The word snoop - Ursula Dubosarsky 2009

Let’s change the alphabet
How it all began

It’s a sad thing, but not everybody who writes in English loves the Roman alphabet. (Sob!)

The main complaint is that the Roman alphabet was really meant to write the sounds of Latin words, not English ones. In English, there are at least 40 different sounds, and yet the Roman alphabet (even with the extras thrown in, like J, V, and W) has only 26 letters. It’s not surprising that all sorts of funny mixtures of letters have been used to create the sounds. But this has meant we’ve ended up with some pretty strange spelling rules (as I’m sure you would have noticed!).

Most of us think, Oh well, that’s the way it goes, better learn my spelling list (sigh) and be done with it . . . But the Word Snoop has discovered that some people have more adventurous minds. The famous American thinker Benjamin Franklin, for one. He had ideas about all sorts of things, including the English language. Way back in 1779, he said we should change the alphabet to make spelling more sensible. He suggested kicking out C, J, Q, W, X, and Y, and replacing them with six new letters, including a special one for the sound ng.

Ten years later in 1789, another American, the dictionary maker Noah Webster, had a different idea. He thought we should put little lines or dots above the letters, like they have in French and German, to show the different sounds. Then in the nineteenth century yet another American, the Mormon leader Brigham Young, suggested a whole new alphabet called Deseret that would make reading easier. Fifty years after that, the novelist Mark Twain, who wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,added his complaints about our alphabet. He said, “It doesn’t know how to spell, and can’t be taught.” (Tsk tsk, bad alphabet!)

Mark Twain thought the best idea would be to make the alphabet shorter. (Hooray!) But on the other side of the world, the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw thought exactly the opposite. (Uh-oh.) He wanted to make the alphabet longer, with more letters for all the different sounds. Even though this might make learning to read and write seem harder at first, he was sure it would be worth it in the long run.

When Shaw died in 1950, he left instructions in his will for an “invent-a-new-sensible-alphabet” competition. A man called Kingsley Read won the prize of 500 pounds, or about 678 dollars, with his invention of the “Shavian alphabet.” But only one book was ever published in this alphabet, a play called Androcles and the Lion by—you guessed it—George Bernard Shaw!