How would you pronounce this word?
Well, you could argue that it’s actually
Fish.
The argument doesn’t really hold up, of course.
“gh” only sounds like /f/ if it comes at the end of a word.
And “ti” only sounds like /sh/ in certain instances.
But it just goes to show how strange English spelling can be.
If you’ve only heard a word and had to guess how to spell it, you’d be struggling,
and vice versa.
Why is this "steak", while this is "streak"?
What about "done", "gone" and "tone"?
That’s why we get things like this.
"E, R, Y..."
"...G, A, I..."
"...Q, U, E. Pendeloque."
Studying for these bees takes hours of repetition, and a good understanding of the etymology.
"Aiguillette. Does this come from French?"
"It's from a Latin-derived French word."
By looking at the history of written and spoken English, we can begin to understand
why the spelling can sometimes seem so illogical.
Basically, writing systems are a secondary form of language - they reflect speech.
And while spoken English has changed radically over the past millennium, English spelling
was pretty much standardised by the mid-18th century.
Which means the way we spell today, reflects how English was spoken hundreds of years ago.
Right from the beginning, the alphabet itself hasn’t been very stable, and we’ve never
really had enough letters for all the sounds we make.
About a thousand years ago, the Anglo-Saxons moved from a runic alphabet to a Latin alphabet,
and even then there weren’t enough letters for all the sounds.
Over time letters have come and gone, but we now have even more sounds in Modern English
- about 44 distinct sounds.
“The problem is, as one linguist once described, English as being like a gigantic linguistic
vacuum cleaner.
We kind of suck up words from so many languages and that indeed has introduced a lot of inconsistency.”
English has a Germanic core, but also has French, Greek and Latin origins.
And these all come with different spelling systems.
Old English is the earliest form of English, and was spoken for hundreds of years.
It’s very different from the English we speak today.
After the Norman conquest of 1066, a lot of French words were introduced into the language,
keeping their French spellings but adopting English pronunciations.
Not only that, but the Norman scribes also made changes to existing words because they
preferred French spelling.
This was a big change for the language, but the biggest changes came during a period called
the Great Vowel Shift.
It was essentially a change in pronunciation - a general raising of all long vowels, which
happened over the course of a few hundred years.
“So when one vowel changes for whatever reason, shifts its position, is pronounced
differently, this will trigger a kind of chain reaction change.”
For example, the Middle English poet Geoffrey Chaucer rhymed blood with wood.
Both these words were pronounced the same at the time.
Later on in Shakespeare’s time, the Early Modern English period, these words still rhymed,
but sounded more like
Over time, "blood" and "wood" have again shifted their pronunciations.
But some words, like "food" and "boot", still carry that "oo" sound.
And early on during this pronunciation shift, spellings weren’t set in stone yet.
There were several different ways to spell a word, because there wasn’t any sort of
standard or regulation.
“Basically in early English you could kind of spell as you wanted.
There was no right way to spell.”
And people would spell their names in different ways as well.
But that all changed thanks to this thing.
The printing press was introduced to England in 1476 by William Caxton, around the early
stages of the Great Vowel Shift.
And so books began being published using popular spellings that had already begun to be established.
But that doesn’t mean spelling was set in stone right away.
Printers still took advantage of the flexibility of spelling to justify lines on their pages.
“So for example they might add an E at the end of the word
to make that line a little longer.
And the fact that the Es had stopped being pronounced at the end of the word meant that,
well it didn't really matter whether it was there or not.
So it did take a long time for spelling to settle down.”
William Caxton and his Flemish typesetters also favoured Dutch spelling conventions,
and so they introduced the “h” in ghost.
And other changes were happening as well.
Consonants were disappearing in words like knife, and knight.
And words like “dette” and “doute” were being changed to match their etymology.
These respellings sometimes resulted in mistakes, or hypercorrections.
For example, the “b” in dumb used to be pronounced, and remained in the spelling as
the sound disappeared.
But then the b was added to words where it was never pronounced,
like “limb” and “crumb”.
Despite this, over time the printing press helped standardise English spelling.
The problem is that by the time the Great Vowel Shift ended, hundreds of books had already
been printed using a spelling system that reflected old pronunciation.
“If only printing had been developed at another time, or these changes happened
earlier, then there would have been a better representation or better relationship between
sound and letter.”
And after that in the Renaissance period, new words kept entering the language, especially
as a huge number of classical works were being translated into English, but with no equivalent
English word in existence.
Some words were borrowed as they were, and some were slightly altered.
Along with the new words we still use today, there were also a lot of so-called “inkhorn”
words that were introduced that didn’t quite make the cut.
But there was no real reason why some words remained and others didn’t.
Which makes it all the more confusing.
By the 1700s, an increasing number of scholars believed English needed
more consistent spelling that matched pronunciation.
Noah Webster — you might recognise his name — is often credited with being a major force
in changing American spelling, through his works.
After the American Revolution, he believed strongly in developing
cultural independence for the US.
This included a distinctive “American” language with spelling changes he believed
improved the spelling.
He’s mainly the one to thank for standardising spellings such as "color" and "traveler", and
the change from aluminium to aluminum.
These changes were accepted by the public, while some other changes,
such as “tung” and “wimmen”, were not.
Something that isn’t actually an Americanism, though, is the use of -ize.
In fact, Oxford Dictionaries recommends -ize.
One comes from Greek, and the other from French.
But now, we seem to be disregarding etymology completely.
So will any more spelling reforms take place in the near future?
Now that English is spoken around the world, any type of reform would likely be both very hard,
and very expensive.
But while historical influences enrich a language,
The “ye” in things like “Ye Olde Shoppe” shouldn’t actually
be pronounced as “ye” at all.
Originally, “the” was written with the letter thorn,
which is now gone from the English alphabet.
Over time, the writing of thorn looked more and more like the letter Y,
until it was hard to really tell the two apart.
So “ye” in this context should actually still be pronounced “the”.
Whether those shops are actually old though, well, you can be the judge of that.