Ingglish

Spelling Reform History

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

This page covers what went wrong for earlier reforms and what Ingglish does differently. That history shaped three of the goals in How Ingglish Was Designed: use only plain keyboard letters, convert to and from standard spelling, and stay voluntary. For the reform proposals people are publishing today, see Reforms Proposed Today.

The Graveyard of Spelling Reforms

Complete Alphabet Replacements

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

Deseret Alphabet (1854) - The Mormon church spent $20,000 (a huge sum in the 1850s) on a 38-letter alphabet. Its Book of Mormon sold only 500 copies, and thousands of its school primers went unsold. Even George D. Watt, its main designer, wrote to Brigham Young: "I candidly confess that I never did like the present construction of the alphabet."

Unifon (1950s) - A 40-letter alphabet designed by Chicago economist John R. Malone and tested in schools in Chicago, Indianapolis and elsewhere. No statistical study of the results was ever published in an academic journal, and its symbols kept changing, so later versions differ from the early ones.

English Phonotypic Alphabet (1845) - An alphabet by Isaac Pitman and Alexander John Ellis. School trials in Syracuse, New York (1850-1866) and Waltham, Massachusetts (1852-1860) found that children learned to read faster. It never gained wide acceptance, but parts of it were absorbed into the IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet).

All of these shared one problem: nothing was written in the new script, and learning it didn't help you read anything that already existed.

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

Transitional Systems

Initial Teaching Alphabet (1961) - Sir James Pitman created this alphabet of about 44 characters to teach children to read. By 1966, 140 of the 158 education authorities in the UK used it in at least one school.

Then it faded. Many children learned to read in ITA but struggled to switch to regular English spelling. A 1969 evaluation (Warburton & Southgate, i.t.a.: An Independent Evaluation, London: John Murray) found early reading gains but uneven transfer to standard spelling.

A system that must later be replaced risks "negative transfer": the first system gets in the way of learning the second.

Ingglish isn't a tool for teaching children to read. Its users already know standard spelling, and Ingglish sits alongside it.

Simplified Spelling Systems

Fonetic Advocat (1850s) - A publication from "Sinsinati" (Cincinnati) by E. Longley, director of the American Phonetic Society, promoting the English Phonotypic Alphabet. George Bernard Shaw owned a copy, a sign of how reform interest carried across generations.

Anglic (1930) - A simplified English spelling by the Swedish philologist Robert Eugen Zachrisson. It tried to make spelling regular while keeping words recognizable.

Cut Spelling (1992) - Christopher Upward's system removed letters that don't affect pronunciation instead of respelling words, which makes words 8-15% shorter. A sample: "Wen readrs first se Cut Spelng, as in this sentnce, they ofn hesitate slytly."

SoundSpel (1986) - Edward Rondthaler's system, the latest in a line of respelling schemes that goes back to the Simplified Spelling Society's New Spelling of 1910. Like Truespel and many others, it spells every sound, and like them it was never adopted.

Chicago Tribune (1934-1975) - Publisher Robert McCormick made the newspaper adopt about 80 simplified spellings, including "thru", "altho" and "fantom". The paper used most of them for four decades, then dropped them in 1975.

Even well-designed simplified systems failed without institutional backing or a large base of users.

Political Failures

Theodore Roosevelt's spelling reform (1906) - The president ordered the Government Printing Office to adopt 300 simplified spellings. Amid public outcry and mockery, the House of Representatives voted against the order about four months later, and Roosevelt withdrew it.

Andrew Carnegie (1906-1920) - The steel magnate put $283,000 (roughly $9-10 million in 2024 dollars, per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator) into the Simplified Spelling Board. It left no lasting mark.

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

No one has the authority to change English spelling. French has the Académie française and Spanish has the Real Academia Española; English has no equivalent. Ingglish doesn't try to replace English spelling, so it needs no one's permission. People can simply choose to use it.

The 10 Ways Spelling Reforms Die

1. The Dialect Problem

Any system that spells by sound must pick whose pronunciation to spell. Shavian follows standard British pronunciation, and speakers who don't make the same sound distinctions find its standard spellings hard to produce.

Ingglish follows General American English, the standard accent of the United States. Its pronunciations come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, a free pronunciation list from Carnegie Mellon University. Speakers of other accents will find mismatches, which is the price of picking one standard. Which Accent Ingglish Spells covers how this affects non-American speakers.

2. Breaking Etymology

Critics argue that spelling shows how words are related: "sign" and "signature" share a visible root even though the 'g' is silent in "sign." Chomsky & Halle (1968) argued that because English spelling tracks word roots as well as sounds, it actually helps reading.

Some spellings that claim to show word history are simply mistakes, though (Crystal 2012, Spell It Out). "Debt" got its 'b' from Latin "debitum," but the word came into English through French without one. "Island" got its 's' from a mistaken link to Latin "insula."

Ingglish puts pronunciation ahead of word history. Some links between related words are lost ("sign" is spelled "sain", which no longer looks like "signacher", the Ingglish for "signature"), but learners who can't pronounce the words can't use those links anyway. Word Families covers what is kept and what is 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 at first.

Ingglish is an add-on to standard spelling, as the IPA is, not a replacement. Standard spelling isn't going anywhere. Ingglish adds an option without taking one away.

It also needs no institutional support. Translation tools convert English to Ingglish and back at any time, so no one else has to adopt it first.

4. No Central Authority

No English Academy exists to decree changes, and every attempt to force a reform has failed. Ingglish doesn't need one: use it if you want, ignore it if you don't.

5. The Network Effect Trap

A spelling system is only as useful as the number of people who use it. Adopting one alone seems pointless until many others do too.

Two-way translation gets around this. You can convert English to Ingglish and back instantly, so you never have to wait for anyone else.

6. Typography Disasters

The Deseret alphabet deliberately left out ascenders and descenders (the parts of letters that rise above or drop below the line) so metal printing type would wear less. The result was dull, blocky text in which every word looked alike.

Ingglish uses ordinary Latin letters, so words keep familiar shapes.

7. Requires Learning New Characters

Systems with new characters (Shavian, Deseret, Unifon) are stuck in a loop: there's nothing to read in them, and nobody writes anything because nobody can read it.

Ingglish adds no new characters. Most of its letter pairs (sh, ch, th, ng) are already familiar to English readers. The two it adds, dh (as in "this") and zh (as in "measure"), are built the same way: a consonant letter plus h.

8. The "Looks Childish" Problem

English readers often find simplified spelling childish, because it looks like the work of a learner sounding words out.

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

This reaction seems specific to English. Finnish, Italian, and Spanish spell far more consistently by sound, and their speakers don't see that as childish. The stigma is cultural, not linguistic.

9. Constant Revision

New Spelling, Unifon, and other systems were revised again and again, which blocked steady adoption and left readers with incompatible versions.

Ingglish's spellings changed too while they were being designed; Spelling History logs every change and why. The difference is that nearly all Ingglish text is generated from standard English by Ingglish's translation tools, so a change means regenerating text, not rewriting it by hand.

10. Vested Interests

People who spent years mastering English spelling resist changes that make that skill worth less. Hard spelling has become a mark of status; hence spelling bees.

Mechanics trained on imperial tools made the same argument against metric. The sunk cost is real, but it doesn't justify charging it to every future generation.

What Actually Worked: Successful Reforms

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

Atatürk replaced the Arabic script with a Latin alphabet within months. Literacy doubled, from about 10% in the 1927 census to about 20% in the 1935 census.

Why it worked:

  • An authoritarian one-party state could order the change
  • Only about one person in ten could read, so few had invested in the old system
  • It was part of a wider remaking of national identity
  • Atatürk led it personally, even teaching citizens in parks

A sudden, total switch needs political power that English-speaking democracies lack, and shouldn't want.

German orthography reform (1996) - Modest Reform

Changed ß to ss in some words, simplified compound consonants, and more.

What happened:

  • Polls consistently showed most people opposed it
  • Some newspapers refused to adopt it
  • A "reform of the reform" in 2006 reversed the most disputed changes
  • It stuck in schools, so a new generation now uses the new spellings

Even minor reforms face fierce resistance when they are mandatory. Voluntary adoption avoids that backlash.

Korean Hangul - The Long Game

King Sejong created Hangul in 1443. It became the official Korean script in 1894. North Korea abolished Chinese characters in 1949; South Korea made Hangul the only script for government documents in 1968. By the 1980s Hangul dominated everyday life, more than 500 years after its creation.

Why it eventually worked:

  • It existed alongside Chinese characters for centuries
  • It gained status gradually through nationalist movements and government policy
  • Computers and phones sped up the shift to Hangul alone

Government policy and nationalism drove Hangul's success, not voluntary choice. But its five centuries alongside another script show that a secondary writing system can survive long enough to become the main one.

What Ingglish Can Realistically Achieve

The Metric Parallel

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

No. Metric won where it matters: science, medicine, the military, international trade, manufacturing. It "failed" only in everyday public use: road signs, weather reports, grocery stores. The logical system rules professional work while the old one lingers in casual life.

Ingglish could follow the same path. Possible uses (none formally tested yet):

  • Sound-based spelling for English learners and young readers
  • Consistent spelling for dyslexic readers (dyslexia has less impact in languages that spell consistently by sound; Paulesu et al. 2001)
  • Unambiguous input for speech synthesis and language models
  • A standard that doesn't favor native speakers who have memorized the exceptions

Standard spelling will probably stay in casual use forever, and that's fine.

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. What matters is not whether a spelling looks familiar but whether the system is better. A system where each letter pattern has one sound is easier to learn than one where "ough" has six pronunciations (though, through, rough, cough, thought, bough), and the research supports this (Seymour et al. 2003).

The "Why Bother?" Question

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

Because you aren't the only one reading English. English learners worldwide outnumber native speakers (British Council 2013; Crystal 2003). Every one of them hits the same walls:

  • Years of extra effort - At the end of first grade, English-speaking children read about 34% of words correctly on a standard word-reading test. Children learning languages that spell by sound, like Finnish or Italian, score 95% or more (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" sounds like "leed" when it means to guide and like "led" when it means the metal. The only way to know is from context.

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

Conclusion

English spelling works, but at a needless cost. Every generation of learners pays for inconsistencies fixed in place centuries ago.

Earlier reforms failed because they needed everyone to switch at once. Ingglish doesn't. Like metric in science and medicine, it can take hold where consistency matters while standard spelling carries on elsewhere. Metric took decades. Hangul took centuries.

Video Resources

Sources

Historical overviews (Wikipedia articles used as starting points; for formal publication, cite the primary sources instead):