How Spelling Got To Be So Difficult

Robert Allen, author of One Step Ahead: Spelling and editor of Pocket Fowler's Modern English Usage, looks back on how we ended up with such a crazy system of spelling...

More sounds than letters
All language exists as speech long before any written form appears. We would like the spelling of words to match the way we pronounce them, whereas in English for much of the time it doesn't seem to correspond at all. This is partly because we use an alphabet, called the Roman alphabet, that was originally devised for Latin, an older language with patterns of sounds and grammatical structures that differ from English.

There are over forty sounds in English but only twenty-six letters to represent them. Some letters simply represent one sound, for example f, l, m, and z. But most letters can represent more than one sound. For example, the consonant c is pronounced differently in the three words cake, city, and (combined with h) church. The vowel e is different in the words den, pretty, and patient, and sometimes it is not pronounced at all, especially at the end of words (as in come and dance).

Letters have to double up
In order to cope with the large number of sounds, two or more letters are often used together to form one sound: vowels as in meet and soak and consonants as in ch, sh, and th. The same set of letters can represent different sounds (although there are variations in some regional accents): oo stands for three different sounds in the words book, soon, and cooperate, and ch stands for two different sounds in character and church.

It works the other way round, too. The same sound can be written by different letters; for example, the words sleeve, weave, receive, and relieve all rhyme, but the syllables that sound the same are spelt in different ways; furthermore, two of the spellings are the same two letters put in a different order, which is bound to cause confusion. The -ee- sound in these word can be written in other ways too, as in the words people, quay, and machine.

Some letters are silent
Other letters can, in some positions, have no pronunciation at all, for example g in words like gnome, k in words like knife, the t in castle and the n in autumn and column, and r in hundreds of words ending in -er and -or such as butter and anchor (except in some varieties of English and in all varieties when they are followed by a word beginning with a vowel).

Pronunciation has changed
Some spelling difficulties have arisen because the pronunciation of words has changed over the centuries since they were first written down, so that the mismatch between pronunciation and spelling has widened.

The most far-reaching of these changes is known as the Great Vowel Shift, which took place in the fourteenth century in the lifetime of the poet Chaucer. During this process, which was remarkably rapid, the number of 'long' vowels (for example the one in heed as distinct from the one in head) was reduced from seven to the five we use today (in the words bean, barn, born, boon, and burn). Before this change, the word life was pronounced as we now pronounce leaf, and name was pronounced as two syllables to rhyme with farmer. After the change, the spellings stayed the same, which explains why we spell so many words with an e at the end that we do not pronounce any more.

Words from Anglo-Saxon
The reason for all these complications lies partly in the way English has developed over many centuries, drawing on many other languages to build up its stock of words. A lot of the words we use today are genuinely English in the sense that they come from Anglo-Saxon, the language spoken in Britain from the fifth to the eleventh centuries: examples include go, good, and house. But many others come from other languages.

Words from Latin and Greek
When the Normans conquered England at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 they brought with them a form of French that became the official language of the court and gradually infiltrated the language of general use, producing a form that is called Middle English. The ultimate sources of these words were Latin and Greek, and in English many of them are more formal in use, like commence and purchase. Words of this kind often survive alongside older words derived from Anglo-Saxon which are used in everyday English, like begin and buy.

Many of these words are spelt in a way that is close to the original forms, and this accounts for the strange appearance of words like castle, column, and foreign.

The spread of the Norman language affected the spelling of existing English words too: queen, for example, is the Norman spelling of a word that in Anglo-Saxon was spelt cwen.

Words from other languages
In more recent times, English has borrowed words from many other languages. Some of these words have changed their form to look like English words: for example cockroach from Spanish cucaracha. Others have retained their original spelling: for example gnu (from an African language, pronounced noo) and karate (from Japanese, pronounced ka-rah-ti).

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