A Rough Slog Through to Our Tough English Spelling

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

My name is Maureen Sanchez, and I’m calling from Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

I’m a polyglot. My kids are polyglots. I have a kid who’s fluent in Mandarin, and he also speaks Spanish in addition to English. I speak Spanish and Italian and some French and some Portuguese and some Greek and some Mandarin. And my husband’s fond of telling me that I can tell him off in 12 languages. And so I find the evolution of language fascinating.

Why do words have that silly, stupid O-U-G-H? And why is it sometimes F? And why do certain words rhyme and other words don’t rhyme? Like house and mouse and lice and louse, but not heist and house or house and heist, for example. This is a big question.

Well, no, right? If you have a house, you likely have, at some point, if you have children, have lice and mice, because that’s just kind of how they go. Is that why they rhyme? House, mouse, louse? Who knows?

All right. This is a big topic here, Maureen. I think we can handle this for you, though. Let me put a shape on this. English is chaotic. All right. So that’s our overarching theme here.

And you know that. Unlike some other languages, English is more of a fossil record of its history. And in a written form, it’s not a simple guide to sound. So what happens here is English absorbed massive vocabulary from invasions. So some from Scandinavia and from the French and the Normans. That’s all on top of this Germanic layer that it started out with.

So a Germanic lair, several invasions, especially the Norman conquest in 1066, which added all this French in there. And then you get the printing press. And the reason the printing press is important is it kind of froze spelling. And this is in the 1400s, right before English underwent what is known as the Greek vowel shift. And this is a huge phonological change where long vowels changed.

Technically speaking, they’re raised higher in the mouth. Yet the spellings remain the same, even though the pronunciations change. So a word that we pronounce as bite now, B-I-T-E, used to sound more like beet, B-E-T, B-E-T. And meet, M-E-T, used to sound more like mayet. Well, and it’s still spelled like that if you’re talking about a cow, which is M-E-A-T, meet.

Yes, that’s a different word, though. Etymologically different. And so when you encounter these oddities in English, it’s almost always because it’s from a different path than what you’re used to. So like you’re encountering, say, a word that goes back to Scandinavian language or a Germanic language or French language. And so there’s not a consistency here because there can’t be.

We would have to change English spelling. And of course, thousands of people and some very important people have tried to change English spelling. But if you did it, you would fracture it and it would shatter like a crystal vase into multiple languages and never be held together again, because you would have to use a different spelling for each dialect.

That’s cool. But why can’t we do something intelligent like the Spanish language that tells us where the accent should be on the syllable, right? If it’s not on the second to last vowel, then there’s an accent mark. So we know how to say the word. There’s no secrecy.

Well, part of it’s complicated by the fact that we don’t have a regulatory body for English. So languages like Hebrew and French and Russian, in Spanish, they do have an official organization that helps guide the language and keep it more consistent. Usually they’re very conservative, lowercase c organizations that are more about retaining history than they are about making change. So that’s an important thing happening.

Our dictionaries kind of fill that role for us of an official body. But as I said, the other difficulty is just even just compare North American Englishes versus British Englishes. If we were to spell them like they sound, they would no longer look alike. They would be as similar, say, as the Scandinavian languages are to each other or some of the Slavic languages are. So they would no longer in written form appear the same. So they would look like different languages. That’s how different they would be.

Yeah. Yeah. And of course, people have tried to reform English spelling for years. There’s a great new book about that by Gabe Henry called Enough is Enough. And that second enough is spelled E-N-U-F. And you might really enjoy that book.

Oh, yeah, it’s fantastic. And it really gets into some of these folks are very spirited in their attempts to change English spelling. And ultimately, most of the efforts fail, or if they succeed, only in tiny ways. But I just want to thank you so much for your call, Maureen, and I appreciate your thoughts on this.

I’m so envious of a polygott family. I’ve always been interested in learning languages, but I don’t have any special knack for it. All I will encourage, anyone who’s listening, get your kids into language as early as you can.

Agreed. Absolutely agree. You sound like a kindred spirit, Maureen. Take care of yourself, Maureen. Thanks for calling. Appreciate it. Thank you so much.

All right. Bye-bye. Take care. 877-929-9673.