The English Language: A Guided Tour of the Language
Page 9
The study of the errors children make when they are learning to spell (errors like our for hour, or sed for said) shows that spelling is not just a visual matter, but a matter of relating letters to sounds. The children spell the word as they hear it in their heads – a very sensible tactic, which would have worked well enough if things hadn’t gone awry in the history of English (see p. 78). We don’t learn to spell by studying the ‘shape’ of the word, and remembering that. Children who try to spell by remembering visual shapes soon get into deep water. Lucy, for example, aged twelve would happily spell fruit as furit, firut, and the like. Women became wemon, bodies became boides. She ‘knew’ which letters should be there, from her visual memory, but they didn’t always turn up in the right order. As soon as she was taught to ‘sound the word out’ as she spelled, this problem began to diminish.
However, learning about the predictable links between spelling and pronunciation, the principles on which the spelling system is based – in short, the ‘spelling rules’ – is far from commonplace. Most traditional spelling rules are based on the written language only. Consider these two examples: ‘to form the plural of nouns ending in y, change y to i and add es’ (cry – cries), and ‘i goes before e except after c’ (quite a useful reminder, though there are a few exceptions – weird, neighbour, etc.). In such cases, we don’t need to know anything about the sounds conveyed by the letters: the rules work on the letters alone. Rules of this kind are useful, as far as they go. The trouble is, of course, that they don’t go very far. They need to be supplemented by more basic rules which tell the learners to relate what they see to what they hear. Ironically, it is these rules which are usually not taught, but left for children to ‘pick up’ as best they can. Not surprisingly, most children don’t.
As an example of how sounds and spellings relate, let’s look at the question of whether to use one consonant letter or two, when adding -ing to a verb that ends in a consonant, such as hop and sit. This is a very common spelling confusion, with children often writing hoping for hopping, or vice versa. But the basic rule is simple, as long as the link between pronunciation and spelling is pointed out. First it is essential to hear the difference between vowels which are very short in length, as in sit, set, sat, cot, cut, full, and those which are much longer, as in me, car, say, go, etc. (see p. 54). It then emerges that the consonant sound is spelled with a double letter if the verb contains one of the short vowels, and it is kept single if the verb contains a long vowel.
Short Long
hop hopping hope hoping
can canning cane caning
sham shamming shame shaming
bet betting beat beating
man manning mean meaning
Thus, if you had never come across the verb sabing before, you would know that it must come from ‘to sabe’; sabbing, by contrast, would have to come from ‘to sab’. This is what a good spelling rule does: it tells you not just about the words you already know, but about those you haven’t yet learned, or which haven’t even been invented yet.
The rule relates many words other than verbs:
latter later
comma coma
red redder
bitter biter
dinner diner
broad broader
This isn’t the whole story, of course. All the above verbs are words of one syllable. When longer words are brought in, we have to hear whether the preceding syllable is stressed or not. If it is, there is usually doubling; if it isn’t, there isn’t.
occur occurring
patrol patrolling
permit permitting
enter entering
visit visiting
develop developing
Spell the modern way?
One of the most noticeable present-day trends is the use of deviant spelling as part of a trade-name or advertising campaign. The motivation for the distinctive trade-mark is to provide an unambiguous, identifiable product name, which won’t be confused with a ‘common’ word in the language. In the case of slogans, the aim is memorability. It remains an open question whether the proliferation of such forms causes any problems for children trying to make sense of the bewildering array of spellings they see around them.
Miami for the chosen phew Heinz Buildz Kidz
(advertising holidays) Loc-tite
EZ Lern (US driving school) No-glu
Fetherwate Resistoyl
Hyway Inn Rol-it-on
Kilzum (insect spray) Wundertowl
Kwiksave
These rules account for thousands of words. By contrast, there are relatively few exceptions (several of which can be learned as ‘rules within rules’). Here are some of them:
If the verb already ends in a double consonant, it keeps it, even if it has a long vowel sound, e.g. purr/purring, err/erring.
Verbs with a short vowel sound spelled with two vowel letters don’t double the consonant, e.g. dread/dreading.
Verbs ending in l, m, g, and (sometimes) p tend to double the consonant anyway, e.g. cancelling, programming, humbugging, kidnapping. Usage varies between British and American English. Doubling is normal in British English, for such words as travelling and worshipping. US English prefers the single consonant letter: traveling and worshiping.
With a very few verbs ending in -s, both forms are possible, e.g. focusing/ focussing, biasing/biassing.
With verbs ending in a vowel followed by c, the doubling of c is spelled ck, e.g. panic/panicking.
This is just one example of the kind of relationship which exists between sounds and spellings in English. Working through such cases shows that there is a system – there are several rules, even though there are exceptions. But why are there so many rules? And where do the exceptions come from? Questions such as these require historical answers.
Where do the irregularities come from?
The English spelling system is the result of a process of development that has been going on for over 1,000 years. The complications we are left with today are the result of the major linguistic and social events which took place during this time.
Some of the complications arose at the outset, when Old English was first written down by the Roman missionaries (see p. 170), using the 23-letter Latin alphabet – the same as our modern alphabet, except that there was no distinction between I and J or U and V, and there was no W (these were added in the Middle English period) – but there were simply not enough letters to cope with Old English, which contained nearly forty vowels and consonants. The missionaries used extra symbols from the local runic alphabet to write sounds that were noticeably different from Latin (such as the th sound heard in such words as think). But despite this, it still proved necessary to use some letters (such as c and g) for more than one sound, and to represent some sounds by combinations of letters (such as sc – the equivalent of present-day sh).
After the Norman Conquest, the French scribes brought their own ideas about spelling to bear on the language. Several Old English spellings were replaced. The French introduced qu, where Old English had used cw (e.g. queen). They brought in gh (instead of h) in such words as night and enough, and ch (instead of c) in such words as church. They used ou for u (e.g. house). They began to use c before e or i in such words as circle and cell. Because the letter u was written in a very similar way to v, n, and m, words containing a sequence of these letters were difficult to read; they therefore often replaced the u with an o, in such cases as come, love, one, and son. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, English spelling was a mixture of two systems – Old English and French.
The introduction of printing in 1476 brought further consequences. In the early fifteenth century, there were many ways of spelling words, reflecting regional variations in pronunciation. William Caxton had to choose one system as a standard to follow in his printing house (see p. 208). He chose the system which reflected the speech of the London area. As a result, the spelling of many words became stable for the first time, and the notion of a ‘
correct’ spelling began to grow.
However, although spelling stayed relatively stable, pronunciation did not. During the fifteenth century, the sounds of London speech were undergoing the greatest change in its history. Six of the vowels of Middle English altered completely. To take just one such change: in Chaucer’s time, the word name was pronounced with an /a:/ vowel sound like that of calm, which is why it is spelled with an a vowel now. It was the fifteenth-century ‘vowel shift’ which changed the pronunciation to its modern form (see p. 201). Before the advent of printing, the scribes would have heard this new pronunciation, and changed the spelling to suit. Name would have come to be spelled neim or naym, or some such. But after the advent of printing, changes of this kind were no longer acceptable. The consequence is that our modern spelling in many respects reflects the way words were pronounced in Chaucer’s time.
The same kind of reasoning explains many of the ‘silent letters’ of modern English spelling. The k of such words as knee, know, and knight was pronounced in Old English, but it ceased to be sounded during the fifteenth century. The e at the end of such words as name and stone was also pronounced – the sound was similiar to the last vowel of sofa – but it became silent during this period. The spelling, however, continued to reflect the older sounds.
In the sixteenth century, there was a fashion among learned writers to show the history (or etymology) of a word in its spelling, and several of these new spellings became standard. This is where the silent b in debt comes from, for instance. The word had no b sound in Middle English. The b was added by people who wished to remind everyone that the word comes from debitum in Latin. Similarly, a b was added to doubt (from dubitare) and a g to reign (from regno). In addition, there was a concern to ‘tidy up’ the spelling – for example, leading people to think that, because there was a gh in night and light, there should be one in delight and tight also.
n the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a new wave of loan words arrived in English from such languages as French, Latin, Greek, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese (see p. 211). They brought with them a host of un-English-looking spellings – words which ended in strange combinations of vowels and consonants, such as bizarre, brusque, canoe, cocoa, gazette, moustache, and intrigue. Some of the strangest spellings in the language stem from this period.
Because of the complex history of the English language, which we discuss in Part III, English spelling is a curious mixture of different influences. It is surprising, indeed, that with such a chequered history so much regularity should have been retained. But the changes took place over a lengthy time scale, and many of the spellings were tried out for long periods (often accompanied by considerable debate, especially in the sixteenth century) before they were finally adopted. The result is a system which, despite its weaknesses, has proved to be sufficiently functional that it has so far resisted all proposals for its fundamental reform.
A dozen confusibles
There are many pairs of words in English which sound the same (or nearly the same) but which are spelled differently. Some of the items which are most commonly confused are listed below. The context will make it clear which sense is intended. The correct spellings are indicated at the end of the list, using the convention A (for the first alternative) or A (for the second).
Did they all accept/except?
Everyone accept/except John left.
Did we prophecy/prophesy the right result?
It was a rotten prophecy/prophesy.
Has he made any allusions/illusions to the problem?
He’s under no allusions/illusions about its difficulty.
I want to amend/emend what I wrote.
I want to amend/emend my ways.
She was born/borne through the crowds.
She was born/borne in 1568.
That will complement/compliment your shirt nicely.
Thank you for your complement/compliment.
Someone’s complained to the council/counsel.
You should take some council/counsel about that.
You need a new licence/license for that hamster.
I’ll licence/license it next week.
Look at that fantastic lightning/lightening.
I think the sky’s lightning/lightening now.
I need some more stationary/stationery.
That car’s stationary/stationery.
I’m the principle/principal speaker.
I’m going to stick to my principles/principals.
I’m going to do some sowing/sewing in the sitting room.
I’m going to do some sowing/sewing in the long field.
1. A; 2. B; 3. B; 4. A; 5. A; 6. B; 7. B; 8. A; 9. B; 10. A; 11. A; 12. B;13. A; 14. B; 15. A (in UK), B (in USA); 16. B; 17. A; 18. B; 19. B; 20. A; 21. B; 22. A; 23. B; 24. A.
Spelling Reform
Despite the existence of a great deal of regularity in English spelling, everyone would agree that a lot of time and money would be saved if the system could be improved by eliminating all the irregularities. Proposals for spelling reform can be traced back to the sixteenth century, but the main movements in favour of reform developed in both America and Britain in the nineteenth century. The Spelling Reform Association was founded in the USA in 1876, and the British Simplified Spelling Society in 1908. Since then, there have been many proposals made and systems devised, some in minute detail.
The arguments in favour of spelling reform are easy to state. Children and foreign learners of English would save much time and emotional effort in learning to read and write. People using the language would save time and money, because they would be able to write English more rapidly, and with fewer letters – as many as 15 per cent fewer, according to some estimates. Over the years, the saving in terms of paper, ink, storage, and so on would be very great.
The arguments against spelling reform are just as easy to state. How could a programme of spelling reform be introduced in a practical or realistic way? How does one persuade people who have learned the old system to adopt a new one? How does one avoid any major break in continuity between old and new spellings? How does one avoid the problems of representing different regional accents in the spelling – for example, accents which pronounce an r after vowels, and those which do not (see p. 60) ?
So far, the disadvantages have proved overwhelming. The nearest the Simplified Spelling Society came to success was in 1949, when their publication, called ‘Nue Spelling’, was presented to Parliament. The bill was defeated, but only by eighty-seven votes to eighty-four! In 1953, another bill in fact passed its first stage, but was later withdrawn.
One of the biggest problems facing the spelling reform movement is the lack of any universal agreement as to what the best alternative system might be. Over the years, hundreds of proposals have been made, differing from each other in all kinds of ways. Some systems, such as Nue Spelling, stay with familiar letters, and try to use them in a regular way. Others go in for a number of invented symbols, which supplement the letters already in use. The initial teaching alphabet devised by James Pitman in 1959 was of this kind, although it wasn’t a proposal for the permanent reform of English spelling, but a system intended to help children when they were learning to read. In addition, there are a few systems which present a totally radical solution – a fresh start in which all old letters are eliminated and brand new symbols introduced. George Bernard Shaw’s Proposed British Alphabet (‘Shavian’) falls within this last category.
Despite more than a century of effort, the spelling reform movement has made little progress. The case is still regularly argued, but the arguments largely fall on deaf ears.
The beginning of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, in Nue Spelling
Forskor and seven yeerz agoe our faadherz braut forth on dhis kontinent a nue naeshon, konseevd in liberti, and dedikaeted to the propozishon dhat aul men ar kreeaeted eekwal. Nou we ar en.gaejd in a graet sivil wor, testing whedher dhat naeshon, or eni naeshon soe konseevd and soe dedikaeted, kan long e
nduer. We ar met on a graet batlfeeld ov dhat wor.
And a less radical system, ‘Regularized English’
Regularized Inglish iz a system ov spelling which lays down definit rules ov pronunciation which wood make it eazier for aull children to lern to read and write. In aull probability it wood lead to a saving ov at least wun year’s wurk for aull schoolchildren. It wood aulso contribute very largely towaurdz abolition ov the existing amount ov illiteracy and backwardness in reading.
Shaw’s proposed British alphabet
Shaw left instructions in his will that an alphabet of at least forty letters should be published, which would enable English to be written in a regular way. After a competition, a design by Kingsley Read was adjudged the winner. The following extract from Lincoln’s address (‘But in a larger sense…’) illustrates the alphabet in use. A key to the symbols is given below.
From Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg
The Shaw Alphabet Reading Key
The letters are classified as Tall, Deep, Short, and Compound. Beneath each letter is its full name: its sound is shown in bold type.
The four most frequent words are represented by single letters: the Q, of , and to . Proper names may be distinguished by a preceding ‘Namer’ dot: e.g. Rome. Punctuation and numerals are unchanged.