Tragedy and hope amid America's Literacy crisis.
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FAQs

Question: Why is English spelling so difficult, so messed up?
Answer:
 That’s a good question. English spelling is 1000 years old, so the answer is long.
  • English pronunciation has changed greatly over the centuries, but spelling hasn’t kept up. The Great Vowel Shift greatly widened the gap between spelling and pronunication
  • .England has a history of conquest, or being conquered, by force and later by colonization. English has “borrowed” many words from other languages, with little anglicizing of spelling but much anglicizing of pronunciation. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes conquered most of the British Isles. Then the Romans (Latin) conquered England. Then the Vikings (Danish, Swedish and Norwegian) conquered the northern parts. Then Normans (French) conquered England under William the Conqueror. French was the official language of England for 3 centuries. Then the English commoners took back their country, providing grist for the Robin Hood tales. Then England became the greatest seafaring nation, colonizing Gibralter (borrowing from Spanish), India (Hindi and other languages), Hong Kong and Singapore (Chinese), North America (various Indian languages), and other places. English is a smorgasbord or melange of languages! (Note: smögåsbord is Swedish, and mélange is French!)
Question: What guarantee is there that NuEnglish spelling will reduce illiteracy?
Answer:

NuEnglish is not a product or service, and so cannot have a guarantee or warranty. However, languages that have phonetic alphabets have low illiteracy rates, limited only by the amount and quality of schooling.

Question:

 NuEnglish seems too radical a change. Won’t NuEnglish students be isolated, and even stuck in a dead-end experiment?
Answer:
A phonetic alphabet is very much the norm for languages. NuEnglish will start to be used by a broad base, such as a state with several million inhabitants. The success of new readers will be obvious to everyone within 3 months. An abundance of additional books and other reading materials will be available as needed because of a respeller computer program available to everyone, especially publishers. Other states and countries will find themselves at an educational and financial disadvantage without NuEnglish, and so, by social pressure, the use of NuEnglish will grow rapidly.
Question: Why will NuEnglish succeed?
Answer:
  • It is one of the few spelling reforms of English that has a perfect correspondance between sounds and letters (other than numbers), and so is very easy to learn and use, and appeals to a child’s sense of orderliness.
  • It is close to Traditional Spelling, and so appeals to readers of Traditional Spelling.
  • Respeller, a computer program, allows publishers to convert any book into NuEnglish quickly and consistently, so there can be an endless supply of reading material in NuEnglish
  • Respeller, a computer program, allows publishers to convert any book into NuEnglish quickly and consistently, so there can be an endless supply of reading material in NuEnglish.
  • Respeller will convert any electronic text, such as on the Internet, into NuEnglish, so NuEnglish readers will not be cut off from society during the transition.
Question: Other spelling reforms have failed. Why should NuEnglish be any different?
Answer:
Believe or not, there has never been a major attempt to promote a thoroughgoing spelling reform of English. It’s been all talk and no action. As for minor spelling reform, Noah Webster succeeded in changing the spelling of a few thousand words, and that is why American spelling is differs from British spelling. NuEnglish will employ mass media education and political action for the first time.