The Mother Tongue

by Bill Bryson

  Without any doubt, the most far-flung variety of English is that found on Tristan da Cunha, a small group of islands in the mid-Atlantic roughly halfway between Africa and South America. Tristan is the most isolated inhabited place in the world, 1,500 miles from the nearest landfall, and the local language reflects the fact. Although the inhabitants have the dark looks of the Portuguese who first inhabited the islands, the family names of the 300-odd islanders are mostly English, as is their language—though with certain quaint differences reflecting their long isolation from the rest of the world. It is often endearingly ungrammatical. People don’t say “How are you?” but “How you is?” It also has many wholly local terms. Pennemin is a penguin; watrem is a stream. But perhaps most strikingly, spellings are often loose. Many islanders are called Donald, but the name is always spelled Dondall. Evidently one of the first users misspelled it that way generations ago and the stuck.

  * However, unlike America, Australia has three layers of social accent: cultivated, used by about 10 percent of people and sounding very like British English; broad, a working-class accent used by a similar number of people (notably Paul Hogan); and general, an accent falling between the two and used by the great mass of people.

  8.

  Spelling

  The mainland of Europe never produced an alphabet of its own. Our own alphabet has its roots in pictographs. Our letter A comes from the Semitic aleph, meaning “ox,” and originally was a rough depiction of an ox’s head. B comes from the Semitic bēth, meaning “house.” But the people of the Near East, unlike those of the Far East, made an important leap in thought of almost incalculable benefit to us. They began to use their pictographs to represent sounds rather than things. The Egyptian symbol for the word re began to stand not just for sun but for any syllable pronounced “ray.”

  To appreciate the wonderfully simplifying beauty of this system you have only to look at the problems that bedevil the Chinese and Japanese languages. There are two ways of rendering speech into writing. One is with an alphabet, such as we have, or a pictographic-ideographic system, such as the Chinese use.

  Chinese writing is immensely complicated. The basic unit of the Chinese written word is the radical. The radical for earth is and for small is . All words in Chinese are formed from these and 212 other radicals. Radicals can stand alone or be combined to form other words. Eye and water make teardrop. Mouth and bird make song. Two women means quarrel and three women means gossip.

  Since every word requires its own symbol, Chinese script is immensely complicated. It possesses some 50,000 characters, of which about 4,000 are in common use. Chinese typewriters are enormous and most trained typists cannot manage more than about ten words a minute. But even the most complex Chinese typewriter can only manage a fraction of the characters available. If a standard Western typewriter keyboard were expanded to take in every Chinese ideograph it would have to be about fifteen feet long and five feet wide—about the size of two Ping-Pong tables pushed together.

  Dictionaries, too, are something of a nightmare. Without an alphabet, how do you sensibly arrange the words? The answer is that in most dictionaries the language is divided into 214 arbitrary clusters based on their radicals, but even then you must hunt randomly through each section until you stumble across the spelling you seek.

  The consequences of not having an alphabet are enormous. There can be no crossword puzzles, no games like Scrabble, no palindromes, no anagrams, no Morse code. In the age of telegraphy, to get around this last problem, the Chinese devised a system in which each word in the language was assigned a number. Person, for instance, was 0086. This process was equally cumbersome, but it did have the advantage that an American or Frenchman who didn’t know a word of Chinese could translate any telegram from China simply by looking in a book. To this day in China, and other countries such as Japan where the writing system is also ideographic, there is no logical system for organizing documents. Filing systems often exist only in people’s heads. If the secretary dies, the whole office can fall apart.

  However, Chinese writing possesses one great advantage over other languages: It can be read everywhere. Chinese is not really a language at all, but more a family of loosely related dialects. A person from Fukien can no more understand the speech of the people of Shanghai than a Londoner can understand what people are saying in Warsaw or Stockholm. In some places one dialect is spoken over a very wide area, but in other parts of the country, particularly in the deep south, the dialects can change every two or three miles. Yet although the person from Fukien couldn’t talk to anyone from Canton, he could read their newspapers because the written language is the same everywhere. The ideographs are pronounced differently in different areas but read the same—rather in the way that 1, 2, 3 means the same to us as it does to a French person even though we see it as “one, two, three” while they see it as “un, deux, trois.”

  An equally useful advantage of written Chinese is that people can read the literature of 2,500 years ago as easily as yesterday’s newspapers, even though the spoken language has changed beyond recognition. If Confucius were to come back to life today, no one apart from scholars would understand what he was saying, but if he scribbled a message people could read it as easily as they could a shopping list.

  Even more complicated is Japanese, which is a blend of three systems: a pictographic system of 7,000 characters called kanji and two separate syllabic alphabets each consisting of 48 characters. One of these alphabets, katakana (sometimes shortened to kana), is used to render words and names (such as Dunkin’ Donuts and Egg McMuffin) that the ancient devisers of kanji failed to foresee. Since many of the kanji characters have several pronunciations and meanings—the word ka alone has 214 separate meanings—a second syllabic alphabet was devised. Called hiragana and written as small symbols above the main text, it tells the reader which of the many possible interpretations of the kanji characters is intended.

  All this is so immensely complicated that until the mid-1980s, most Japanese had to learn English or some other Western language in order to use a personal computer. The Japanese have now managed to get around the pictographic problem by using a keyboard employing katakana syllables which are converted on the screen into kanji characters, rather as if we were to write twenty percent by striking three keys—“20,” “per,” and “cent”—and then seeing on the screen one symbol: “20%.” Despite this advance, the Japanese still suffer two considerable problems. First, they have no tradition of keyboard writing, so that typing is a bewildering new skill to many of them, and, second, each computer must be immensely more powerful than a Western model just to deal with the fact that it takes 7,000 symbols to write Japanese (against a hundred or so for most Western languages) and that whereas Western letters can be represented on computer screens by as few as 35 dots of light, Japanese characters can require up to 576 dots to be clearly distinguishable.

  It is a disarming reflection of their determination and ingenuity that they have become such a technological powerhouse with such a patently inefficient system of orthography.

  In comparison the Western way of writing begins to look admirably simple and well ordered. And yet in its way it is itself a pretty imperfect system for converting sounds into thoughts. English is particularly hit or miss. We have some forty sounds in English, but more than 200 ways of spelling them. We can render the sound “sh” in up to fourteen ways (shoe, sugar, passion, ambitious, ocean, champagne, etc.); we can spell “ō” in more than a dozen ways (go, beau, stow, sew, doe, though, escargot, etc.) and “ā” in a dozen more (hey, stay, make, maid, freight, great, etc.). If you count proper nouns, the word in English with the most varied spellings is air with a remarkable thirty-eight: Aire, ayr, heir, e’er, ere, and so on.

  Spellings in English are so treacherous, and opportunities for flummoxing so abundant, that the authorities themselves sometimes stumble. The first printing of the second edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary had millennium spelled millenium
in its definition of that word, while in the first edition of the American Heritage Dictionary you can find vichysoisse instead of vichyssoise. In The English Language [page 91], Robert Burchfield, called by William Safire the “world’s most influential lexicographer,” talks about grammatical prescriptivists who regard “innovation as dangerous or at any rate resistable.” It should be resistible. In The Story of Language, Mario Pei writes flectional on page 114 and flexional just four pages later. And in The Treasure of Our Tongue, Lincoln Barnett laments the decline of spelling by noting: “An English examination at New Jersey’s Fairleigh Dickinson University disclosed that less than one quarter of the freshmen class could spell professor correctly.” I wonder, for my part, how many of them could spell freshman class.

  Just as a quick test, see if you can tell which of the following words are mispelled.

  supercede

  conceed

  procede

  idiosyncracy

  concensus

  accomodate

  impressario

  irresistable

  rhythym

  opthalmologist

  diptheria

  anamoly

  afficianado

  caesarian

  grafitti

  In fact, they all are. So was misspelled at the end of the preceeding paragraph. So was preceding just there. I’m sorry, I’ll stop. But I trust you get the point that English can be a maddeningly difficult language to spell correctly.

  Some people contend that English orthography is not as bad as all that—that it even has some strengths. Simeon Potter believed that English spelling possessed three distinguishing features that offset its other shortcomings: The consonants are fairly regular in their pronunciation, the language is blessedly free of the diacritical marks that complicate other languages—the umlauts, cedillas, circumflexes, and so on—and, above all, English preserves the spelling of borrowed words, so that people of many nations “are immediately aware of the meanings of thousands of words which would be unrecognizable if written phonetically.” We might dare to quibble with the first of these observations. Potter evidently was not thinking of the c in bloc, race, and church or the s in house, houses, and mission, or the t in think, tinker, and mention, or the h in host, hour, thread, and cough, or the two g’s in garage and gauge, or indeed most of the other consonants when he praised their regularity of pronunciation. On the other hand, English does benefit from the absence of diacritical marks. These vary from language to language, but in some they play a crucial, and often confusing, role. In Hungarian, for instance, tőke means capital, but töke means testicles. Szár means stem, but take away the accent and it becomes the sort of word you say when you hit your thumb with a hammer. David Crystal in The English Language observes that there are only 400 or so irregular spellings in English (only?), and, rather more persuasively, notes that 84 percent of English spellings conform to a general pattern (e.g., purse/nurse/curse, patch/catch/latch) while only 3 percent of our words are spelled in a really unpredictable way.

  A mere 3 percent of our words may be orthographically troublesome, but they include some doozies, as we used to say. Almost any argument in defense of English spelling begins to look a trifle flimsy when you consider such anomalies as colonel, a word that clearly contains no r and yet proceeds as if it did, or ache, bury, and pretty, all of which are pronounced in ways that pay the scantest regard to their spellings, or four and forty, one of which clearly has a u and the other of which just as clearly doesn’t. In fact, all the “four” words—four, fourth, fourteen, twenty-four, and so on—are spelled with a u until we get to forty when suddenly the u disappears. Why?

  As with most things in life, there are any number of reasons for all of these. Sometimes our curious spellings are simply a matter of carelessness. That is why, for instance, abdomen has an e but abdominal doesn’t, why hearken has an e but hark doesn’t. Colonel is perhaps the classic example of this orthographic waywardness. The word comes from the old French coronelle, which the French adapted from the Italian colonello (from which we get colonnade). When the word first came into English in the mid-sixteenth century, it was spelled with an r, but gradually the Italian spelling and pronunciation began to challenge it. For a century or more both spellings and pronunciations were commonly used, until finally with inimitable illogic we settled on the French pronunciation and Italian spelling.

  The matter of the vanishing u from forty is more problematic. Chaucer spelled it with a u, as indeed did most people until the end of the seventeenth century, and some for half a century or so after that. But then, as if by universal decree, it just quietly vanished. No one seems to have remarked on it at the time. Bernstein suggests [in Dos, Don’ts and Maybes of English Usage, page 87] that it may have reflected a slight change in pronunciation—to this day many people aspirate four and forty in slightly different ways—but this begs the question of why the pronunciation changed for the first word and not for the second. In any case, it would be most unusual for the spelling of a word to change to reflect such a minor adjustment of pronunciation.

  Usually in English we strive to preserve the old spelling at almost any cost to logicality. Take ache. The spelling seems desperately inconsistent today, as indeed it is. Up until Shakespeare’s day, ache was pronounced aitch when it was a noun. As a verb, it was pronounced ake—but also, rather sensibly, was spelled ake. This tendency to fluctuate between “ch” and “k” sounds was once fairly common. It accounts for such pairs as speech/speak, stench/stink, and stitch/stick. But ache, for reasons that defy logic, adopted the verb pronunciation and the noun spelling.

  English spelling has caused problems for about as long as there have been English words to spell. When the Anglo-Saxons became literate in the sixth century, they took their alphabet from the Romans, but quickly realized that they had three sounds for which the Romans had no letters. These they supplied by taking three symbols from their old runic alphabet: w, þ, and ð. The first, literally double u, represented the sound “w” as it is pronounced today. The other two represented the “th” sound: þ (called thorn) and ð (called eth and still used in Ireland).

  The first Norman scribes came to England and began grappling with what to them was a wholly foreign tongue—a fact clearly evident in many of the spellings from the Domesday Book. In just one small parish in Yorkshire, Hanlith was recorded as Hagenlith, Malham as Malgham, and Calton as Colton—all spellings that were probably never used locally. Many such errors can be attributed to carelessness and unfamiliarity, but others clearly reflect Norman orthographic preferences. The Normans certainly did not hesitate to introduce changes they felt more comfortable with, such as substituting qu for cw. Had William the Conqueror been turned back at Hastings, we would spell queen as cwene. The letters z and g were introduced and the Old English ð and v were phased out. The Normans also helped to regularize such sounds as ch and sh, which in Anglo-Saxon could be rendered in a variety of ways. They substituted o for u in certain words such as come and one, and they introduced the ou spelling as in house and mouse. These changes made things more orderly and logical for Norman scribes, but not necessarily for later native speakers of English.

  As we have seen elsewhere, the absence of a central authority for the English language for three centuries meant that dialects prospered and multiplied. When at last French died out and English words rushed in to take their place in official and literary use, it sometimes happened that people adopted the spelling used in one part of the country and the pronunciation used in another. That is why we use the western England spellings for busy and bury, but give the first the London pronunciation “bizzy” and the second the Kentish pronunciation “berry.” Similarly, if you’ve ever wondered how on earth a word spelled one could be pronounced “wun” and once could be “wunce,” the answer in both cases is that Southern pronunciations attached themselves to East Midland spellings. Once they were pronounced more or less as spelled—i.e., “oon” and “oons.”

 
; Even without the intervention of the Normans, there is every reason to suppose that English spelling would have been a trifle erratic. Largely this is because for the longest time people seemed emphatically indifferent to matters of consistency in spelling. There were exceptions. As long ago as the early thirteenth century a monk named Orm was calling for a more logical and phonetic system for English spelling. (His proposals, predictably, were entirely disregarded, but they tell scholars more about the pronunciation of the period than any other surviving document.) Even so, it is true to say that most people throughout much of the history of the English language have seemed remarkably unconcerned about niceties of spelling—even to the point of spelling one word two ways in the same sentence, as in this description of James I by one of his courtiers, in which just eight words come between two spellings of clothes: “He was of a middle stature, more corpulent though in his clothes than in his body, yet fat enough, his cloathes being ever made large and easie. . . .” Even more remarkably perhaps, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words by Robert Cawdrey, published in 1604 and often called the first English dictionary, spelled words two ways on the title page [cited by Crystal, The English Language, page 204].

  Throughout this period you can find names and words spelled in many ways—where, for instance, has been variously recorded as wher, whair, wair, wheare, were, whear, and so on. People were even casual about their names. More than eighty spellings of Shakespeare’s name have been found, among them Shagspeare, Shakspere, and even Shakestaffe. Shakespeare himself did not spell the name the same way twice in any of his six known signatures and even spelled it two ways on one document, his will, which he signed Shakspere in one place and Shakspeare in another. Curiously, the one spelling he never seemed to use himself was Shakespeare. Much is often made of all this, but a moment’s reflection should persuade us that a person’s signature, whether he be an Elizabethan playwright or a modern orthodontist, is about the least reliable way of determining how he spells his name. Many people scrawl their signatures, and Shakespeare was certainly one of history’s scrawlers. In any case, whether he used the spelling himself or not, Shakespeare is how his name appears on most of the surviving legal documents concerning him, as well as on the title pages of his sonnets and on twenty-two of the twenty-four original quarto editions of his plays.