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A spelling reform is a deliberate, often officially sanctioned or mandated change to spelling rules of a language. Proposals for such reform are also common and many languages have undergone such reforms. Recent high-profile examples are the German orthography reform of 1996 and the on-off Portuguese spelling reform of 1990, which is still being ratified by the different countries. There are a number of reasons driving such reforms: easing the task of children or immigrants becoming literate, making the language more useful for international communication, making etymology clearer, or for aesthetic or political reasons. Opposition to reforms is often based upon concern that old literature will become inaccessible, the presumed suppression of regional accents, or simple conservatism based on concern over unforeseen consequences. Reforms that concentrate on removing unnecessary difficulties ought to take account of such arguments. Reform efforts are further hampered by habit and, in many countries, a lack of a central authority to set new spelling standards. Spelling reform may also be associated with wider discussion of what the official script should be, language planning and language reform. == Arguments for reform == In languages written with alphabetic or syllabary scripts, one might expect there to be a close match of the script or spelling with the spoken sound. However, even if they match at one time and place for some speakers, over time they often do not match well for the majority: one sound may be represented by various combinations of letters and one letter or group of letters pronounced in various ways. In cases where spelling takes account of grammatical features these too may become inconsistent. People who use non-standard spelling often suffer from adverse opinions, as a person's mastery of standard spelling is often equated to his or her level of formal education or intelligence. Spelling is easier in languages with more or less consistent spelling systems such as Finnish, Serbian, Italian and Spanish, than in languages where the pronunciation has moved on since the spelling was fixed, or which use anachronistic or inconsistent spellings, like Irish, English or French. Spelling reforms have been proposed for various languages over the years; these have ranged from modest attempts to eliminate particular irregularities (such as SR1 or Initial Teaching Alphabet) through more far-reaching reforms (such as Cut Spelling) to attempts to introduce a full phonemic orthography, like the Shavian alphabet or its revised version, Quikscript, the latest DevaGreek alphabet,〔(Extended English Alphabet with Devanagari Orthography )〕 the Latinization of Turkish or hangul in Korea. Superfluity of graphemes (letters or characters) is often an issue in spelling reform, which prompts the "Economic Argument"—significant cost savings in the production materials over time—as promulgated by George Bernard Shaw. The idea of phonemic spelling has also been criticized as it would hide morphological similarities between words with different pronunciations, and thus obscure their meanings. It is also argued that when people read, they do not in reality try to work out the sequence of sounds composing each word, but instead they recognize words either as a whole, or as a sequence of small number of semantically significant units (for example ''morphology'' might be read as ''morph''+''ology'', rather than as a sequence of a larger number of phonemes). In a system of phonetic spelling, these semantic units become less distinct, as various allomorphs can be pronounced differently in different contexts. For example, in English spelling, most past participles are spelled with an ''-ed'' on the end, even though this can have several pronunciations (compare ''kissed'' and ''interrupted''). One of the difficulties in introducing a spelling reform is how to reflect different pronunciations, often linked to regions or classes. If the reform attempts to be absolutely phonemic in some model dialect, speakers of other dialects will find conflicts with their own usage. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「spelling reform」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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