Consider yourself lucky, not just to be reading this wonderful column, but to be reading and speaking English. It is by far the hardest language to learn because word usage, pronunciation and even spelling can be so confusing. The word “pitcher” refers to something that holds water, or someone who holds a baseball. A word can also have multiple meanings depending on its usage — “fair” can mean someone is attractive, or average; it can mean being free from prejudice; it can even mean a place where crowds gather to see attractions, play games and pet farm animals. Many words also sound the same but are spelled differently — “principle” and “principal” — while other words are spelled differently than they sound — “Wednesday.”
To address these problems a group of prominent intellectuals, led by Andrew Carnegie, met in 1906, in New York City, to discuss how to simplify the English language. They were convinced that the 20th Century was the American century, and America would lead the world if only English was simple enough to become the world’s universal language.
Their first goal was to simplify American spelling. The Simplified Spelling Board was the result.
The Board first focused on the phonetic differences between written and spoken English. Why is there a “b” in the word “debt”’? they asked (or, for that matter, an “h” in the word “why”). Why is there a “w”’ in the word “answer”?
The Board also thought some spellings were unnecessarily complicated. Why “bureau” when “buro” would do? And enough with “enough” — let’s make it “enuff.”
For months the Board carefully studied English words, identifying thousands of words that should be changed. However, worried about overwhelming the general public, especially school kids, with such a radical departure, they whittled the list down to an original 300 words whose spelling could be changed immediately.
The idea began to catch on, and when then-President Teddy Roosevelt learned of it, he was so enthusiastic about the Board’s work that, this week (Aug. 27) in 1906, he ordered the Government Printing Office to use these 300 newly spelled words in all government documents. Alas, this enraged Congress, which had not been consulted, and caused a backlash in the print-dominated media — magazines and newspapers — which ridiculed the idea. Congress even passed a resolution stating it was sticking to its old spellings in its documents, and soon the public soured on the idea. President Roosevelt even rescinded (why is there a “c” in “rescinded”?) his earlier order to the Government Printing Office.
The Board subsequently disbanded, meaning “board” (why is there an “a” in “board”?) remained a word that could either mean a gathering of (in this case, unsuccessful) intellectuals, or a piece of wood.
I hate to tell you this, but English is not a hard language to learn. The grammar is pretty simple, nouns are not gendered and do not have case-endings, verbs don’t change except for adding an -s in third person singular. And the complications of vocabulary you mention are certainly not unique to English. Take the Swedish word val, for example, which means either whale, choice, or election. German and Icelandic are much harder. I don’t know as much about Asian languages, but Chinese must very difficult for a European. Just FYI. But keep up the good work. I always enjoy your history column.
That column has launched a thousand responses, with about 50 percent agreeing with me and 50 percent disagreeing–give or take. In retrospect, this seems to be an instance in which difficulty is in the eye of the beholder. That is, everyone’s thought processes, and learning processes, being different, what language seems the hardest to one person is different than what is hardest to the other. One of those who agreed with me wrote that, according to some international study, English is the language with “the worst letter-to-sound and sound-to-letter ratios (phonemicity).” Interestingly, among those who disagree with me, there is a wide disagreement over which is the hardest language to learn. A little more than five percent agree that Chinese is the hardest.