Recently the Portuguese government approved a reform of the country’s spelling, bringing much of it into line with the Portuguese spoken in Brazil, most significantly by eliminating a number of silent letters and introducing K, W and Y to the alphabet (which do not exist in native Portuguese words, only in foreign loan-words). Marcel Berlins, in today’s Guardian, thinks English could benefit from cutting out a load of our silent letters.

Those he cites include the P’s at the beginning of words like psychology and the B in doubt. He suggests that, if words were spelled more like the way they were pronounced, spelling would be that much less of a headache, particularly for those learning to write English. I am not convinced.

Some silent letters really are pointless - for example, the B in “doubt”, which allegedly only half of English 11-year-olds were found to be able to spell correctly in a recent survey according to Berlins’s article, was inserted into the word (formerly spelled “doute”) in the 19th century to better reflect its Latin roots. There has been an attitude among scholars in England that Latin and Greek words were superior to English ones, which resulted in their spelling being preserved even when it went against the rules of English spelling; real Latin-derived languages, like French and Italian, do not have this problem, adding accents and doubling and removing letters as the languages changed.

However, his examples of silent P’s at the beginnings of words are among the milder examples of allegedly pointless silent letters, because they are either consistent (as in the many words beginning psycho) or technical terms rarely used in conversation. Some silent letters distinguish the different meanings of words pronounced the same way (consider rite, write, right and wright, for example) and others are silent in some dialects but not others - the word white starts with an aspirated W in Scotland but a plain W in most of England. However, there are a “hard core” of commonly used but entirely unphonetical words, but surely it is not that difficult for most people to learn a relatively small number of words?

The comparison with the recent Portuguese reforms is not entirely appropriate, because the parliament there decided to accept the spellings used by the majority of those who speak Portuguese and the pronunciation of most of the rest, and so they are no doubt well understood by the population. The reforms of English suggested by Berlins would introduce ambiguity into the written language which may not be appropriate for the written word even if it has proven adequate for the spoken.

Besides, Marcel Berlins has, in the past, described his own native language, French, as “the most beautiful language in the world, the most elegant, expressive and mellifluous”, and it is notoriously full of silent consonants, manglings of vowel sounds and other bizarre spelling features. Perhaps they should do away with the numerous -er, -ez and -et endings, given that they are all prounounced é - and why not get rid of the ée feminine ending for good measure, since it’s pronounced the same way as the masculine? Surely children manage to learn these features of French, much as some of us do manage to learn to spell our English properly.

How is the semicolon too subtle for English, then? The purpose of it is to demonstrate a connection between one phrase and another, both of which qualify as sentences in themselves, that is stronger than that between two separate sentences. Perhaps that’s subtle, but not too subtle that it’s beyond the reach of anyone who wants to be a serious writer to understand, when it really is a very useful, even important, piece of grammar?

I’ve long been pretty conservative when it comes to matters of the English language (as here), but I find the attitude of some of those quoted as being against it, both French and English-speaking, rather off-putting. If people don’t find it useful in their writing, they are quite at liberty not to use it, but they should not dismiss it as reflecting “a fuzziness of thought” or just that you’ve been to college. (Actually, I’m pretty sure I used them before I went to college, but I do remember asking my teacher about semicolons when I was 7 or 8 and being told we did not use them in that year.) Do people really hate their English or French teachers that much that they deprive themselves of a way of expressing themselves in writing, let alone want to deprive others?

Text messaging forms have their place, not least in text messages where you can only fit so many letters into your message. They exist to improve the flow of writing, as they do also in instant message conversations, to save time when using phones on which an S takes four key-presses, and to conserve space so as to get as many words as possible into those 160 character spaces. Shortenings such as the use of the letter 8 to symbolise the “ate” sound may not have been adapted from Braille, but they have been used in that medium for years, to reduce the use of letters, as Braille documents take up an awful lot of space. There are times and places for abbreviations, and standard written English is not the place to abbreviate common words. The last major English spelling reform, Jenkins informs us, was carried out by Noah Webster in the years after American independence:

When the great Noah Webster invented American spelling after independence, he left British English immured in bigotry. He chided “even well-bred people and scholars for surrendering their right of private judgment to literary governors”. To Americans, spelling reform was the sovereignty of common sense. For that reason the British treated it as foreign, vulgar and, worst of all, American.

In the rest of the article, however, Jenkins voices the usual complaints about silent consonants, unncessary vowels and multiple pronunciations of “ough”. “Every time I write cough, bough, through and thorough (not to mention write), I think of the teeming millions of students who ask their teachers: why? There is no answer. I suggest they learn American English instead.” The only difficulty is that American English has most of the same inconsistencies which frustrate learners of British English. American English is easier for some foreigners to learn probably because it lacks the flat R sound characteristic of middle-class and urban southern English, although even this exists in some American idioms. But it has its own fair share of oddities, such as pronouncing the letter T, mid-word, as a D. The “ough” variations still exist in US English. It’s still I before E, except after C. Reading over this paragraph, I can’t find a word I would have spelled differently if I were an American.

There are often good reasons why words are sometimes spelled the way they are, even if they are often historical ones. We spell doughnut that way because a doughnut is made of dough. Simple, right? To spell it “donut” is only appropriate when you desperately need to make room for more letters, but it should not be confused for proper English for the purpose of answering an academic exam question. Words which have a silent consonant or two often sound identical to a word with a different meaning (rite, without the W, being a religious practice). There are no doubt words whose spelling could be reformed without consequences worse than the present situation, but there is a simple answer teachers can give children or students who ask “why?” when struggling to learn a relatively few inconsistently-spelled English words: history. And perhaps they should actually teach them that history.

There are two separate reasons why we should resist radical spelling reforms. The first is that it risks codifying the pronunciation of English as spoken in one particular region, rather than English in general. For example, we pronounce colour as “culla” in London, while Americans tend to say “cuhlr”. Neither of them particularly resemble color or colour, both of them clinging to the tendency to spell Latin-derived words as they were spelled in Latin, rather than how they sound in English (a practice not replicated in actual Latin-derived languages such as Italian, in which letters are doubled and accents added as needed by its own speakers). However, if we were to go down the route of spelling things phonetically, we simply could not do it without making written London English incomprehensible to Americans, or even people in other parts of the British Isles. Do we leave the silent R’s in or take them out? Either way, they will only be phonetic on one side of the Atlantic. Right now, we have consistency and mutual intelligibility.

The second, more profound, reason is that it would constitute cultural vandalism on a grand scale. Learning to read and write English presently gives one access to a vast range of literature, which would have to be rendered into the new script in a huge transliteration effort, at huge cost, if future generations who learned the new writing method in primary school were to be able to read it. It is likely that some authors, who still held the copyright to their own works, would reject the new script, refuse to write in it or to allow their works to be published in it while their copyrights remained valid. Otherwise, the children would have to learn the present script as well, as “literary English”, in order to read a lot of classical English literature, which would defeat the whole object of inventing a new script.

It would thus cut off future generations of English-speakers from their history, which is usually what is intended when a language is radically reformed as Turkish was in the early 20th century. The cut-off there is such that young people cannot readily understand the early speeches of the author of those reforms, Kemal “Ataturk”. This is the equivalent of English-speakers being unable to understand the writings of the Edwardian period or Virginia Woolf, to say nothing of the classic literature of the preceding century. If we are really to go down the radical Shavian route of adopting a new alphabet, we would not only be cutting ourselves off from our past, but also from other speakers of European languages - an even more extreme cut-off than that which “Ataturk” perpetrated. If we want to know how easily such reforms could be effected in a democracy, we only need look at the German spelling reforms which were rejected by sections of the country’s press.

I’m not suggesting that there should be no reforms, simply that any reform should be incremental and not result in our being cut off from our literary heritage. Whatever might result might be dismissed as “tinkering around the edges”, but that’s all we can do if we are to avoid uprooting our entire culture. Of course, in a context where text-message language or some other colloquialism is used for literary effect in an examination, it should be rewarded rather than penalised, because it shows that the writer has insight into the situation he or she is writing about. But we should not permit such usages to be confused with proper literary English. If we are to allow academic examinations to be abandoned to such practices, then we abandon the principle that there are times and places where informality is appropriate and other times and places where it certainly is not.