The Useless Alphabet
A thesis on phonics reform in the English language
Professor Calvey
5 May 2010
If you’ve ever had the opportunity of reading a paper or book aloud in a classroom or
group, you know that people will often come to a complete halt when words unfamiliar to them
are presented. Instead of attempting to read the word and let the other readers listen along, they
end up stopping the flow of the literary work and waiting until someone tells them the
pronunciation of the difficult word. It’s only unfortunate English doesn’t follow a strict set of
reading rules so that the reading aloud would be held uninterrupted and allow the current reader
to underline that word for future reference without drawing any kind of embarrassing attention
towards his, or her, lack of vocabulary. While literacy in the United States may be high, it only
applies when using a common vernacular. Beyond that all things have to come to a screeching
halt for the less educated due to the lack of phonetical reform, requiring English to use a 3 part
process for reading aloud alone, even though other languages have made sure to adapt their
language to a matching writing system so that readers only need to focus on comprehension - and
not pronunciation - while reading. Bringing about change would require governmental effort, a
steady stance against the opposition, and more regulation within English classes.
To those who may look at the official US literacy rate, it might seem like a sturdy
system. After all, according to the Central Intelligence Agency Factbook, the US has a 99%
literacy rate. This should imply that people can read well and therefore the current alphabet
surely can’t have anything wrong with it. However the methodology for the test has not been Franco 2
revealed. Another source of literacy is from the NAAL, who proceeded to use a small sample of
people who represented the overall population. When doing so, however “Special
accommodations were made for adults with disabilities or with limited English proficiency
(“Sampling”)”. If the alphabet system were more structured, perhaps it would be easier for those
with disabilities to learn to read. Perhaps, it might even aid learners of English, since now at least
reading pronunciation would no longer be an issue, and would lead to a greater rate of English
Currently, reading aloud in English requires three processes: phonetics, holistic word
approach, and sentence comprehension. Phonetics is simply the use of the few established rules
and patterns in order to take a guess at a way (or many ways) a word may be pronounced. Simple
words like “hat”, “cat”, “ate” use that kind of approach because they can actually be described
using basic reading rules. Holistic word approach is by recognizing the word itself. This would
once again encompass words like “though” and “through” since the ‘gh’ portion would only be
known by knowing that specific word. This requires you to actually know the word you are
attempting to say. Imagine the embarrassment of reading a book in front of people and
misreading a word because you’ve never seen it before. The ever so popular “Your Baby Can
Read” video reading system for children under 5 years old follows this approach entirely and
teaches words by introducing the sound of the word with the spelling of the word without every
breaking it down phonetically, and then providing a video of the meaning of the words (“Baby”).
Instead the children using this program learn every word as if it were a pictorial – they may as
well be learning Chinese. The 3rd and last part of the English reading process is sentence level
comprehension, and it is even tougher as it requires you to have some fluency in order to figure
out what definition of the word is being use – like with the word “bow” – in order to decide on Franco 3
its pronunciation. Take the sentence “Live on Broadway”. It can either be taken to mean a
performance is going to be held live on Broadway, or maybe it’s trying to tell someone to live on
Broadway. Unless some defining element such as in “Concert – Live on Broadway” exists to
clarify that meaning of the word ‘live’, it is thoroughly impossible to decide on a pronunciation.
Therefore, words with multiple pronunciations that are dependent on a definition require
sentence level comprehension. The last two processes are no easy task for English learners or
young readers who may not have enough of a vocabulary or grammatical grasp to be able to
determine what a sentence means. This makes reading more inaccurate than with more
phonetical languages as described by a study that compared English, Greek, Japanese hiragana
(phonetic), and Japanese kanji (holistic) reading accuracy. In this study, “The reading test was
discontinued after a child made five consecutive errors, a procedure that resulted in a variable
number of total errors per child (Ellis 453)” which gave the conclusion that “the younger
children reading the two more transparent orthographies, Greek and hiragana, evidenced
significantly longer correct reading onset latencies than did readers of orthographically opaque
This is not the first time languages have had to be reformed in order to lead to a more
sensible system. France has held many changes, as translated: “The French Academy and its
orthographical rectifications proposed in 1990 by a report of the superior Council of the French
language” with the “objective of making the language more "logical"” (“Français”). Japan, once
home to three separate writing systems, two phonetic systems and one pictorial system, decided
to embrace a phonetic – or rather syllabic – approach. All words come with a syllabic
representation called furigana, and pictorials were limited to around 2000 characters. “In Franco 4
newspapers it is a legal requirement for furigana to be attached to kanji which are not included in
the official list of the 1,945 most frequently-used kanji. Newspapers in fact rarely use kanji not
included in this list (“Hiragana”).” Though other publications are not restricted, most works will
utilize only regulated kanji and provide furigana assistance for any kanji outside of the
regulation, or outside of the reading level of their target audience. Thus, should a publication use
a unregulated kanji, syllabic assistance is provided for those who did not learn beyond the
required set of pictorials, leading to their ability to phonetically read any word that exists
regardless of whether they actually know it. These are but two countries that reformed their
writing systems to a more streamlined approach. English, however, is not constantly updated.
According to Masha Bell, as dictionaries were printed, people would take on the spelling used by
the most revered dictionaries and allowed English to at the very least conform to a single spelling
for a word, though still not using a standardized system. The last reform to make words confirm
to some sort of spelling pattern occurred within the 16th century (Bell).
English does need a reform as there are simply too many inconsistencies. How else can
you justify “tough” with a ‘gh’ as a ‘f’ sound, while “though” does not? Or even how can one
determined how the word “bow” is pronounced unless they happened to know from contextual
clues? After all, the hair accessory “bow” and the verb describing a submission or polite action
“to bow” use the same alphabetical representation but not the same pronunciation. Those words
would need to be rewritten, but over time people would eventually adapt to the new spelling. In
some cases, words may even have to be completely rewritten, especially foreign words, in order
to make both reading and comprehension sense. Even the French decided to rewrite the
popularly used word “email”, pronounced as it is in English even though it does not follow Franco 5
French reading rules at all, into “courriel” [a mixture of “courrier éléctronique” or “electronic
Changing English or at the very least US English, since of course changes can’t be
imposed to other English speaking countries, would be difficult. Considering the difficulty this
government has toward standardizing the metric system, it is understandable why reform has yet
to be passed. By looking at other countries, however, it can be seen that reforms are usually
brought about incrementally and focusing only on a relative few select words at a time in order
to give people time to adjust. The entire language simply cannot be altered right away as people
There is also opposition to the idea of a reform from an etymology standpoint. Changing
the language would be changing its cultural heritage. However, what those etymology lovers
forget is that the very nature of etymology is to track down how words have changed over time.
This study would not exist if words did not change for popular or governmental reasons.
Stopping the language from becoming more accessible would stop the process of etymology.
German, a language similar to English in its roots as well in its modern additions of Latin and
Greek rooted words, has managed to keep its etymology when they completely reformed their
writing system. Using their new system, it is nearly impossible not to be capable of reading aloud
an unknown word. Yet, a simple dictionary and etymology search would still reveal how the
language has drawn on others and itself; it still reveals a structured etymology. It is therefore not
impossible to keep the roots as a flowing evolution as long as the reforms are made carefully and
diligently based on the few reading rules that do exist within English today.
The struggle isn’t just within the opposition nor within the difficulty of changing a
system people are familiar with; it is also dependent on education. I’ve personally been told this Franco 6
English joke twice as a student, once in High School and another in a college English class. The
professors would have written ‘ghoti’ on the board and asked us to pronounce the word. Once we
all failed, they would have revealed it to be a spelling for “fish” (Franco). Both times, the
majority of my classmates would look at it in awe once the professors explained how this came
to be (‘gh’ can be pronounced [f] like in ‘tough’; ‘ti’ can be pronounced [sh] like in ‘addition’;
‘o’ can be pronounced like a short [i] like in ‘women’). However, as awed as my classmates
were, and as inconsistent as the English language is, I always found this to be an inappropriate
example of the banality of the English language. It is a pattern that ‘gh’ can only have the [f]
sound when using within a word – not at the beginning of the word. ‘ti’ can only have the [sh]
sound when followed by an ‘a’ or ‘o’ vowel, where the ‘t’ becomes [sh] and the ‘i’ becomes [ee]
if the following vowel sequence is long, or becomes silent if it is short. This was obvious to me,
but yet the fact that a majority of my classmates were amazed by this revelation, and the fact that
neither of the professors pointed out the inconsistencies within this joke, implied something
much graver – reading patterns were obviously not taught to everyone. If a reform did occur, it
would be pointless unless English teachers pre-university schools were forced to make sure all
Bringing about this change would increase literacy among children and non-native
English speakers as the guesswork of a word’s pronunciation would be taken out, leaving them
to focus on the meanings of the words and sentences separately of the reading aloud process.
Reading levels across all the states could then be standardized by which rules are covered at what
grades, and educational reading software on the market would increase now that an actual
method to the reading madness would be created for them to focus on, and allow students to
practice reading skills without necessarily having to read a dozen books to increase their Franco 7
exposure to less common words. Reading would be less of a chore, and what could ever be
Works Cited
Bell, Masha. "A Short History of English Spelling." English Spelling Problems. N.p., 2006.
Ellis, Nick C., Miwa Natsume, Katerina Stavropoulou, Lorenc Hoxhallari, Victor H. Van Daal,
Reading Research Quarterly 39.4 (2004): 438-68. EBSCOHost. Web. 6 Apr. 2010.
"Français - Wikipédia." Wikipédia, L'encyclopédie Libre. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Apr. 2010.
<http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francais#Histoire_de_la_langue_fran.C3.A7aise>.
"Japanese Hiragana." Omniglot - the Guide to Languages, Alphabets and Other Writing Systems.
<http://www.omniglot.com/writing/japanese_hiragana.htm>.
"National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) - Sampling & Data Collection." National
Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Home Page. U.S. Department of Education, n.d.
United States. CIA. The World Factbook: Literacy. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Apr. 2010.
<https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2103.html>.
Your Baby Can Read. Advertisement. Your Baby Can Read®. Your Baby Can, LLC. Web. 07
