1
Spelling
English spelling is easy to make fun of – and not easy to get right. It certainly defies logic. We spell ‘harass’ with one ‘r’ and ‘embarrass’ with two; the noun ‘dependant’ has an ‘a’ in the last syllable while the adjective ‘dependent’ has an ‘e’. In British English we spell ‘licence’ and ‘practice’ with a ‘c’ when they’re nouns and with an ‘s’ when they’re verbs (‘she has a licence to practise’; ‘they licensed the practice’) – though we pronounce them in exactly the same way. In American English, on the other hand, ‘license’ with an ‘s’ does for both noun and verb – and so does ‘practice’ with a ‘c’. Confused?
The numerals ‘four’ and ‘fourteen’ are followed by ‘forty’ – suddenly the ‘u’ has disappeared although the pronunciation of ‘four’ and ‘for’ by most people is the same. ‘Mantelpiece’, the shelf covering the fire, shows its Latin origin (mantellum, cloak) more clearly than ‘mantle’, the word actually used to mean ‘cloak’. ‘Metal’ in its literal sense of iron or steel differs from ‘mettle’ meaning ‘courage’, as does ‘flower’, the general term for what plants produce, from ‘flour’, the particular ‘flower’ derived from wheat. And so on …
It’s claimed that there are more than 200 ways of spelling the 40-odd distinct sounds in English. For example, Bill Bryson (in Mother Tongue, 1990) says there are 14 ways of conveying the ‘sh’ sound, as in shoe, sugar, passion, ambitious, ocean, champagne; more than a dozen for ‘o’, as in go, beau, stow, sew, doe, though, escargot; and another dozen for ‘a’, as in hey, stay, make, maid, freight, great. Including proper nouns, the English word with the greatest number of variants is said to be air with 38, as in Aire, Ayr, heir, e’er, ere …
The primary explanation for this rich confusion lies in the history of English. Unlike French, say, or German, English is a mongrel language – an amalgam of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, Norman French and Latin, which went on to adopt and absorb words and idioms from all over the world. The Anglo-Saxon of the Germanic invaders of the fifth century AD evolved in various regional dialects and spellings and was strongly influenced by the next wave of invaders, the Vikings, who spoke a related but different language, Old Norse. Then in 1066 came the Norman Conquest.
Suddenly England was a bilingual country (or a trilingual one if you include church Latin). The ruling class of nobles and clerics spoke a northern dialect of French while the peasants talked Anglo-Saxon among themselves. Slowly the two languages came together and when the bilingual period was over, English had absorbed much French vocabulary, spelling and pronunciation. More than a third of the English words in a modern dictionary are said to come from French.
Because of its complex history, English spelling is a mixture of different influences: Roman missionaries writing down Old English for the first time; Norman French scribes with their own ideas (replacing cw by qu to produce queen – which looks like a French word but isn’t); and the growth of different dialects in different parts of the country. But the introduction of printing in the fifteenth century had the biggest impact of all. When William Caxton set up his printing house in London in 1476, he started publishing in the East Midlands dialect, used at court, in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and in London. This brought a degree of standardisation.
Gradually during the next century the idea of standard spelling became popular. There were radical reformers like John Hart, who wrote several books advocating substantial change to achieve consistency, and practical pedagogues like Richard Mulcaster, a headmaster who wrote his own book, the Elementarie (1582), arguing that piecemeal reform was a more prudent course of action – things had gone too far for radical change. Mulcaster created an alphabetical list of over 8,500 words with recommended spellings, based on what he saw people using in their handwritten texts.
Early in the eighteenth century there was a proposal to establish an English academy on the lines of the Académie Française, founded in 1635, to police the language generally and lay down standards for spelling. Although it was supported by the Royal Society, by eminent writers like Dryden, Evelyn and Swift – and even by the government in 1712 – nothing happened. Several dictionaries were published in this period, notably one by Nathaniel Bailey (1721), but it was Samuel Johnson’s magisterial Dictionary of the English Language (1755) that established a standard English spelling, much of which is in use today.
Johnson is sometimes described as ‘creating’ a standard spelling – but in his preface he explicitly rules this out: ‘Even in words of which the derivation is apparent, I have been often obliged to sacrifice uniformity to custom.’ As Philip Howard noted (in The State of the Language, 1984): ‘Johnson followed the spelling generally adopted by the printers, establishing it in private use as the standard of literate English writers and spellers.’
Johnson’s American equivalent, Noah Webster (1758–1843), was also credited with more than he tried to achieve. He didn’t set out to change American but to systematise it and establish it as of equal status to English. If sales are any guide, he certainly succeeded: his American Spelling Book (1788) was so popular it had sold 60 million copies by 1890.
The curious thi...
