Ingglish

Spelling Reform Comparison

English spelling reform has a long history of mostly failure. Noah Webster succeeded with incremental changes (colour→color, centre→center), but every attempt at comprehensive reform, from Benjamin Franklin's 1768 phonetic alphabet to the Initial Teaching Alphabet of the 1960s, has failed. So why would Ingglish be any different?

What went wrong, and what Ingglish does differently.

The Graveyard of Spelling Reforms

Complete Alphabet Replacements

Shavian Alphabet (1962) - George Bernard Shaw left money in his will to create a new 48-character alphabet. One book was published (Androcles and the Lion, 1962). Almost nobody used it.

Deseret Alphabet (1854) - The Mormon church spent $20,000+ (enormous in the 1850s) creating a 38-character alphabet. They sold 500 books. Even Brigham Young, who commissioned the project, abandoned it, writing: "I candidly confess that I never did like the present construction of the alphabet."

Unifon (1959) - A 40-character alphabet tested in Chicago schools. Nobody published any academic validation, and the system kept getting revised, creating incompatible versions.

English Phonotypic Alphabet (1845) - Isaac Pitman and Alexander John Ellis created a 40-letter alphabet. Trials in Waltham, Massachusetts (1852-1860) and Syracuse, New York (1850-1866) showed students could learn literacy faster, but elements were later absorbed into the IPA instead of gaining direct adoption.

These all had the same problem: no reading material existed in the new script, and once you learned it you couldn't read anything already written.

Ingglish uses standard Latin letters (no 'q', no 'x', 'c' only in 'ch'). If you can read English, you can read Ingglish.

Transitional Systems

Initial Teaching Alphabet (1961) - Sir James Pitman created a 44-character system to teach children to read. By the mid-1960s, thousands of schools used it.

Then it collapsed. Children learned ITA, but couldn't transfer to regular English. Teachers had no training for the transition. The Warburton & Southgate (1969) evaluation (i.t.a.: An Independent Evaluation, London: John Murray) found mixed results: initial reading gains but inconsistent transfer to traditional orthography.

Teaching a system that must later be replaced risks negative transfer: the first system interferes with learning the second.

Ingglish isn't an initial literacy tool. Users already know traditional spelling; Ingglish supplements it.

Simplified Spelling Systems

Fonetic Advocat (1850s) - Published in "Sinsinati" (Cincinnati) by E. Longley, director of the American Phonetic Society. Promoted the English Phonotypic Alphabet. George Bernard Shaw himself owned a copy, showing the continuity of reform interest across generations.

Anglic (1930) - A collaboration between the Spelling Reform Association and the English Spelling Society with Swedish professor R.E. Zachrisson. Tried to simplify spelling while keeping words recognizable.

Cut Spelling (1992) - Christopher Upward's system focused on removing unnecessary letters rather than respelling. Claimed to eliminate 50% of common spelling errors by cutting redundant letters. Example: "accommodation" → "acomodation."

SoundSpel (1910) - One of many systems based on Pitman and Ellis's phonogram foundations. Like Truespel and others, attempted full phonetic representation but never achieved adoption.

Chicago Tribune (1934-1975) - The newspaper unilaterally adopted 80 reformed spellings including "tho," "thru," "agast," "burocrat," and "iland." After 40 years, they quietly abandoned the experiment.

Even well-designed simplified systems failed without institutional backing or network effects.

Political Failures

Theodore Roosevelt's spelling reform (1906) - The president ordered the Government Printing Office to adopt 300 simplified spellings. Congress overturned it within four months amid widespread outcry and mockery.

Andrew Carnegie (1906-1920) - The steel magnate invested $283,000 (roughly $9–10 million in 2024 dollars per BLS CPI) in the Simplified Spelling Board. Result: zero lasting impact.

UK Parliamentary Bills (1949, 1953) - Both failed.

No central authority can mandate spelling changes for English. Unlike French (Académie française) or Spanish (Real Academia Española), English has no official body with that power. Ingglish doesn't try to replace English spelling. No political mandate needed, just voluntary adoption.

The 10 Ways Spelling Reforms Die

1. The Dialect Problem

Every phonemic system must choose whose pronunciation to encode. The Shavian alphabet faced dialect fragmentation: speakers of different dialects would spell words differently to match their accents.

Ingglish uses General American English via the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. See Dialect Assumptions for the full treatment of how this affects non-American speakers.

2. Breaking Etymology

Critics argue that spelling preserves word relationships: "sign"/"signature" share a visible root even though the 'g' is silent in "sign." Chomsky & Halle (1968) argued that English spelling's morphophonemic properties actually aid reading.

That said, some "etymological" spellings are just wrong (Crystal 2012, Spell It Out): "debt" got its 'b' from Latin "debitum" but came through French without it; "island" got an 's' from a false Latin "insula" connection.

Ingglish prioritizes pronunciation over etymology. You lose some morphological connections ("sign"→"sain"), but learners who can't pronounce the words can't use those connections anyway. See Morphological Preservation for the full analysis of what's preserved and what's lost.

3. The Transition Problem

An estimated 1.5 billion people speak English as a first or second language (Crystal 2003, English as a Global Language; Ethnologue). Any reform makes existing text harder to read, at least initially.

Ingglish is a supplementary system (like IPA), not a replacement. Traditional spelling isn't going anywhere. Ingglish adds an option; it doesn't take one away.

You don't need institutional buy-in. Bidirectional translation tools let you convert between English and Ingglish at any time; no one else needs to adopt it first.

4. No Central Authority

There's no English Academy that can decree changes. Every attempt at mandatory reform has failed. Ingglish doesn't need one: use it if you want, ignore it if you don't.

5. The Network Effect Trap

The value of a spelling system depends on how many people use it. Individual adoption seems pointless without collective adoption.

Bidirectional translation breaks the network effect. You can convert English to Ingglish and back instantly, so you never need anyone else to adopt it first.

6. Typography Disasters

The Deseret alphabet deliberately avoided ascenders and descenders (letters extending above or below the line) to make printing type last longer. The result was monotonous, rectangular blocks of text that were tiring to read.

Ingglish uses standard Latin letters, so words keep their familiar shapes.

7. Requires Learning New Characters

Systems requiring new characters (Shavian, Deseret, Unifon) face a chicken-and-egg problem: no materials exist to learn from, and nobody creates materials because nobody can read them.

Ingglish has zero new characters. The digraphs (sh, ch, th, ng) are already familiar to English readers.

8. The "Looks Childish" Problem

Simplified spelling often looks childish to English readers because they associate phonemic spelling with the attempts of learners sounding things out.

Spellings like "luv," "thru," and "enuf" carry stigma from text-speak and children's writing.

This seems to be an English-specific thing. Finnish, Italian, and Spanish have far more transparent orthographies, and their speakers don't perceive phonemic spelling as childish. The association exists in English because phonemic spelling resembles the attempts of beginning readers sounding words out. It's a cultural bias, not a linguistic one.

9. Constant Revision

New Spelling, Unifon, and other systems were repeatedly revised, preventing stable adoption and creating incompatible versions.

Ingglish is based on stable phoneme-to-grapheme mappings from the CMU dictionary. Every spelling is documented with IPA equivalents and cross-language comparisons in the Orthography Comparison.

10. Vested Interests

People who invested years mastering English spelling resist changes that would devalue that skill. Spelling difficulty has become cultural capital, hence spelling bees.

Mechanics who learned imperial tools made the same argument against metric. The sunk cost is real, but it doesn't justify imposing that cost on every future generation.

What Actually Worked: Successful Reforms

Turkish alphabet reform (1928) - The "Big Bang"

Atatürk replaced the Arabic script with a Latin alphabet in three months. Literacy rose from roughly 9% to over 30% within a decade (Zürcher 2004, Turkey: A Modern History; exact figures vary by source).

Why it worked:

  • Authoritarian one-party state could mandate change
  • Only 9% initial literacy (few people invested in the old system)
  • Part of a broader national identity transformation
  • Personal leadership (Atatürk himself taught citizens in parks)

Big-bang reform requires political power that English-speaking democracies lack, and shouldn't want.

German orthography reform (1996) - Modest Reform

Changed ß→ss in some words, simplified compound consonants, etc.

What happened:

  • Polls consistently showed majority opposition
  • Some newspapers refused to implement it
  • A "reform of the reform" in 2006 reverted controversial changes
  • But it stuck in schools, creating a new generation using the new spellings

Even minor mandatory reforms face massive resistance. Voluntary adoption avoids the backlash.

Korean Hangul - The Long Game

King Sejong created Hangul in 1443. It was declared the official Korean script in 1894. North Korea abolished Chinese characters in 1949; South Korea made Hangul the sole script for government documents in 1968. By the 1980s, Hangul dominated everyday life, a journey of over 500 years.

Why it eventually worked:

  • Coexisted with Chinese characters for centuries
  • Gained status gradually through nationalist movements and government policy
  • Technology (computers, phones) further accelerated exclusive Hangul use

Hangul's success was driven by government policy and nationalism, not voluntary adoption. But the coexistence of two writing systems for 450+ years shows that supplementary scripts can survive long enough to eventually become primary.

What Ingglish Can Realistically Achieve

The Metric Parallel

The US officially adopted metric in 1975. Fifty years later, Americans still use miles and Fahrenheit daily. Did metric fail?

No. Metric won where it matters: science, medicine, the military, international trade, manufacturing. The "failure" is just consumer-facing measurements: road signs, weather reports, grocery stores. The rational system dominates professional contexts while the legacy system persists in casual ones.

Ingglish could follow the same path. Possible applications (not yet formally tested):

  • Phonemic spelling for ESL and early literacy
  • Consistent spelling for dyslexic readers (transparent orthographies correlate with lower dyslexia impact; Paulesu et al. 2001)
  • Unambiguous input for speech synthesis and language models
  • A standard that doesn't privilege native speakers' memorized exceptions

Traditional spelling will probably stick around in casual contexts forever, and that's fine.

Design Summary

Design Choice Why It Matters
24 ASCII letters only Works on any keyboard, any device
Standard digraphs (sh, ch, th) Already familiar to English readers
CMU dictionary basis Consistent, well-documented pronunciations
Supplements, doesn't replace No political battle required
Bi-directional translation Maintains connection to traditional spelling

The Unfamiliarity Hurdle

Initial Perception

Some Ingglish spellings will look strange at first:

  • "enough" → "inuhf"
  • "through" → "throo"
  • "beautiful" → "byootafal"

But "strange" isn't "wrong." Kilometers looked strange to Americans too. The question isn't whether it looks familiar; it's whether the system is better. A spelling system where every letter pattern has one sound is easier to learn than one where "ough" can be pronounced seven different ways, and the research backs this up (Seymour et al. 2003).

The Dialect Gap

This is covered in detail in The Dialect Problem above. The short version: Ingglish standardizes on General American English. Non-American speakers will encounter mismatches, but that's the price of picking one standard.

The "Why Bother?" Question

Fluent English readers might ask: "I already know how to pronounce words. Why would I care?"

Because you're not the only person who reads English. The number of English learners worldwide exceeds the number of native speakers (British Council 2013; Crystal 2003). Every one of them hits the same walls:

  • Years of extra effort - At the end of Grade 1, English-speaking children read at roughly 34% accuracy on a standard word-reading task, compared to 95%+ for children learning transparent orthographies like Finnish or Italian (Seymour, Aro & Erskine 2003; replicated by Ziegler et al. 2010)
  • Rules that aren't - "I before E except after C" has more exceptions than examples
  • Unreadable words - "Lead" rhymes with "read" or "red" depending on context. There's no way to know without memorizing each word.

Fluent readers have already paid this cost. Should every future generation keep paying it too?

Conclusion

English spelling works, but at unnecessary cost. Every generation of learners pays for inconsistencies baked in centuries ago.

Previous reforms failed because they required everyone to switch at once. Ingglish doesn't. Like metric in science and medicine, it can find a foothold in domains where consistency matters while traditional spelling persists elsewhere. Metric took decades. Hangul took centuries.

Video Resources

Sources

Historical overviews (Wikipedia articles used as starting points; primary sources should be substituted for formal publication):