The Bee in My Bonnet

Another National Spelling Bee has come and gone, and the winner is Arvind Mahankali. Like most years, the winner was of Indian descent, and he won by spelling a foreign word (knaidel).

If you can believe it, the Bee elicited an organized protest outside the Grand Hyatt in Washington. The protesters weren't demonstrating against the South Asian lock on spelling bees (kids whose ancestors hail from the subcontinent have won 11 of the past 15 Bees). No, they're protesting spelling itself.

With the slogan "I'm Thru with Through," members of the American Literacy Council stood outside the hotel and denigrated the efforts of thousands of American kids who study etymology and word lists night and day.

To be honest, I've always thought spelling bees were silly, even though I would have probably done well in them (though like everyone I'm occasionally the victim of a stray typo). I disdain computer spell checkers because they don't catch the most egregious and embarrassing spelling error — the homonym, or my main bugaboos — omitted or correctly-spelled extra words resulting from over-editing.

My problem with spelling bees is that the vast majority of their words are not English: they're just imported foreign words, typically used only in obscure scientific or literary circumstances. If you've ever watched  a bee you know what I mean: the first question a contestant asks after being presented with a word is "Language of origin?"

Since most languages have much more regular spelling rules than English, that single piece of information can be a dead giveaway, even if you don't know the word. That's particularly true for languages such as Spanish and Italian, but it's also true for German and even French. So the spelling bee isn't so much a test of English spelling proficiency, but spelling in any language English has co-opted, which is all of them.

But there's a problem: when words come from languages that don't use the Latin alphabet, such as Russian, Chinese or Japanese, what's the "correct" spelling? There are at least 10 different ways to romanize Chinese. Russian can be romanized in several different ways, depending on the native language of the person who does it. We always spell Tchaikovsky with a T, but we do so because we took the French spelling — the "proper" English transliteration should be Chaikovsky. And you still see it occasionally spelled the German way: Tschaikowskij. To make things even more confusing, Russians usually pronounce it Chikovsky.

The Russian word указ is usually spelled ukase in English, but that's a French transliteration of a Russian word: the English should be ukaz.

And so it was that this year's bee opened with with a Russian word: glasnost. (Glasnost was the policy of openness introduced by Mikhail Gorbachov [1] that ultimately brought the downfall of the Soviet Union.) And here's where that transliteration problem comes in: the spelling proffered by the Bee is wrong [2].

Which brings us back to the spelling reform advocates. The problems with reforming English spelling are threefold.

First is assimilation of foreign words: we literally have millions of them. Reforming English spelling to mangle words of foreign origin such as derailleur, menage à trois and Weltschmerz into duhrayler, menahzh a twah and veltshmairts is just plain silly: no two people will decide on the same spelling.

Second is an issue with language in general: pronunciation changes over time. In words like thought and through the "silent" letters used to be pronounced. You get an inkling of the original pronunciations by comparing them to their modern German counterparts dachten and durch. This process isn't going to stop just because we reformed spelling. Pronunciation will continue to evolve, ultimately rendering the phonetic spellings the reformers want us to adopt just as lacking as our current orthography.

Third is the problem of differences in pronunciation across dialects (which is just the end result of the second problem). The spelling reformers want to spell English the way it's pronounced: but whose pronunciation should we use? Take the phrase Today is a good day to die. Listening to certain Australians you'll hear To die is a good die to doi. Or compare the Midwestern, Boston and Georgia pronunciations of car, or the Eastern and Southwestern American pronunciations of pen and pencil.

If we abandon current English orthography and have everyone spell it the way they say it, written English would degenerate into mutually unintelligible dialects, creoles and pidgins. No one would spell things the same way because everyone pronounces things differently.  I'm not just making dire predictions: it's the natural course of language development. All the Germanic languages started from a common protolanguage that evolved over the centuries into English, German, Dutch, Frisian, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and several languages that have since died out, such as Gothic and Norn.

The benefit of standard spelling is that it provides a lingua franca that everyone understands. It also pushes speakers back to a common pronunciation. There's a definite tendency for people to pronounce words the way they're spelled. For example, the t in often was dropped over the centuries, but many modern speakers have reinserted it because, seeing it spelled that way, they think it's proper to pronounce the t. Words like waistcoat and mainsail were so commonly used that they became slurred and the "proper" pronunciation became weskit and mainsl. Modern readers, encountering these words long after they've fallen out of common usage, pronounce them as they're spelled.

With increased literacy it seems that the rate of language evolution decreases. We can still read  Shakespeare's plays 400 years after they were written (understanding his literary and social references is another story...). But the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle from 1138, a mere 300 years before Shakespeare, looks like gibberish: "... ] flemden þe king æt te Standard  ] sloghen suithe micel of his genge." [3]

With the popularity of global mass media like popular music, summer blockbuster movies and the Internet it seems that the rate of language evolution should slow even more, as differences between regions are smoothed over quickly and may never have a chance to develop in the first place.

But then you consider the influence of popular cultural phenomena like hip hop music on English, and you realize that instantaneous global communication may actually accelerate language evolution. But at least we'll all be in on it.

Notes
[1] Gorbachov's name is almost always transliterated incorrectly. In Russian newspapers it's usually spelled Горбачев, but the actual spelling is Горбачёв (in the olden days Russian typesetters apparently didn't have enough lead to make a separate letter for the e with two dots). The ё is usually pronounced "yo" (Yo!), but after a ч you don't pronounce the "y" part. So, for some stupid reason the people who transliterated Russian names for American publications used Gorbachev, rather than the actual pronunciation of Gorbachov, which means most Americans pronounce his name incorrectly.

[2] In Russian glasnost is spelled "гласность". If you look carefully, you'll notice that the Russian has one extra letter compared to the English. That extra letter is the "soft sign," which means the final t is "palatized." Russian differentiates palatized consonants in cases where English treats them the same. Palatization in English is usually just part of your accent. For example, an American from the Midwest will pronounce the word "tune" as toon (an unpalatized t) while an educated Briton will pronounce it tyoon (with a palatized t). Americans usually palatize the first n in union (yoonyun), while many Britons don't palatize it, pronouncing it yoo-nee-un.


Thus, the "proper" English transliteration of гласность should be glasnost' (the apostrophe designates the soft sign). The official bee spelling omits the soft sign, surely as grievous an error as spelling derailleur derailer! Yes, that's ridiculously nitpicky. But the whole point of a spelling bee is to be as nitpicky as possible!

Another of the words in the first round of the Bee was perestroika (перестройка), which could just as easily be spelled perestroyka using the standard transliteration of the letter "й".

[3] "... and routed the king at the Standard, and slew very many of his gang"