Spelling matters, but not as mats as u fink

Alwyn Viljoen can write with a pan.

DISCUSSING creative writing with a prominent and well-loved school teacher in Pietermaritzburg recently, I was delighted to hear from her that the spelling Nazis “just get in the way of telling a good story”.

Her husband backed her with a recollection of English novelist Graham Greene, who wrote 25 novels without ever giving much thought to the exact arrangement of the letters. “That’s what editors are for,” he said at a talk in Cape Town. Greene is not the only well-known scribe who paid scant heed to which letters should symbolise what sounds. He is joined by F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Shakespeare and Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain. Fitzgerald was well-known for spelling words as they sounded, while olde Bill wrote his surname as “Shakspere”, although his tomb has it as “Shakspeare”.

Clemens would have approved, for he famously said: “Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks imagination”.

The fact is the rules of spelling are not cast in stone, or even wet cement. They are rather like carefully tied flies cast over the ever-moving eddies and swirls of a pool, in the dark depths of which meaning swims about like fat, lazy trout.

Especially English spelling is but a snapshot of what a society agrees the sounds should look like at any given time. And there is a lot of overlap, as G. Bernard Shaw (he hated to be called George) pointed out when he said “fish” can be spelled as “ghoti”, starting with the soft “gh” as in “tough”, the middle “o” as in ‘women’ and the final “ti” as in “nation”.

So English spelling morphs constantly as this marvellous language swallows whole cultures. To keep up, we have to learn not the craft of spelling, but the twin crafts of encoding and decoding symbols with their associated sounds.

The gud nwz is our brains r constantly doing this, wdr v listen to kwaito stars like SPHEctacula, or wonder why the kids say they are :-(.

The challenge is to keep up with the times, as was best said by the father of English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote: “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne”.

And the modern communication demands created by thumb-typed Whats­Apps with predictive text make spelling changes happen even faster.

My solution is to stop any further literary obeisancies to old spelling guidelines like “i before e except after c”, as this mnemonic is neither sufficient nor scientific and is supported only by a weird species who fear foreign words — as each of the words containing an “i” after an “e” before the “c” in this sentence shows.

English spelling has always been a mess since it began life as a pidgen Germanic language before spelling Nazis tried to force it into a Latin toga.

Many Witness readers will recall an e-mail that is still doing the rounds, which calls for English to be Germanified. While that e-mail is funny for all native English speakers, it makes a lot of sense to everyone who came to English spelling from another mother tongue. It really would save the world a lot of bother if we could all agree to write words like they sound. This makes even more sense in South Africa, where our 11 languages and many more local accents turn the watery soup that is the Queen’s language into a thick broth.

The instant connections of social media now enable us to put this broth in the same package wherever there is a Wi-Fi signal, in order to create a phonetical English in a time frame that Chaucer and Shaw could only dream of.

I propose that we call ours “Sevrikan Enklis” and use as base the flytaal spoken on Egoli’s streets.

Of course, we cannot introduce Sefrikan overnight, but I moot a small weekly change in our texting habits will have the nation write as one within a month.

In the first week, we kill the letter “c”, which often as not cannot decide whether it should be a “k” or an “s” and we just use a “v” for all fricative sounds, instead of “w” “f” or “v”.

Thus cadres vil drink Blue Label visky.

The sekond veek sees us dropping all silent letters as vell as all those “ees” just hanging around at the end of words.

No mor teradactyls drinking Blu Labl viski over ilands!

The third veek sees us vriting “th”, “ch” and “gh” as they are said.

“This” bekoms “dis”, “thought” becomes “fot” and “change” is written as “tjange”.

And what about “tsk, tsk” you ask? Check our coat of arms. It is obviously “!x, !x”. (Like… duh!)

Da forf veek we rite all vouls as dey sound, perhaps adding a litl stryp to aid our ee-nan-shi-hy-sjon.

As a vinal vlorish, nambrz kan replys sounds. Dis vil myk oll vurds vhiv voulz dat mats izijer 2 spel kurrektli, vhits vil be gr8t 4 all.

Just vink — iv ve oll myk diz our nu jur’s re-solu-sjon, ve will b rytin and spikin pjur Sevrikan Inklis by da end ov Janu-ari!