Across the pond

Simons Jenkins, in his column in The Guardian today entitled, ‘A million fingers are tapping out a challenge to the tyranny of spelling’, launches a fierce attack on British English, which he says is ‘immured’ in bigotry. He writes: ‘Across the globe, students of English are driven to distraction by its spelling’. He contrasts us with the Americans, who, he says see spelling reform as the sovereignty of common sense. ‘For that reason the British treated it as foreign, vulgar and, worst of all, American.’ As someone who has taught some hundreds of foreign students I stand shoulder to shoulder with him on this issue. European students, particularly take the trouble to learn our language, whereas the British are still extremely reluctant to learn any language but their own.

Paradoxically the only reason the Brits can get away with saying it loud in English in every capital on the globe is because of American power. The world has to learn American, so they can understand English, even in its weird written form. Jenkins argues the case for the British to adopt the American spelling forms. That would not only make it easier for foreign students it would make things less confusing for English children and university students, who have to read, at all ages, many books (and blogs) written in American English.

There is, however, one paragraph, which Simon gets entirely wrong. He compares the British failure to reform its spelling with the failure to reform the QWERTY keyboard layout. He rightly says that the QWERTY layout was designed to minimise the problem on the old-fashioned typewriters of keys jamming when adjacent keys were tapped in rapid succession. His next sentence is quite wrong. He writes: ‘Yet even when the electronic keyboards ended the jamming problem nobody thought to reform the QWERTY layout…’

That is wrong on two counts. The jamming problem was cured long before the electronic keyboard. The QWERTY layout was invented by Christopher Scholes in 1876. Improvements in manual typewriter design gradually reduced the jamming problem and it was totally eliminated by the invention of the electric typewriter in the late 1920s.

A much better keyboard layout was invented in 1934 by August Dvorak, Professor of Management at Washington State University after extensive research on word usage in the English language. Dvorak’s layout was specifically designed for touch typing, which was not invented until four years after Scholes invented his layout. The huge advantage of the Dvorak layout is that it can be learnt in one third of the time that it takes to learn QWERTY. It also makes it possible to type 15 per cent faster and about 20 per cent more accurately.

And the amazing thing is that it is available as an alternative layout on nearly all the computers currently being manufactured by two clicks with the mouse. Only a few thousand people know that it is there. The reason it is in Windows is not because Bill Gates wanted to advocate a switch to a more sensible keyboard layout. It is there because, as Microsoft told me when Windows first arrived here in 1995, Dvorak is the only keyboard layout that has variations for people who have only one hand. So if you go into the Windows Control Panel you will find layouts for left handed Dvorak and right handed Dvorak as well as the two handed version. Microsoft told me that they had put in the Dvorak option as part of their policy of developing features which make it easier for people with disabilities to use computers.

As I suggested in my blog, Time to Retire QWERTY, here on 30 August 2006 one further step is necessary if the millions using computers are going to make the change to Dvorak. That is for keyboard manufacturers to produce keyboards which have the QWERTY and the Dvorak letters on each key. The full story about how QWERTY and Dvorak developed is on my other site at www.typingbytouch.com. Where you can also download a typing tutorial to teach yourself Dvorak.

The lesson for Simon, in his efforts to get common sense changes to British spelling, is that even the pragmatic Americans are hugely resistant to change.

Persuading the people in power to make changes in British spelling is going to be even more difficult to achieve than getting them to switch from Dvorak to QWERTY. It is unlikely that either of us will live long enough to see these changes happen. But we can set an example in the hope that our grandchildren will be taught the spelling and the keyboard layout which reason suggests is better.

I switched from QWERTY to Dvorak in the Christmas vacation in 1993 when I was nearly 60 so I know it is not difficult even for someone who has used QWERTY for forty years.

I have decided to lead by example on the spelling issue to. So I am switching to the US language spell check, so this blog will henceforth appear in American spelling. I will let readers know if the change drives me mad.

I hope that Simon will do the same thing. Publish his next book in American English which he can do at his own say-so. But also insisting that his own column on The Guardian appears from henceforth in American English. To do that he will have to persuade The Editor and the Scott Trust and probably have to face the ire of the sub-editors.

But it would be a splendid way of keeping the issue in the limelight. I am sure that not a few Guardian reading teachers of English will be sprinting in their sandals to get in their letters of complaint.

And perhaps we could both suggest to Gordon Brown that the best way for him to show that he is different from New Labour and Old Labour, and that he is in favour of sensible reforms, would be to change the name of the Labour Party to the Labor Party.