Mary Barry is a secondary school student from Cork. She wonders how it came about that the Americans have a different spelling system to us.
Noah Webster (1758-1843) was mainly responsible. He was educated at Yale and became a lawyer, and in A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, which incorporated The American Spelling Book, he sought to free American English from dependence on British models of the standard language.
In 1806, he published A Compendious Dictionary, but most of the spelling reforms he advocated in this work were dropped because of fierce opposition from Jospeh Emerson Worcester and other scholars. In his famous An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) Webster modified his stance on spelling, but here we have for the first time honor, center, defense and even public, instead of the then norm publick.
His insistence that current educated American usage should be regarded as standard was a great advance, patriotic Americans such as Benjamin Franklin agreed. Webster lobbied President Washington for the passing of the first federal copyright laws, mainly to save his own works from being pirated, but a distinguished Wexfordman beat him to punch in entering the first American-published book for copyright. This was done in Philadelphia on June 9, 1790. The book's title was The Philadelphia Spelling Book arranged upon a plan entirely new, adapted to the capacities of children and designed as an immediate improvement in spelling and reading the English language. This was a shot across Webster's bows. The author of the new spelling book was none other than John Barry, the first commissioned American naval officer to capture an enemy ship, and the first commodore of his navy. And a namesake of young Miss Barry from Douglas, of course.
Few would deny that English spelling is still a notoriously unreliable guide to English pronunciation, but modern efforts at reform have failed miserably. In 1948, the distinguished phonetician Daniel Jones and the equally distinguished dialectologist Harold Orton recommended a new spelling system to the Simplified Spelling Society, an outfit which was founded in 1908. Consider this effort and you'll see why Jones and Orton were ignored:
We rekwier dhe langgwej as an instrooment; we mae aulsoe study its history. Dhe presens ov reprezenting dhe seam sound, three or for uesez ov dhe same leter: aul dhis detrakts from dhe value ov a langgwej az an instrooment.
Das ri-et.