'Enuf is enuf' say spelling reformers

S.Pathiravitana

Whatever happened to the Spelling Bee contests that Radio Ceylon used to hold once upon a time and let public schools compete ? With the coming of Television to this country Radio Ceylon, having changed its name to the SLBC, seems to have quietly gone into abeyance since then. There is hardly any noise from that direction now except for the predominant air space it gives to the point of gay abandon to the BBC to spread its falsehoods in this free and independent country.

I was reminded of our Spelling Bee contests on discovering that Indians who have migrated to the States are turning out to be champion spellers in the national spelling contests the US holds every year. At the 2005 contest, a mere 13 year old kid, Anurag Kashyap, walked away with the $30,000 prize, books, scholarships and other goodies.

And as reported in the New York Times, "For many American contestants, the most uncommon words at last week's national spelling bee were not appoggiatura ( a musical term) and onychophagy, but the names of the top four finishers: Anurag Kashyap, Aliya Deri, Samir Patel and Rajiv Tarigopula. All were of Indian ancestry."

At one time our own spellers from our public schools were so good that we were given to believe that we were far superior in many ways in our command of the English language to the Indians. Now we find them far superior even to the native-born Americans, not only by taking the championship away from them but to win this championship five out of seven times in the past seven years.

Britain, under whom we got started with spelling bees, doesn't seem to be as fascinated with spelling bees as America is. There are only a few spelling contests in Britain and they are said to be 'peculiarly American' in origin and referred to sometimes in snide remarks as a 'bizarre phenomenon.'

The British press hardly gives the kind of publicity America lavishes on them. America, of course, has reason to be fascinated. For it was Noah Webster who thought it was time to stop this eccentric spelling system in the English language and sat down to produce spelling books for children and later a dictionary where the principle was to improve as much as possible the logicality of English spelling.

British dictionaries are not exactly caving in now but acknowledging finally that there could be two forms of spelling some words like programme and program. And even the name Bee in Spelling Bee is attributed to be of American origin in British dictionaries.

We have been talking so far about the spelling bees held for juniors or rather students which are sponsored by the Scripps Howard firm and is known as the Scripps National Spelling Bee contest. There is also a spelling bee contest for Seniors or retirees from the age of 50 upwards.

Contestants aged 86 have appeared in these contests. Although the rewards for winning are not outstanding as for the Juniors or Students - only a mere $100, it is not the money that attracts the Seniors but the entertainment they get by looking up the meaning of words and compiling lists of them.

This has been going on for over a dozen years and looks as if it would go on for a long time more. Retirees too should be keeping their minds occupied. Perhaps this is the alternative some would like to have instead of the recommended merit of meditation.

But to come back to our own spelling bee contests of yesteryear, I remember the time a serious mistake made by one of the referees at these spelling contests. I remember it too well because the speller who was victimised was from my old school.

The word he was called upon to spell was 'committee.' It is such an easy word to spell because you remembered it always as having a double em, double tee and double ee.

And the contestant from my old school had no hesitation in coming out with it as speedily as he could. But zing! went the bell of the referee and we the listeners, as well as the contestants, were startled by this rude interruption by the referee's zinging bell indicating, 'Error!.'

How come, we wondered, this spelling was wrong ? Then the referee said that the word he had in mind was 'comity' - meaning 'friendly recognition as far as practicable of each others laws and usages.' Since the umpire's word is law there were no protests from the contestants.

At that time I was too small to refer up big dictionaries to see whether the umpire was right. Years later, that is just the other day after reading about the National Spelling Bee contest in the US, I looked up the words in the dictionary.

The referee at that contest should have indicated the difference in the two words by pronouncing 'comity' correctly. The contestants as well as the listeners heard him pronounce the word as 'committee' (ker-mit-tee). But 'comity' is pronounced differently.

The 'co' part of the word should have been sounded to rhyme with 'so' and not with 'ker' as in committee. In this case, as it happens in cricket, the umpire was wrong. That these Spelling Bees inflict another kind of injustice on a section of the people may be seen by the number of protestors lining up the streets in the States to demonstrate whenever spelling contests are held.

There are two organisations in the US with international membership which have been formed to reform the existing complicated spelling system. One of them is the American Literacy Council and the other is the Simplified Spelling Society. Both of them are agreed that as a result of this complex spelling, illiteracy is on the increase and the cure is to simplify this complexity.

When they were protesting outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington where the contest was being held they carried sandwich boards and slogans very expressive of their aims. 'Enuf is enuf', 'I am thru with through', 'All u need is l-u-v' and 'Spell different difrent.'.

The reasons they advance in support of their claims seem to be valid even for this country. too, where there is now a desperate effort being made to catch up with English; the stumbling blocks being pronouncing words like sough, sought, and dough and spelling them.

One of the picketers representing both the above mentioned organisations referring to the kind of problem words just mentioned says, "Our odd spelling retains words like cough, bough, through and though. This increases illiteracy and crime. Fix it and you fix a host of problems. We want to fix it." Another picketer said that their prisons are full of illiterates.

The organiser of the picket is Elizabeth Kuizenga (SSS), from San Francisco. She says there is evidence that English-speaking children around the world take much longer than speakers of other languages to learn to write, and they are distracted from writing creatively because of the constant attention they must give to spelling problems as they write.

"There is also empirical evidence that children's confidence in their sense of logic is seriously undermined by our illogical spellings, resulting in problems with mathematics skills as well. Indeed, many children just give up on school altogether as a result. The prisons are full of people with literacy problems."

A Canadian from Victoria representing the Simplified Spelling Society who was also picketing at this contest giving the Canadian angle to this problem said "Our spelling puts an unfair burden on the many foreigners and aboriginals in Canada's population.

We welcome them into our culture, then throw a written language at them that they can expect never to master. This is not only unnecessary, it's discriminatory, hypocritical and wasteful."

And if we are still unconvinced that this change is not possible, here is an authoritative voice to tell you why it can happen: "Spelling, being obviously written and thus belonging to a different domain than spoken language, is slower to change than speech... If you think that spelling doesn't change, look at a passage of Old English!" - Patricia Moody, associate professor of English at Syracuse University.