At school, I was terrible at spelling.  I don’t think trying to learn strings of letters by rote really work and my brain always wanted to sort spelling out so that it was more logical.  I could never ‘get’ syllables either, because I’d think that using three-letter groups instead would be much more logical.  I had the same issue learning French – why have genders, why not not… etc, rather than just accepting that’s how it is.  This way of thinking is great for computer programming, but useless for learning things.  (I have got better at spelling after years of the computer red underlining errors.)

In The Murder of Conky Whallop, I had a gag about whether it’s scone or scone.

“No!” she said, “it’s not pronounced ‘scone’, it’s pronounced ‘scone’!”

I’ve riffed further in the forthcoming sequel.

It’s a good joke on paper, but I imagine an audiobook narrator would have kittens.

English spelling is a nightmare.  We discovered the printing press at exactly the wrong time.  For a couple of hundred years, there was The Great Vowel Shift, when all our vowels moved from Middle English to Early Modern English.  ‘Oh’s became ‘You’s and so on, and some letters became silent.  Printing fixed the spelling, but sometimes before the shift, sometimes during and sometimes after.  Some words seemed to be spelt according to what letters they had left over.  The Americans tried to correct the spelling, so ‘color’ not ‘colour’, but that wasn’t consistent either.  And then scholars in Victorian England changed things to demonstrate their superiority over the uneducated.  Don’t, boldly or otherwise, split the infinitive came from that movement.

I have been wondering about updating spelling in an SF book, but it would be a) hard work, b) cause arguments and c) be impossible to read.  But my brain keeps working on it.

To start with, we don’t want accents.  ‘E’ is ‘e’, not ‘é’.  I didn’t learn French (true), just to suggest we adopt lots of little difficult-to-type lines all over the place.  Esperanto has a fixed way of pronouncing letters, limiting its sounds, but meaning that all speakers sound the same and can therefore understand one another.  (Cue the Harry Harrison story about Esperanto speakers meeting in New York.  One of them didn’t know Esperanto, so they switched to English to include them in the conversation.  Unfortunately, they had to switch back to Esperanto as no-one could understand the Scot and the Aussie.)

I’d get rid of long vowels.  ‘Lead’ the metal and ‘lead’ the action is just foolish.  Surely ‘led’ and ‘leed’, respectively.  You see, ‘Mon’ as in ‘Mons Olympus’ and ‘Moon’ as in shiny thing in the sky, makes it very clear whether there’s along vowel in there, so why not ‘Daavid’.  With the single ‘a’, it would be ‘David’ as in ‘Davros’.  Add using the right vowel, so ‘one’ and ‘won’ become ‘won’ and ‘wun’, respectively.

Also, we don’t need all the letters.  A feline pet can be spelt ‘cat’, ‘kat’ and ‘qat’ – we don’t need three ways of doing that.  ‘C’ can be hard, ‘cat’, and soft, ‘city’, so that’s one to go.  ‘Kat’ and ‘sity’ works fine.  Disposing of ‘q’ also removes the ‘must be followed by u’ business too.  We need ‘z’ as ‘zit’ is not the same as ‘sit’, although the Romans had no ‘z’, but do we need ‘x’.  Xylophone can be spelt ‘zylophone’ and we could spell ‘Oxford’ as ‘Oksford’.

That’s ‘c’, ‘q’ and ‘x’ gone, which brings the alphabet (or our ‘ABD’) down to 23 letters.  These frees up three keys on the keyboard and that would mean less finger strain and new opportunities for me to reconfigure my Ergodox.

And I’d separate, not letters or syllables, but something in-between to divide the different sounds.  You could use an apostrophe, so that everything looks like Klingon.  So I’d be Daa’vid, but the apostrophe is a much over-used and abused piece of punctuation already doing too many jobs.  This article’s ‘use’ of it, for instance.  So why not the old middle dot, ‘·’ as in ‘Daa·vid went to Oks·ford’.

(Good grief, the computer has gone berserk with red underlining.)

So, finally, to come back to scones.

These would be spelt ‘sk·on’ or ‘sk·own’ – that’s very clear on the pronunciation, although it ruins the joke.

It would have an effect on dialect.  Speakers in different regions would spell things differently.  The Scottish, for example, write ‘scone’ and say ‘sch·oone’.  It’s an art to write dialect and should be used sparingly.

And finally, on the subject of scones, is it cream then jam, or jam then k·reem?