Phonetic Orthography in Spain and Italy

Fonetic spelling, in one form or another, has been, and is now, used by progressiv teachers in England and America as an introduction and an aid to the study of the current orthografy. Their experience is that children can spel correctly that is, fonetically the words they ar able to pronounce, as soon as they hav learnd the alfabet employd, and the principle of combining letters into sillables. In languages such as Italian and Spanish, that hav approximately fonetic alfabets, appro...

 English Spelling Risks Becoming Like Chinese Ideograms

Indeed, the present tendency in the scools is to dis- regard the fonetic basis of English spelling, and to treat the written and printed words as ideografs like Chinese the pupils being taught to recognize a word by its appearance as a whole, rather than by a f util attempt to analize the supposed sounds of the letters composing it. Vast amounts of mony and incalculable years hav been spent in efforts, never wholly success- ful, to teach children to memorize the intricate and unreaso...