is trying to learn English spelling about the benefit of the ‘u’ in honour. Better yet, try to explain the benefit to them.

In a chat about spelling’s continual evolution, one avid reader said to me, “I prefer to preserve the history of words.” I replied that if spelling never changed, there would be no history to preserve.

In 1604, conteyn, worde, plaine, Greeke, Latine, and vnderstand were correct spelling. It’s odd that so many people approve of dropping the ‘e’ in word but not the ‘u’ in neighbour.

Really, people just don’t like change. All change that happened before they learned English was good, but any possible future change will be bad. You can see the illogic, I’m sure. Sorry, I mean, U can see. After all, ‘I’ is just one letter. ‘U’ should be too. That change is coming and I welcome it.

Dave Lloyd is a writer and musician who grew up in St. Albert.

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