No word is an îland

Altho yu may laf, Teddy Roosevelt wanted to achiev a form of English speling that was eazier to lern, and he askt all government buros to follo the new paradim.  

The above sentence looks as though it had been written by a six-year-old, but that was sort of the point.  Andrew Carnegie founded the American Spelling Board in 1906 with a mandate to reform and simplify the English language.  The Board, packed with famous Americans, immediately prepared an initial list of 300 proposed word changes.  In August 1906, President Roosevelt ordered that all government documents would follow the new orthography.

Some of the changes have stuck -- or were already being slowly adopted even before the Board did its work.  Esthetic and fetus, instead of aesthetic and foetus.  Gram instead of gramme, and plow instead of plough.  The dropping of the "u" in words like colour and flavour.  Some of the suggested changes have gradually become a substandard or commercial form of spelling -- donut, cigaret, catalog.  Manoeuver was to be written manuver.  Modern American English has compromised with "maneuver."  

But most of the changes were too radical for public acceptance.  At the end of 1906, Congress resolved that standard dictionary spellings should be used in government documents.  Roosevelt threw up his hands and conceded the fight.  Our American experiment with government-mandated spelling ended within months of its commencement.

This battle was brought to mind by a feature article in today's New York Times discussing France's efforts to curtail to some extent the use of the circumflex -- that little hat that you often find over French vowels.  The idea wasn't to eliminate it entirely -- only in those cases involving the vowels "i" and "u."  Nevertheless, the public is in an uproar.

Unlike America and Britain -- aside from our unfortunate effort in 1906 -- France has a permanent body, the Académie Française, that determines what is correct and what is not correct French usage.  The Académie can rely on its decisions being enforced in some contexts -- public advertising and signage, for example.  It remains to be seen how effective their latest efforts to simplify French spelling will prove.

French is derived from Latin, as is English to a lesser extent.  The circumflex is most commonly used to show that an "s" in a Latin word has become omitted in French pronunciation, and thus spelling.  For example, "insula" becomes "isle" in English but île in French, showing that the "s" has been dropped.  Interestingly enough, one of the American Spelling Board's 300 changes was to change isle and island to ile and iland. 

"Yuk" is my reaction, and was also the reaction of the American public in 1906.

While the average reader of English probably couldn't care less, for some of us, the clues revealing our language's ancestry are valued and even, at times, useful.  The French are far more tradition-minded than we Americans, and I imagine that the loss of the circumflex in île would be at least as painful as would be the loss, for us, of the silent "s" in island. 

Language isn't static, but it changes slowly, glacially, as people's lives change.  Over the past century or two, Americans have lost their enthusiasm for the "British u" in words like honour, harbour, and flavour.   They are now willing to countenance use of either "catalogue" or "catalog."  And while comic books and popular magazines may tolerate "alright," "altho," and "laff," none of us has become  "advanst enuf" to claim he "preferd" "iland" for "island."

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once stated that, "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience."  So also for the life of a nation's language.