The English spelling system is the most inconsistent, illogical and often plain barmy alphabetic spelling system in the world.
Quote:
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/6cc395e6-db41-11da-98a8-0000779e2340.html
Mispell or Misspell?
By James Essinger
Published: May 5 2006 17:29 | Last updated: May 5 2006 17:29
My friend Clair-Marie, who lives in Tunbridge Wells (Kent) is, perhaps because of this, adamant that people should spell properly. On several occasions she has had no qualms about dumping suitors who haven’t been able to satisfy her spelling needs. But even if you are more tolerant of poor spelling than Clair-Marie is, I wouldn’t be surprised if you get irritated when you see, in the newsagent’s window, cards proclaiming “cook requred”, “accomadation availabel” or that a second-hand stereo system for sale is in “excellant” condition. Yes, you know what the advertisers mean, but the spelling is still lousy.
It is, however, not as serious as getting your punctuation wrong. Lynne Truss, in Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, suggests that if we don’t halt the slide in punctuation standards, we will somehow lose an important part of ourselves. On the other hand, if you get your spelling wrong, your reader is, by and large, still likely to understand what you are talking about.
Granted, if you spell words incorrectly - which means nothing more or less than incorrectly according to the essentially arbitrary standard that is regarded as acceptable within a particular country or culture - you run the risk of letting yourself down socially, professionally and, very possibly, financially. The business world is surprisingly intolerant of poor spelling considering that business is supposed to be about making money.
Yet it’s also true that spelling doesn’t need to be as accurate as punctuation to convey an exact meaning. We can still understand misspelt words. (Incidentally, the correct spelling of “misspelt” is “misspelt”, and while, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “misspelt” and “misspelled” are both acceptable, “misspelt” is more usual in British English and “misspelled” in American English. So, make sure you spell “misspell” correctly and don’t misspell “misspell” as “mispell”, “mis-spell” or “miss-spell”, or misspell “misspelt” as “mispelt”, “mis-spelt” or “miss-spelt”.) Indeed, even if words are badly misspelt we can still read them. This is because we read by focusing on the entire image of the word, and particularly on the first and last letters. We use an alphabet while the Chinese employ a system based around logograms (written symbols representing an element of meaning), but just like them we read by recognising the shape of an individual meaning-unit, which we describe as a word.
Ftify yares ago, an ex-soochlmeatsr celald Geoffrey Willans sat dwon to wtire a book aubot a scoohlboy. In fcat, Willans wnet one beettr tahn taht, and dcdeied to make it seem as if the book wree wttiren by his scoholboy, Nigel Molesworth.
In the above paragraph, apart from the proper names, all the words longer than three letters have had their internal letters jumbled up, yet it presents no real difficulty to the native English speaker. I’ve also tested the paragraph on a number of friends for whom English is a second or foreign language, and on the whole they too can read it quite easily.
Maybe when we were learning to read as children we slowly pieced words together by looking at the letters they contain, but once literate we seem only to read like that when we encounter an unfamiliar word. If I invent a new word here and now - “bankalicious”, for example, which could mean the warm feeling you get when you see that your post contains an envelope you strongly suspect has a cheque in it - you’ll piece that word together from its letters because you’re not familiar with it. But when you do know a word well, you read it by a kind of automatic recognition process, just like driving a car.
When you consider that the English spelling system is the most inconsistent, illogical and often plain barmy alphabetic spelling system in the world, and that there are hardly any reliable rules for spelling words properly (even the “i” before “e” except after “c” rule only covers the spelling of 11 words in the English language), it’s amazing how well we do spell.
To understand why we spell the way we do requires an appreciation of the story of our language and culture, even before its birth on the lips of marauding Angles, Saxons and Jutes from continental Europe, who invaded Britain in the 5th century. You need to go back to the ancestor of English, known to linguists as Proto-Indo-European, whose existence was first suspected in the 19th century by Eton and Harrow-educated British colonial administrators who, steeped in Latin and Greek at public school, were sent out to govern India. There they got to know the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit, which is still used today by some Indian scholars as a literary language.
They were fascinated to discover that many Sanskrit words looked much like those in Latin or Greek. For example, the Sanskrit words for “father”, “mother” and “brother” are, respectively, pitar, matar and bratar. The corresponding Latin words are pater, mater and frater and the Greek words pater, meter and phrater. The word for “three” is trayas in Sanskrit, treis in Greek and tres in Latin. Finding these similarities convinced the administrators that there was only one possible explanation: Greek, Latin and Sanskrit had to have developed from a common parent language. Linguists have been able to reconstruct some of Proto-Indo-European words: ekwo meaning “horse”, for example, which gives us, via Latin, the words “equine”, “equerry”, “equipage”, “equestrian” and “equestrianism”; su meaning “pig” (”sow” in modern English); and kuningaz meaning “king”.
It’s almost certain that the early Indo-Europeans - an agricultural people who also hunted deer, wild boar, bear and lynx for food and clothing - never wrote their language down. In our own highly literate society, we are too prone to think of language as something that is primarily written, and indeed even to think of speech as a sequence of essentially written words that we happen to speak aloud. But the truth is that modern Homo sapiens have been speaking complex and highly intelligible languages for about 100,000 years. It’s only in the past 5,000 years at most that any have been preserved by being written down.
Understanding the utterly fascinating historical context of English spelling helps us to spell better because it makes us more sympathetic to the way English is spelt, as well as making us aware of many intriguing examples of why specific English words are spelt the way they are.
Here are just a few examples of why English is such a fearsomely difficult language to spell properly.
Different sounds are frequently represented by the same letter or combinations of letters. Examples are the words “cough”, “enough”, “borough”, “nought”, “plough”, “through” and “Loughborough”, the unassuming Midlands town whose spelling causes foreign learners of English so many headaches. There are thousands of other examples. Here are a few: “bite”/”night”, “taught”/”thought” and “bait”/”gate”.
The same sounds in English are frequently represented by a different letter or combination of letters. Many of these words are homophones - words that sound the same but have different meanings, for instance, “gate”/”gait”, “made”/”maid”, “mettle”/”metal” and “tea”/”tee”. The very fact that homophones can be spelled in different ways shows just how inconsistent English spelling really is. Almost by definition, homophones tend to lend themselves to puns. Many English surnames are homophones, but variations in the spellings of the surname have developed to distinguish them. Such is the case with “hog”/”Hogg”, “nun”/”Nunn” and “wild”/”Wilde”. English spelling contains numerous words that feature silent letters. Indeed, this is a notorious aspect of the English spelling system and causes great difficulty to anyone trying to learn how to spell and read English. Here are a few of the many examples: “debt”, “island”, “knee”, “knight”, “scissors”. This isn’t helped when the word containing the silent letter is also a homophone with another word of unrelated meaning, as is the case with words such as “gnaw”/”nor” and “knight”/”night”.
The use of the letter “e” - the most common letter in written English, is fantastically inconsistent. Often it is not pronounced at all, and seems practically redundant, as in words such as “image”, “imagine” and “submerge”. The letter “e” may, rather more usefully, reflect a change in the vowel sound of the spelt word to distinguish it from another word that does not have the final “e”. Examples are: “car”/”care”, “jut”/”jute”, “mad”/”made”.
Generally, written letters in English can stand for a wide - even positively alarming - range of sounds. Consider the different sounds represented by the written letter “o” in the following five words: “police”, “Oswald”, “ozone”, “nation” and “zoo”. Or consider how written letters can represent a range of different sounds in English in the numerous ways the “ee” sound is written down in all the following words: “Caesar”, “conceive”, “fee”, “field”, “key”, “machine”, “me”, “people”, “quay”, “sea” and “subpoena”. Similarly, the “sh” sound is written down in a range of different ways: “chaperon” (or “chaperone”), “conscious”, “eschew”, “fuchsia”, “fissure”, “mansion”, “mission”, “nation”, “nauseous” (there is an alternative pronunciation of this word in which the middle “s” is pronounced like a “z”), “ocean”, “shoe”, “sugar” and “suspicion”. You don’t need to seek out longer words to see just how inconsistent English spelling is. Consider, for example, the problems of spelling “to”, “too” and “two”.
Given these complexities, it is not surprising we accept that most of us have words we can’t always spell accurately. But if you spell really badly, some people whose opinions you value may take you less seriously than you would want. Yet, while we can usually make sense of misspelt words, the fact remains that spelling does matter. Of course it does. It matters enormously. The quality of your spelling will probably play a role in your career advancement, and even in the quality of your social life if the people you want to befriend are like Clair-Marie.
James Essinger’s book “Spellbound: The Improbable Story of English Spelling” will be published by Robson Books (£9.99) on May 25.
Quote:
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/6cc395e6-db41-11da-98a8-0000779e2340.html
Mispell or Misspell?
By James Essinger
Published: May 5 2006 17:29 | Last updated: May 5 2006 17:29
My friend Clair-Marie, who lives in Tunbridge Wells (Kent) is, perhaps because of this, adamant that people should spell properly. On several occasions she has had no qualms about dumping suitors who haven’t been able to satisfy her spelling needs. But even if you are more tolerant of poor spelling than Clair-Marie is, I wouldn’t be surprised if you get irritated when you see, in the newsagent’s window, cards proclaiming “cook requred”, “accomadation availabel” or that a second-hand stereo system for sale is in “excellant” condition. Yes, you know what the advertisers mean, but the spelling is still lousy.
It is, however, not as serious as getting your punctuation wrong. Lynne Truss, in Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, suggests that if we don’t halt the slide in punctuation standards, we will somehow lose an important part of ourselves. On the other hand, if you get your spelling wrong, your reader is, by and large, still likely to understand what you are talking about.
Granted, if you spell words incorrectly - which means nothing more or less than incorrectly according to the essentially arbitrary standard that is regarded as acceptable within a particular country or culture - you run the risk of letting yourself down socially, professionally and, very possibly, financially. The business world is surprisingly intolerant of poor spelling considering that business is supposed to be about making money.
Yet it’s also true that spelling doesn’t need to be as accurate as punctuation to convey an exact meaning. We can still understand misspelt words. (Incidentally, the correct spelling of “misspelt” is “misspelt”, and while, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “misspelt” and “misspelled” are both acceptable, “misspelt” is more usual in British English and “misspelled” in American English. So, make sure you spell “misspell” correctly and don’t misspell “misspell” as “mispell”, “mis-spell” or “miss-spell”, or misspell “misspelt” as “mispelt”, “mis-spelt” or “miss-spelt”.) Indeed, even if words are badly misspelt we can still read them. This is because we read by focusing on the entire image of the word, and particularly on the first and last letters. We use an alphabet while the Chinese employ a system based around logograms (written symbols representing an element of meaning), but just like them we read by recognising the shape of an individual meaning-unit, which we describe as a word.
Ftify yares ago, an ex-soochlmeatsr celald Geoffrey Willans sat dwon to wtire a book aubot a scoohlboy. In fcat, Willans wnet one beettr tahn taht, and dcdeied to make it seem as if the book wree wttiren by his scoholboy, Nigel Molesworth.
In the above paragraph, apart from the proper names, all the words longer than three letters have had their internal letters jumbled up, yet it presents no real difficulty to the native English speaker. I’ve also tested the paragraph on a number of friends for whom English is a second or foreign language, and on the whole they too can read it quite easily.
Maybe when we were learning to read as children we slowly pieced words together by looking at the letters they contain, but once literate we seem only to read like that when we encounter an unfamiliar word. If I invent a new word here and now - “bankalicious”, for example, which could mean the warm feeling you get when you see that your post contains an envelope you strongly suspect has a cheque in it - you’ll piece that word together from its letters because you’re not familiar with it. But when you do know a word well, you read it by a kind of automatic recognition process, just like driving a car.
When you consider that the English spelling system is the most inconsistent, illogical and often plain barmy alphabetic spelling system in the world, and that there are hardly any reliable rules for spelling words properly (even the “i” before “e” except after “c” rule only covers the spelling of 11 words in the English language), it’s amazing how well we do spell.
To understand why we spell the way we do requires an appreciation of the story of our language and culture, even before its birth on the lips of marauding Angles, Saxons and Jutes from continental Europe, who invaded Britain in the 5th century. You need to go back to the ancestor of English, known to linguists as Proto-Indo-European, whose existence was first suspected in the 19th century by Eton and Harrow-educated British colonial administrators who, steeped in Latin and Greek at public school, were sent out to govern India. There they got to know the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit, which is still used today by some Indian scholars as a literary language.
They were fascinated to discover that many Sanskrit words looked much like those in Latin or Greek. For example, the Sanskrit words for “father”, “mother” and “brother” are, respectively, pitar, matar and bratar. The corresponding Latin words are pater, mater and frater and the Greek words pater, meter and phrater. The word for “three” is trayas in Sanskrit, treis in Greek and tres in Latin. Finding these similarities convinced the administrators that there was only one possible explanation: Greek, Latin and Sanskrit had to have developed from a common parent language. Linguists have been able to reconstruct some of Proto-Indo-European words: ekwo meaning “horse”, for example, which gives us, via Latin, the words “equine”, “equerry”, “equipage”, “equestrian” and “equestrianism”; su meaning “pig” (”sow” in modern English); and kuningaz meaning “king”.
It’s almost certain that the early Indo-Europeans - an agricultural people who also hunted deer, wild boar, bear and lynx for food and clothing - never wrote their language down. In our own highly literate society, we are too prone to think of language as something that is primarily written, and indeed even to think of speech as a sequence of essentially written words that we happen to speak aloud. But the truth is that modern Homo sapiens have been speaking complex and highly intelligible languages for about 100,000 years. It’s only in the past 5,000 years at most that any have been preserved by being written down.
Understanding the utterly fascinating historical context of English spelling helps us to spell better because it makes us more sympathetic to the way English is spelt, as well as making us aware of many intriguing examples of why specific English words are spelt the way they are.
Here are just a few examples of why English is such a fearsomely difficult language to spell properly.
Different sounds are frequently represented by the same letter or combinations of letters. Examples are the words “cough”, “enough”, “borough”, “nought”, “plough”, “through” and “Loughborough”, the unassuming Midlands town whose spelling causes foreign learners of English so many headaches. There are thousands of other examples. Here are a few: “bite”/”night”, “taught”/”thought” and “bait”/”gate”.
The same sounds in English are frequently represented by a different letter or combination of letters. Many of these words are homophones - words that sound the same but have different meanings, for instance, “gate”/”gait”, “made”/”maid”, “mettle”/”metal” and “tea”/”tee”. The very fact that homophones can be spelled in different ways shows just how inconsistent English spelling really is. Almost by definition, homophones tend to lend themselves to puns. Many English surnames are homophones, but variations in the spellings of the surname have developed to distinguish them. Such is the case with “hog”/”Hogg”, “nun”/”Nunn” and “wild”/”Wilde”. English spelling contains numerous words that feature silent letters. Indeed, this is a notorious aspect of the English spelling system and causes great difficulty to anyone trying to learn how to spell and read English. Here are a few of the many examples: “debt”, “island”, “knee”, “knight”, “scissors”. This isn’t helped when the word containing the silent letter is also a homophone with another word of unrelated meaning, as is the case with words such as “gnaw”/”nor” and “knight”/”night”.
The use of the letter “e” - the most common letter in written English, is fantastically inconsistent. Often it is not pronounced at all, and seems practically redundant, as in words such as “image”, “imagine” and “submerge”. The letter “e” may, rather more usefully, reflect a change in the vowel sound of the spelt word to distinguish it from another word that does not have the final “e”. Examples are: “car”/”care”, “jut”/”jute”, “mad”/”made”.
Generally, written letters in English can stand for a wide - even positively alarming - range of sounds. Consider the different sounds represented by the written letter “o” in the following five words: “police”, “Oswald”, “ozone”, “nation” and “zoo”. Or consider how written letters can represent a range of different sounds in English in the numerous ways the “ee” sound is written down in all the following words: “Caesar”, “conceive”, “fee”, “field”, “key”, “machine”, “me”, “people”, “quay”, “sea” and “subpoena”. Similarly, the “sh” sound is written down in a range of different ways: “chaperon” (or “chaperone”), “conscious”, “eschew”, “fuchsia”, “fissure”, “mansion”, “mission”, “nation”, “nauseous” (there is an alternative pronunciation of this word in which the middle “s” is pronounced like a “z”), “ocean”, “shoe”, “sugar” and “suspicion”. You don’t need to seek out longer words to see just how inconsistent English spelling is. Consider, for example, the problems of spelling “to”, “too” and “two”.
Given these complexities, it is not surprising we accept that most of us have words we can’t always spell accurately. But if you spell really badly, some people whose opinions you value may take you less seriously than you would want. Yet, while we can usually make sense of misspelt words, the fact remains that spelling does matter. Of course it does. It matters enormously. The quality of your spelling will probably play a role in your career advancement, and even in the quality of your social life if the people you want to befriend are like Clair-Marie.
James Essinger’s book “Spellbound: The Improbable Story of English Spelling” will be published by Robson Books (£9.99) on May 25.