English spelling is
atrochüss
by
Howard Richler
Some writers have shown a hyperbolic
penchant, if not ourtright chauvinism, in their advocacy of the English language. Typical of these
comments, is the following encomium by British novelist Michael Arlen: “English
is the great Wurlitzer of language, the most perfect all-purpose instrument.” On
this side of the Atlantic, language writer Richard Lederer wrote in The Miracle of Language that “English is
easy to learn because it has a familiar look to speakers of other languages”
due to its myriad borrowings from other languages.
English may be relatively easy to learn but
its spelling is irrational and a bane to people learning it as a second
language. In his 1982 book, The
REALReason Why Johnny Still Can’t Read, Stanley L.Sharp related “there are
at least 50 million adults in the United States who do not spell well.”
Why is English spelling such tuff stough?
Many factors account for our largely non-phonetic
orthography. Between the seventh and eleventh centuries, England was invaded
repeatedly by sea-faring marauders who brought with them diverse spelling
practices. To complicate matters, when English spelling was evolving in the
seventh century, there were four distinct dialects in England and they often
developed different spelling for the same word. For example, “heaven” could be rendered as heofon, heofen or heofne.
Because the ruling class of England was
dominated for centuries by the monolingual Norman French, there was even a
tendency to Frenchify some words. Hence the word cwén (the Old English form of “queen”) was spelled in the Middle English period quene and hús turned into “house.” By the beginning of the 15th century, English spelling was a
mixture of two systems, Old English and French.
Until writers such as Shakespeare proved that
English could be as lyrical as any language, many an Englishman believed his
mother tongue to be second rate. When Thomas More wrote Utopia in 1516, he wrote not in English, but in Latin. This
tendency to regard Latin as superior extended into the realm of spelling as
many felt that Latin’s fixed spelling was an improvement over the instability
of English orthography. For example, the OED
shows for the word “never” in the Middle English twenty-three spelling
variations; even the name Shakespeare
was rendered in at least twenty different manners. And still today, logic
doesn’t always prevail in spelling. For example, the sh sound has nineteen spellings, including the ce in ocean, ch in chute,
sc in crescendo, ss in issue and a single t
in negotiate.
Many an idiosyncratic English spelling bears a
Latin imprimatur. The word “debt” was originally spelled
phonetically (dett or dette) until the 16th century
when it was replaced by the spelling “debt” because it was
influenced by the Latin spelling debere to
owe.” Also, receite was replaced by “receipt” influenced by the Latin recepta, the feminine past participle of
the verb recipere. At least in these instances, we retain the original
phonetic pronunciation; in other cases we have acquired a new pronunciation,
such as the word “cors” which decayed into “corpse.”
The disparagement of English led to other false
etymologies. In his book, Spelling
Dearest, Niall McLeod Waldman informs us that word “island” was originally
spelled phonetically as iland or yland.
In the 16th century, however, scholars incorrectly
interpreted it as deriving from the Latin word insula and therefore inserted an “s,” making “island” the standard
form by 1700. Similarly, the Middle English delit
was rendered as delight in the mistaken belief that the word was connected
to “light.”
Another factor that affected spelling was the
Great Vowel Shift. When it commenced in the 15th century, English
speakers started to alter the way vowels were pronounced and this sound change
was heightened by inconsistencies. Although they have the same oo- spelling,
“flood” and “blood” are not pronounced in a similar fashion to “food,” which
itself is pronounced differently than “good.”
Waldman relates that during the Great Vowel Shift, “our spelling not
only moved away from the sounds of words, as often was the case in the past,
but the sounds of words also moved away from our spelling.”
Around the same time as the Great Vowel Shift,
William Caxton introduced the printing press to England. Before printing,
spelling tended to be more phonetic, was meant to be read aloud and was not
standardized. Everyone spelled words in the manner they deemed they should be
pronounced. Caxton and fellow printers, seeking some regular manner of spelling
words decided on a fairly standardized way of spelling which corresponded to
the sound system of Middle English, not Modern English.
By contrast, spelling in most other European languages
tends to be more phonetic. In these languages, there were not large sound
changes between the medieval and modern versions, possibly because language
academies were established that were able to monitor this process. The English language, on the other hand, has
never had any such monitoring body. And although some language, such as German and Russian,
reformed their spelling in the 20th century, and there are many people who’d
like to see English spellling reformed, this is unlikely to happen. Those who
have mastered traditional spelling would be unwilling to learn a new system.
Also, there is no agreement among advocates of spelling reform about any
optimun system.
Richler’s
latest book is Wordplay : Arranged
and Deranged Wit.
