P as in hiccough
The first point to make is that language is human. It’s fallible. Or, not to beat about the bush, it’s full of cock-ups. One such error is hiccough. The word first pops up in Elizabethan English as hickop or hikup, an adaptation of the earlier hicket or hicock. Now it’s pretty clear from all these versions that the word was onomatopoeic, a fair attempt to catch the sounds of a hiccup in letters. But no sooner had the word decided to settle down than people started to assume that a hiccup was some sort of cough. And if a hiccup was a cough, then shouldn’t it be written that way: hiccough, not hiccup? The answer was no, it shouldn’t. Not then, and not now. The error grew nevertheless, until hiccough became at least as common as hiccup. The error is rejected by most dictionaries, but is still common enough that my computer spellcheck accepts both versions. Since people not dictionaries are the ultimate appeal court in these matters, then hiccough is certainly a real enough word, a mistake that’s passed the test of time.
O as in though
Most oddities of English have little to do with straightforward errors. A bigger problem is that English is a living language, and its strangest spellings are often left as residues, like tree rings marking out past phases of growth.
English spellings largely derive from a particular period in British history, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It’s possible to be as precise as this for the simple reason that for the three hundred years or so following the Norman Conquest English had mostly disappeared as a written language. When official documents needed to be written, they’d been written in French or Latin. Thus by the time that English began to re-emerge from its long hiding, it was faced with the challenge of adopting a writing system almost, as it were, from scratch.
This could easily have been a recipe for disaster. People tended to spell as they pronounced, and regional accents of the time were very varied. There are more than five hundred spellings recorded for the word through. The word she had more than sixty, including:
Scae
Sse
Sche
Shae
Se Che
Shee
Zhee
Sheea
Sheh
Shey
Sha
Sso
Sco
Scho
Schoe
Show
Sho
Shoy
Schew
Schw
Shoe
Shou
She
Su
Scheo
Sheo
Zhe
If you were writing just for your own friends, or to conduct business locally, perhaps none of this might have mattered. But as soon as official records and legal proceedings began using English too, then this kind of variation began to matter a lot; a common approach was called for. Naturally enough, London, home to the court and the senior echelons of the national bureaucracy, became dominant in imposing its spellings, in particular through the most senior bureaucrats of them all, the Masters of Chancery. Over time, they began to stamp their authority on the chaos. Out went all those scheos and sheeas and zhes, to be replaced by she. Out went ich (and many others) to be replaced by I. Because the movers and shakers of London spoke an English drawn mostly from London and the Midlands, our spelling is based largely on those accents.
Those early bureaucrats did a good job. Fifteenth-century English spelling was increasingly systematic and rational—a typical European language. Alas, however, no sooner had the spellings been fixed than pronunciations shifted. The spelling of words like through, rough and right is a perfectly accurate guide to the way these words used to be spoken. But the language has moved on, leaving these old medieval relics behind.
T as in debt
The silent B in debt is another tree ring.
When the Masters of Chancery were working to fix the language, there was a debate between those who thought that all spellings should be phonetic, and those who wanted them to be based on sound etymology. The phonetic camp won out in most cases, but not in all. Debt has a silent B, simply because medieval scholars wanted to point out that the word has its origins in the Latin debere, to owe. So a silent B was added—and never mind the fact that the word actually came from the French dette, which never had a B anywhere near it.
This was a quirky way to justify introducing a totally needless letter, and it was based on a more than generous interpretation of etymology, but there was, at least, an etymological connection, however thin. Medieval scholars were, however, prone to finding connections to the Latin where none actually existed, so our language is littered with plenty of spellings that are unjustifiable on any level. Island doesn’t come from the Latin insula; it comes from an s-free Germanic root. (Compare modern German Eiland.) Anchor, rhyme, scythe, island, numb, ghost and many others derived their oddness from other errors fixed and perpetuated by Renaissance dictionaries.
A as in neighbour
All the problems so far mentioned fade into insignificance compared with the one identified by the A in Shaw’s potato.
Just as the Masters of Chancery were producing the first rational spelling system in English, something was going on to turn all their fine work on its head. This was the Great Vowel Shift, which did exactly what it said on the tin. Before the shift, English vowels had been much the same as their Continental neighbours. The word fine in English used to be pronounced with an ‘ee’ sound, like the Italian fino (‘fee-no’). If a fourteenth-century speaker of English had encountered a sentence like ‘I see my goat is lame—my cow too’, they’d have pronounced it approximately as: ‘Ee say mee gawt ays lahm—mee coo toe’
This sounds odd to us, but only because we’re not used to it. At least English used its vowels in more or less the way you’d expect given its ancestry. Then, for no known reason, the vowels decided to get up from their fixed positions and wander round till they settled again in new places. The Chaucerian ‘ee’ sound became the modern ‘eye’ sound, the Chaucerian ‘ay’ became the modern ‘ee’, and so on.
The process was both strange and not strange at the same time. In some ways, nothing much could be more ordinary. Language changes. If you want a scone, do you ask for a scohne or a sconn? If you talk about dust, do you use the southern ‘uh’ sound, or the shortened Yorkshire ‘oo’ sound? If a Brummie moves to a new part of the country—Liverpool, say, or Glasgow or Cornwall—they may well start to modify their vowel sounds, almost without noticing it. The Great Vowel Shift was in a way no odder than that—and bear in mind that it took place over two centuries, or the space of five or six medieval lifetimes.
On the other hand, the process is also a little odd. Why did English change so much and its closest neighbours little or not at all? And what propelled the movement? There is no shortage of theories. Social upheavals following the Black Death is one possibility. Another is that as the French-speaking ruling class came to speak English, there was a vogue for a kind of patriotic hypercorrection of French vowel sounds. But no one knows for sure. It’s just one of those things.
The one certainty, however, is that English spellings were fixed before, during and after the shift. A word like polite (around before the shift) simply saw its pronunciation change, from something like pol-eet to the modern pol-ite. But an almost identical word—police—which entered the language after the shift reflects the Continental ‘ee’ sound of its origin. The result, of course, is that there’s no way to tell in advance how a word should be spelled, or how a spelling should be spoken. Fine for those who grow up with the language; murder for those who have to learn it.
T as in pterodactyl
The first recorded reference to a pterodactyl is in Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. In it, Lyell predicts, ‘The pterodactyle might flit again through umbrageous groves of tree-ferns.’ Whether pterodactyls could ever have been described as flitting is open to doubt, but what’s significant here is that new words have to be coined for new uses, and that one
of the biggest creators of new words is science.
Scientists are only human. They want their coinages to have a bit of class—and what could be more classy than a bit of Latin or (still better) Greek? And since the ancient Greeks were fond of their initial Ps, our language is now adorned with pterodactyls and ptomaine and psychology and many others. The trouble with these introductions, of course, is that English tongues can’t really wrap themselves around such (to us) exotic constructions. So the pronunciation tends to be anglicized, while the spelling resolutely isn’t.
O as in bureau
The final great complicating factor for English is highlighted by the final letter of Shaw’s potato. Bureau is a French word. It has entered English with its pronunciation and spelling more or less intact, but because the French match up vowel sounds and letter combinations differently from us, their words only serve to baffle and complicate our spellings.
That’s not the only problem that can arise, however. Sometimes a new word entered the language—for example, nation, another French borrowing—and English tongues weren’t able to wrap themselves around the foreign sounds. So the French pronunciation, roughly na-see-o(n), becomes corrupted to the comfortable English nay-shun. Creations like this are hideously common. Do you want to guess how many ways there are to create the sh sound in English? You might play safe and say two or three. Or perhaps go wild and suggest five or six. The correct answer is in fact thirteen, as in shed, sure, issue, mansion, passion, ignition, suspicion, ocean, conscious, chaperone, schedule, pshaw and fuchsia.
Potato as in
That’s now every letter of Shaw’s potato accounted for. Shaw himself so disliked the mess of spellings that he left money in his will for a prize to be awarded for the best new alphabet to take care of English spelling. The winner was a chap called Kingsley Read. As Read saw it, a big part of the problem with English spellings is that there are too few letters for the number of sounds they need to make. There are forty-eight distinct sounds in English, and only twenty-six letters to do their work. The letter A, for example, has at least four jobs to do: ay as in able, a as in at, ah as in alms and or as in all. If English is to be easy to spell, then there should be one sound to a letter, one letter to a sound. Read’s alphabet, the Shavian alphabet, is a rather beautiful creation. It looks like this:
(That’s the start of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in case you missed it.) Alas, however, no one ever used Read’s alphabet. No one ever used Quickscript, his later modification of it. No one has ever used Readspel, Read’s final attempt to get people on his side. And no one ever will.
In the end, weird spellings are only a problem if that’s how you choose to see them. Part of the beauty of English is that its history is visible for all to see. It’s a hybrid between Anglo-Saxon rootstock and Franco-Latinate blooms. It’s a magpie language, acquisitive and reckless. It’s a human language, strewn with errors and eccentricities. It’s a living language, with vowels and pronunciations that shift from age to age. That won’t ever change. The question really is, who’d want it to?
DECLINING TO CONJUGATE
For English speakers, one of the most striking facts about learning other languages is how bloomin’ complicated they seem to be. A perfectly regular French verb has five different forms in its present tense alone. Adjectives have to vary depending on whether a noun is singular or plural, masculine or feminine. And French is easy. German has three genders, five cases. The Polish struggle with three genders and seven cases, and if that weren’t enough, their nouns, adjectives, numbers and pronouns all decline differently. Italian has fifty forms for each verb, ancient Greek more than three hundred, modern Turkish an eye-popping two million.
For we Brits, this complexity seems simply astonishing. We have two standard noun forms, singular and plural—dog and dogs, for example. We have four standard verb forms: bark, barks, barking and barked. Our adjectives don’t vary at all.* When we encounter a language with the complexity of Polish or Turkish, most of us find it simply stunning. It seems a wonder that Polish or Turkish toddlers ever manage to master the tongue at all.
To a linguist, however, the puzzle is a rather different one. English is a Germanic language, and the only one of its family to have lost almost all inflections. English is, in fact, about the least inflected language ever known. The reason for this has nothing to do with some form of linguistic evolution, from ‘primitive’ inflected languages to ‘modern’ uninflected ones. Rather, the answer has to do with that most English of solutions to precarious situations: muddle, fudge and compromise.
Back in 878, Alfred the Great defeated the Danish army at Edington. The battle checked the hitherto unstopped Viking advance, and enabled Alfred to go on to negotiate a peace agreement which divided the country into two. A line was drawn diagonally across England, running roughly from Chester to London. The area to the south of the line would remain under English rule; the northern part (the ‘Danelaw’) would be ruled by the Danes (though most of those ruled, of course, would be English).
Trade carried on across the line, very much as before. After Alfred’s son, Edward, had won back the Danelaw, then a common authority existed across the whole country, though pockets of Danish settlers were still widespread. Although frustratingly little is known about the pattern of Danish settlement, the likelihood is that significant numbers of Danes contined to come and settle across the eastern seaboard for the next two hundred years or so. Indeed, as late as the nineteenth century, linguists were recording language communities in Lincolnshire whose speech contained entire sentences that were effectively in Danish, not English. Old habits die hard.
Under these conditions—and largely in the east—Danes and English came into regular, daily, routine contact. The two communities would have been able to communicate with relatively little difficulty. Although the English spoke Old English and the Danes spoke Old Norse, the two languages were extremely close, rather in the way Norwegian and Swedish are today. The sentence ‘I’ll sell you the horse that pulls my cart’ translates as:
OLD ENGLISH: Ic selle the that hors the draegeth minne waegn
OLD NORSE: Ek mun selja ther hossit er dregr vagn mine
The main words of this sentence are pretty close. Sell translates as selle / selja. Horse is hors / hossit, and so on. The speakers of one group could fairly easily have guessed the broad meanings of the other party’s words. But what about all those word endings? The cases and genders, tenses, moods and the rest? The chances of a non-native speaker being able to guess the subtle implications of all those word endings would have been approximately nil.
So—and still only in the east—the word endings started to disappear. As traders and others sought to do business, Dane with English and vice versa, they simply started to drop the parts of the language that didn’t function for them. The process moved furthest and farthest in the areas where Dane and English lived closest together. In the west of the country, where Danish influence was minimal, a highly inflected version of English lasted right into the fifteenth century.
In the end, though, the Easterners had the advantage of geography. London, Oxford and Cambridge all fell, more or less, into the eastern zone, and those three centres of cultural power ended up dictating the language the rest of the country would speak. In consequence, English went from being an ordinarily inflected language to one with almost no variation at all: the pidgin product of an uneasy peace.
How should one interpret this change? Almost certainly as a historical-linguistic quirk. Just one of those things. Yet it’s hard to avoid a nagging sense of something further. There have been plenty of instances in which two similar linguistic communities have travelled and traded, mixed and mingled, yet English is exceptional in its lack of inflection. Were those early English exceptional in their desire to trade rather than fight, in their willingness to rub along with alien folk? The evidence falls a mile short of being conclusive, yet those same traits would prove to be reasonably prominent national
characteristics many centuries down the road. Possibly, and only just possibly, those same traits were present way back in Anglo-Saxon times; that linguistic oddity their only surviving trace.
Whatever the answer to that particular conundrum, the inflections never came back. They are still eroding, very slightly, today. Whom has almost given way to who. The regional dialect thou makes(t) for the standard you make has just about vanished too. Those wonderful Danish-speaking Lincolnshire folk have been obliterated by the BBC and universal education and the internal combustion engine. (Though Lincolnshire dialect is still rich in words and phrases from Old Norse.)
This simplified, simplifying language offers one huge benefit to the world. To its billion and a half non-native speakers, English spelling is nothing but a plague and a torment. English inflections, by contrast, are now so simple you could learn them all in a minute, and still have time to put the kettle on.
* With one exception: blond and blonde.
A WORLD OF SQUANTOS
In November 1620, the Pilgrim Fathers made landfall off Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts. It wasn’t the best time of year to arrive. The New England winter was more ferocious than anything the predominantly East Anglian settlers were used to. Nor were the precedents exactly encouraging. The first British settlement in North America had disappeared without trace. The second (in Jamestown, Virginia) had survived, but only after terrible loss of life. The Pilgrim Fathers weren’t even well equipped. They were missing basic tools, and were astonishingly ignorant of both agriculture and fishing. Their prospects were lousy, and they knew it. In the words of the colony’s first governor, William Bradford:
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