Friday, January 11, 2008

Spelling 101

A few comments on the book by David Crystal, The Fight for English: How language pundits ate, shot, and left, Oxford, 2006.

According to this author much of the confusion in today's English spelling is due to the use of French scribes back in the 1400s when the printing press was introduced in England.
These French scribes paid little attention to the usual spellings of English and replaced many English spellings with French ones: they used qu instead of cw in words such a queen; ch instead of c in church (old English cirice); sh and sch instead of sc as in ship (Old English scip.) These French scribes and the Dutch typesetters with whom they worked also had problems deciding how to write English. They often forced Old English and French spellings together along with some Dutch spelling conventions. That is where the gh in such words as ghost comes from.
According to Crystal, other spelling confusions were created in

"the Great English Vowel Shift, [which] took place in the early 1400s. Before the shift, a word like loud would have been pronounced 'lood'; name as 'nahm'; leaf as 'layf'; mice as mees'. ...The renewed interest in classical languages and cultures, which formed part of the ethos of the Renaissance, had introduced a new perspective into spelling: etymology. Etymology is the study of the history of words, and there was a widespread view that words should show their history in the way they were spelled.... that it would help people if they could 'see' the original Latin in a Latin-derived English word.

So someone added a b to the word typically spelled det, dett, or dette in Middle English, because the source in Latin was debitum, and it became debt, and caught on. Similarly, an o was added to peple, because it came from populum: we find both poeple and people, before the latter became the norm. An s was added to ile and iland, because of Latin insula, so we now have island. There are many more such cases."

I find it interesting that the biggest spelling challenges in our language -- the "inconsistencies"-- the silent letters -- the irregularities --are there because someone studying etymology, at some time in the far past, thought they were helping future English users see the connections between related words.

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