Ing-glitch anguish idiotsyncracies

The archaic, totally flawed and overcomplicated twisted tongue structure of Ing-glitch and its quirky, unnecessarily contrived exceptions have proven resistant to change for more than 400 years. Exponents of linguistic reform have ranged from the British monk Ohm in the 12th century to Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster and Teddy Roosevelt. George Bernard Shaw bequeathed much of his estate to spelling reform, as did Andrew Carnegie. So why have these contemporary inertia, common-sense attempts failed to progress?

More than half of the most commonly used words to facilitate English language communication have phony phonic irregular spellings. Unruly English spelling miss-steaks are disabling, but regularising the reed-red-reading code would require signify-can't attitude adjustment and bureaucratic commitments, tempering elitist arrogance and snob job ignorance, eliminating thousands of irregular spellings in favour of a straightforward common-sense, letter-to-sound approach. Compare and contrast Bahasa simplified phonetic spellings with English: amnesti, biskut, demokrasi, sains, fizik… Get the mesej? Why the inconsistencies in long spellings - nice, idea, high, my, die, type, eye, buy, height, aisle? The outdated sekolah sistem cries out for updated change, now not whenever!

Reading underpins all other subjects as well, such as literature, history, science, math problem solving, creative & abstract think-thank-thunking and lojikal reasoning. Pity those who tune out or act out in class before becoming drop-outs or push-outs, humiliated and stigmatised for life, through no fault of their own, since the flawed idiotsyncratic Ing-glitch Anguish spelling system is hit and miss (mostly miss), abnormally inefficient to master or achieve communicative competence, and virtually dumb, with a final b that is really dum.

Everyone would benefit if Asean adopted a progressive spelling system that is modernised and regularised, making interaction a bit simpler and a lot more logical. Using digital information technology, comprehensive reform should be EZier to facilitate than in the BC (Before Computers) error-era. Recoding would demand only one syllable per sound, not like "long e" variants in we, tree, repeat, movie, many, money, receive, taxi, magazine, people.

If a child is taught how to sound out a word, he can then decode it and spell it correctly. A "4 in 1" policy is advocated, designating a streamlined Malaysian-Indonesian Bahasa as Lingua Franca, with Mandarin Chinese, Paasaa Thai and mid-Atlantic English as shared interactive regional communicative options.

Languages constantly change phonetically in time and space. The Chinese, whose language is anything but phonetic, have adopted a Romanised phonetic transcription, Pinyin, to make cross-cultural, multilingualism easier and more efficient.

Charles Frederickson

Bangkok