Death to Double Letters

The Russian language, as rich and varied as English, is equally hard to comprehend and spell. With the 1917 revolution came a determined effort to clean up the lingual mess, and the regime simplified spelling rules and eliminated outdated letters. Just by liquidating the hard sign at the end of words, printers saved 70 pages on each copy of Tolstoy's War and Peace.

In Moscow last week, the newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva published an interim look at the work of the State Spelling Commission, which is preparing a new report on language reform to be issued next year. The major drive will be against useless double letters in Russian words; thus kommunist will become komunist, appetit, apetit, and so on. Of 1,200 Russian words containing double letters, only twelve will be retained. Among them: Russia and other proper names. The soft sign following sibilants at the end of words will disappear, as did the hard sign following consonants, and 16 rules of hyphenation are to be reduced to one. If all goes well, War and Peace will be shorter than ever, great quantities of paper will be saved, and the State Speling Comision will win credit for once again enroling language in the fight for Comunist progres.

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