Typos, tricks and misprints

https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-english-spelling-system-so-weird-and-inconsistent

by erehweb • 5 years ago

84 34 5 years ago

pxc• 5 years ago

I really like languages whose phoneticism is reinforced through series of orthogtaphic reforms, because it gives them an aspect of regularity and predictability that is rare in non-written aspects of natural languages, since natural languages are fundamentally social and evolve over time.

But I also love the etymological richness of languages like English where little or no attempt is made to truncate the visible histories of loan words by normalizing their spellings (or pronunciation or grammar, for that matter— in English, spellings and pronunciations of words that are identical or similar to their original, foreign ones usually remain acceptable even as more Anglicized forms naturally develop alongside them). There's something magical about how rich the English language is with historical traces, even to foreign lands and tongues.

If you're attentive to spelling, English's orthographic conservatism also exposes the relationships between words to you in a way that spelling reforms can obscure. It lets us recycle words, too, so that words of ultimately identical roots (and sometimes grammatical role, too) come to bear different shades of meaning and connotation that reflect their histories. For better and for worse, words get to have a kind of 'path dependence' in English in this way.

LatteLazy3• 5 years ago

English has never been standardised because England didn't suffered an invasion (post 1066) or had a strong central authority the way other countries have had.

English isn't a "real" language. English started as old German (Angols and Saxons brought it over). Then the Norman invasion added a bunch of French words. And the grammar got massively simplified. Both these factors are to suit the invaders for instance cow is from the German Kuh, because peasants keep the cows. But Beef is from the French Boeuf because aristocrats eat the cows so they use the French word.

Over time we have added some Latin and Greek and basically any other language we could "borrow without asking" from.

The result is that every rule is at best a guideline. That the same sound is spelt differently in different words. And that different sounds and spelt the same in other words.

I'm a native English speaker and it must be a nightmare for anyone learning it. I speak ok German but I can spell most words in German effortlessly because German spelling makes sense. Because it was nice ver such a mess and it's regularly standardised.

tshaddox• 5 years ago

English started as old German (Angols and Saxons brought it over). Then the Norman invasion added a bunch of French words. … Over time we have added some Latin and Greek

Aren’t you leaving out the much earlier Roman conquest? And didn't Latin already have a big influence on the Germanic languages even before the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Great Britain?

LatteLazy3• 5 years ago

The Romans left before the Anglo-Saxons arrived, so when they replaced the existing peoples the latin influence mostly disappeared. I don't think they ever made it far enough into North Germany to influence them before they left but I don't know. It would be interesting to see how many romans lived for how long in England, Northern Germany and (say) France (as a reference). I wonder if you can see a correlation between that number and the amount of Latin retained?

Latin had a pretty big influence all over the place so I don't want to talk it down. We can add it to the mix, but then you have even more volcab and grammar mixed up in an even bigger mess that still never got standardised. And that's sort of my point here. Other nations have 1 language. England has 2 (plus latin if you like?) mashed together badly and never cleaned up.

msrenee2• 5 years ago

English isn't a real language because it's had additions from other languages and the grammar has changed over time? Is French a real language? They've also lost most of their case declensions and have plenty of loan words. Same with Spanish. There's actually a decent number of Arabic loan words in that language. The Spanish spoken in Mexico has quite a few borrowings from Nuhuatl and other languages that were in the area before the Spanish settled there. Russian has lots of English loan words that honestly sound a little silly when surrounded by Russian words. Quite a few from French too and some of their pronunciation changed to mimic French as well if I'm not mistaken. They do have lots of cases though. Does that cancel out the loan words?

English is just a real of a language as any other. It's got an interesting and complex history, but so does every other language in this world.

LatteLazy3• 5 years ago

You may be over-reading what I meant when I said real (I did use speech marks?). I don't mean any offence, sorry if I caused some.

My point above is that English is made of 2 languages (Old German and Old French) and they have been messily combined and never cleaned up. That's really not true of any other language I am aware of? Most languages come from a root, evolve and exist. Taking 2 and splicing them together is the reason behind it's unusual grammar, illogical spelling and it's low overlap of nouns with other languages.

Bertom• 5 years ago

English not being standardised because England hasn't been invaded since 1066 feels like a red herring, maybe this is part of a greater argument with more context but I'm just completely missing what relevance this has at all.

English not being standardised because there's no central authority is an easily acceptable proposition, although in defence of English it's hard to standardised a language when it's being spoken by independent industrious nations on entirely different continents. Had French remained the lingua franca or had Spanish overtaken both English and French we'd be having the exact same conversation about how those languages never underwent standardisation like English would have done in this alternate history.

Something to remember about standardisation that you yourself also noted is that German, and indeed most languages that have been reformed and standardised, did so fairly recently and require regular standardisation attempts to reflect the ever changing nature of language. Dutch, French, and German all underwent unification/standardisation around the 18-19th century as well as introduction of spelling reforms in the 1990s. Brazil and Portugal both had two reforms in the 20th century. Norway has had half a dozen reforms since the start of the 20th century. Even non-European languages like Japanese and Chinese have reformed since WW2. Spanish did successfully reform in the 18-19th century but has mostly remained the same, possibly for the same reasons that would make a modern English language reform difficult.

As far as English being difficult to learn, there are many aspects to consider when it comes to difficulty of language but spelling seems so far down on the list that it's barely worth considering. Sure, there are an obnoxious amount of spelling rules being stated as fact that happen to have more exceptions than the rule covers, and it's awkward not knowing how to spell a word after hearing it or being able to pronounce a word after reading it, but there's no radically different regional dialects to learn (despite being unstandardised) like in German. French is standardised but it has a complex (albeit consistent) spelling system that's based on etymology rather than phonology. There's no complicated grammatical gender system to learn, there's no real complex grammar like Finnish or grammar with exceptions like Russian, the phonology is fairly simple and pronunciation isn't too difficult or strict, etc. The main complaints about English from non-native speakers seems to be that spelling and pronunciation is inconsistent, which is something native speakers struggle with, it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.

- ramblings below -

English isn't a "real" language.

I'm really struggling to understand what you mean by this. A generous interpretation would be that English isn't a continuation of the language that has been spoke on Britain, which is clearly true, but you go on to say that it has a bunch of French and Latin words (30% and 30% of total vocabulary respectively). By this metric is French a real language? 20% of French vocabulary comes from German and Greek. The same can be said of German which is 20% French and Latin. How about Portuguese which has 25% of its Vocabulary coming from English/Arabic/French/Latin/etc. Up until around the 19th century written Norwegian was simply Danish, and even today there's a struggle between Bokmål and Nynorsk, is Norwegian a 'real' language?

English started as old German (Angols and Saxons brought it over).

While you didn't explicitly say that English comes from Old German it's worth pointing out that there was no specific Old German for English to have come from. Old English during the migratory period (more recently but disputedly referred to as the Anglo-Frisian language or dialect groups) would have been extremely similar to the language/dialects that the Angles, Frisians, and Saxons spoke, and this lineage can still be seen today with Frisian followed by Dutch being the most closely related languages to English. Documented examples of written Old English even predate those for Old Saxon (or Old Low German) by a good 100-150 years, so while English is a Germanic language it's not necessarily something that just existed in the same form prior to the migratory period.

And the grammar got massively simplified.

This was never something that happened from a singular event in a singular place, for example Old English started to lose grammatical gender around the time of the Norse invasions but Danelaw had a big effect on its decline, however in more conservative areas of the country grammatical gender would remain until the 13th century, that's a good 400-500 years that covers both Norse and Norman conquests as well as the Old English to Middle English phase.

It's also worth noting that simplification of grammar is something that tends to happen to most languages that have contact with a large degree of adult settlers that are attempting to communicate with you, something like grammatical gender is difficult to learn as an adult, this simplification isn't something that makes a language 'less real'.

When it's the case of the entire aristocracy or ruling class being replaced (as is the case during the migratory period or the Norman invasion) this step tends to be skipped as no attempt to learn the common language is made, instead the common language is replaced entirely (as was the case with the Romano-Celtic language spoke in lowland England) or the common language inherits vocabulary (as was the case for the Norman invasion). A good demonstration of this is the decline of the Cornish language that was accelerated by English replacing Latin as the language of the church.

Both these factors are to suit the invaders for instance cow is from the German Kuh, because peasants keep the cows. But Beef is from the French Boeuf because aristocrats eat the cows so they use the French word.

We do use the French word 'beef' and it's commonly attributed to the Norman invasion but the same separation of finished products that the aristocracy could afford and unfinished products that the peasants would produce exists in other languages too, 'cow' in French isn't 'boeuf' but 'vache', kuh/rindfleisch, carne de res/vaca, etc.

whall6• 5 years ago

I’ve always been curious about how delineating “queens English” affected other dialects of English

paozac• 5 years ago

With most languages the spelling gives you enough information to figure out how to pronounce a word you've never heard before. Not with english. My last wrong guess: the writer Malcolm Lowry (/lauri/ instead of /louri/). Danish, same problem.

JadeNB• 5 years ago

With most languages the spelling gives you enough information to figure out how to pronounce a word you've never heard before. Not with english. My last wrong guess: the writer Malcolm Lowry (/lauri/ instead of /louri/). Danish, same problem.

I think names are always going to be a source of orthographic irregularity. Even if English were an orthographically perfect language—which of course it isn't—it would still have to be able to deal with people whose names derive from any other language.

goodells• 5 years ago

I don't know if it's necessarily the English language to blame here, but this reminds me of an experience I had while talking with one of the Chinese international students in college. He pronounced the first few syllables of the word "amazing" and "Amazon" the same as there aren't really any obvious pronunciation hints. It took a few minutes to sort out what he was actually trying to say and figure out where the confusion came from, even with the -ing suffix.

lionsdan• 5 years ago

I've known multiple people with the last name spelled Koch. One pronounced it "Coke", one "Cook", one "Cock", and one "Cahch".

stevekemp• 5 years ago

Dialects and accents really make this kind of difference very pronounced.

In Edinburgh, Scotland, there is "Cockburn Street". Which is pronounced co-burn. Other good examples trip up tourists, such as Buccleuch Street which is pronounced "Buck-Loo".

Jap2-0• 5 years ago

I also knew a Kock who pronounced it "Cuck", just to add to the list of pronunciations.

zabzonk3• 5 years ago

The BBC used to (maybe still does) have a Pronunciation Unit which dictated how proper names must be spoken on TV and radio. They were always getting things wrong. My family's bete noir was the pronunciation of "Sowerby Bridge", the small town in West Yorkshire where my dad's parents lived.

Everyone for about 50 miles around: "Sorbey Bridge"

BBC: "Sourby Bridge"

My dad used to get quite irate about this.

scubbo• 5 years ago

As someone who is clearly interested in words, I hope you will take this comment in the "let's share some interesting knowledge!" sense in which it is intended, rather than a nit-picky correction...

It's actually "bête noir" - which is interesting because, commonly, ê signifies a replacement/contraction of the "es" sound. So the original phrase would have been "beste noir", which makes it easier to see the English meaning of "black beast" - an evocative phrase!

Someone• 5 years ago

I would guess the BBC would have/will argue(d) that the locals speak with an accent, and that their way to say it is received pronunciation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation)

bradrn• 5 years ago

EDIT: Looks like the title’s been changed — it was previously ‘Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable?’.

Put simply, the title question can be answered as follows: 500 years of sound change, plus analogy, plus borrowing from other languages, plus a complete lack of standardisation.

Actually, all of these points are interesting, so let me elaborate:

• English spelling was ‘standardised’ (for lack of a better word) roughly ~500 years ago. Since that time, English pronunciation has changed considerably. Most prominently, the Great Vowel Shift [0] messed up the long vowels. To take just two examples, ⟨ee⟩ and ⟨oo⟩ used to be the same sounds as ⟨e⟩ and ⟨o⟩, just pronounced longer; however they now sound more like long versions of ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩. The old sound /x/ has disappeared, leaving silent ⟨gh⟩s everywhere. And the process continues today: in my dialect, final /l/ has vocalised, meaning words like ‘bottle’ should really be spelt like ⟨bottoo⟩. Even worse, some sound changes were sporadic (i.e. random): IIRC there was a sporadic change from /ɒ/ to /ʌ/ in some words, which is why ⟨won⟩ and ⟨dot⟩ have different vowels.

• At some times people liked to mess up the spelling of words to make them more similar to ‘related’ words — even when, on closer examination, there turns out to be no relation at all. Thus ⟨iland⟩ → ⟨island⟩ (by analogy with ⟨isle⟩); ⟨dout⟩ → ⟨doubt⟩ (by analogy with Latin ⟨dubitare⟩).

• Of course, a word borrowed from another language will obey different spelling rules. This is especially the case if it’s passed through another language on its way: e.g. ⟨rhino⟩ and ⟨archaeology⟩. (Ancient Greek distinguished ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨rh⟩ from ⟨c⟩ and ⟨r⟩; all four had separate letters, but Latin borrowed the former as digraphs.)

• For some reason, English spelling has proved very resistant to both standardisation and reform. The most successful attempt so far has been Websters’; American English adopted it partially, while British English did not, which of course just added to the confusion. (XKCD 927 is relevant here.) This may be contrasted to languages like Spanish, the more phonemic spelling of which is standardised and updated by the Real Academia Española.

Of course, it should be noted that English is not alone in its spelling. Irish spelling, for instance, is something I find practically impenetrable. French and Tibetan spelling systems are somewhat more regular, but both suffer from being formulated ~1000 years ago. (e.g. the well-known Tibetan name ‘Tashi’ is spelled བཀྲ་ཤིས་, in Roman letters ⟨bkra-shisl⟩, which is indeed how it would have been pronounced in the 9th century.) As always, Japanese is in a league of its own. But of the alphabetic systems, English is probably the worst.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

fortyseven• 5 years ago

The "blogger from 1990" huh?

gumby2• 5 years ago

A lot of the complaint about English spelling comes from a theory that the written form must be phonetic. This is reflected by the mistake of teaching American kids "phonics": giving them a bunch of post facto rules and then immediately telling them that there are innumerable exceptions to said rules.

As the article points out, a lot of the spelling reflects meaning (etymology) which is more useful when reading than the sound (unless, I suppose, you're reading out loud). The loose phonetic linkage is handy, but you end up simply learning a bunch of words, which is no different from learning Hanzi.

icegreentea22• 5 years ago

I would refine your statement about phonics as the mistake is HOW we teach phonics, not that we use phonics in itself.

Phonics at it root is about decomposing a written word into its sub-units, and then applying rules to build back up to the whole word sound. The alternative to phonics (as unreliable as it is) is basically rote memorization (granted that English requires significant rote memorization anyways).

Here's an article (it was previously on HN I think) that talks about the whole word vs phonics "debate" https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...

I found it really interesting.

canjobear2• 5 years ago

It's true that the phonetic linkage in English is loose, but it still requires massively less memorization than Hanzi.

gumby2• 5 years ago

Definitely!

But also, apart from tiny nouns (cat, dog) when I was learning words as a kid (not just reading, but speaking) I was often told what its pieces were (not just obvious ones like "skyscraper", but "entrance? We enter through it."). Any other way just seems hard.

icegreentea22• 5 years ago

The article argues that English spelling inconsistencies were heavily driven by the printing press appearing in a period of overall spelling turmoil in English, due to the displacement of written English from ~1066 to 1300s.

As (basically) a native english speaker, does anyone know of how this works analogously in other European languages?

How consistent was French or German spelling around 1450?

canjobear2• 5 years ago

The article's argument doesn't seem right. French and German had comparable spelling consistency within dialects before printing, although they had much more divergent dialects than English. The difference between them and English is that English went through a massive series of sound changes after the orthography was set, whereas German didn't. French did, but the sound changes were mostly deletions, leaving a relatively regular spelling.

Typos, tricks and misprints

Related Stories