Every now and again a call goes up for the reform of English orthography to make it more user-friendly. After all, it is said, the Spanish, the Germans, and even the French, have accepted changes to their spelling systems. By way of comparison, we could think of the suggestion that the Greeks should abandon their alphabet and adopt the Roman one, to come into line with most other European countries. Thankfully, there seems no serious possibility that this will happen. The reasons against it are solidly linguistic and not ones prompted by blind tradition. The same sorts of reasons should prevail for English. The Greek case, though, can provide some lessons. For there have, in fact, been changes to Greek orthography in recent times. An important one was in 1982, when the variety of diacritic signs was reduced to a single accent.

In the classical period (of Plato, Euripides etc.) the Greek language was written with upper case letters only with no diacritic signs at all. The lower case letters were developed later as the language spread, and diacritic marks were introduced to help foreigners pronounce it correctly. For some words, these accent signs also incidentally indicated grammatical features. The three accents, acute, grave and circumflex, indicated varieties of pitch; in addition, words beginning with a vowel had either a ‘smooth’ or ‘rough’ breathing-sign, distinguishing, for example, between words beginning ‘a-’ and ‘ha-’. The rough breathing was also placed over an initial rho (r), which accounts for the English spelling of words like ‘rhombus’ and ‘rhetoric’.

With the changes in pronunciation over the centuries, these accent-signs eventually ceased to represent pitch. By the modern period, all three accents did no more than indicate the stressed syllable. The distinction between ‘rough’ and ‘smooth’ had also disappeared, since all words beginning with a vowel or rho were pronounced with the ‘smooth’ sound.

It was logical and pragmatic, therefore, particularly for Modern Greek typesetting, to abandon this complexity in favour of a single accent-sign, usually now printed as an acute accent or just as a vertical line above the letter. Yet even this is redundant, since a native Greek speaker has as little need to be shown which syllable carries the stress as an English speaker has for English. This can be demonstrated with Greek sentences written entirely in capital letters, where accents are usually omitted: they present no problems of pronunciation for a native speaker. Maybe the next move, then, will be to abandon even this single accent, keeping it only for books for teaching pronunciation to foreigners.

All this sounds a sensible and efficient development. So, is there any disadvantage to it? Perhaps I am biased, since I was exposed first to Classical Greek, in the form written with all the accents, and then to Modern Greek before it changed to the monotonic system. So, for me, words in modern Greek books and newspapers nowadays look denuded; but, more than that, something of their etymological and grammatical nature has disappeared. A similar development in English would be like changing all the ‘ph’ words to ‘f’. This has happened in Spanish and Italian, though not in French. Now, even if someone is unaware that the ‘ph’, pronounced ‘f’, in an English word shows that it is of Classical Greek origin, the distinctive spelling of such words identifies them as a group. One could think also of the words that end in ‘-ght’. Why not replace ‘caught’ with ‘caut’ or ‘light’ with ‘lite’ (as, indeed, often happens with the latter in the world of advertising)? If that happened, then, within a generation, an understanding of the character of those words, though perhaps only vaguely sensed by most people, would be lost, except for experts in the history of English.

The simplification of the Greek accentual system, then, has ceased to make a visual distinction among some types of words and some grammatical features. Once you are literate, there is bound to be a mental connection between speaking and reading. So, something of the history of Greek words is now no longer on the printed page. Oddly enough, therefore, Greeks nowadays must either have learned Classical Greek, or know the old system, to understand why the Greek-derived English words ‘helium’ and ‘echo’ are not ‘elium’ and ‘hecho’.

The Greeks have made their decision and, for them, there is no going back. I could envisage a few small changes in English, that would do no harm, to reverse false etymologies, for example, such as the removal of the ‘s’ from ‘island’ and the ‘c’ from ‘scythe’, but if there is ever any serious proposal of modifications to English orthography on a large scale, changing ‘knowledge’ to ‘nowledge’, for example, or ‘which’ to ‘wich’ or ‘physics’ to ‘fisics’, there are some good reasons against it.