English orthography

The orthography (or spelling) of contemporary English allows for a lot of variation in how each sound is represented. The vowel sound represented by /i/ is written in various ways, as shown in the first two columns on the left below, and the consonant sound represented by /ʃ/ has various spellings, as in the other two columns.

Notice how often in these two lists the single phoneme is actually represented by more than one letter. Part of the reason for this is that the English language is full of words borrowed, often with their spelling, from other languages, as in “ph” for /f/ in the Greek borrowings alphabet and orthography. Notice again the use of two letters in combination for a single sound. A combination of two letters consistently used for a single sound, as in “ph” /f/ and “sh” /ʃ/ is called a digraph.

The English writing system is alphabetic in a very loose sense. Some reasons for this irregular correspondence between sound and symbolic representation may be found in a number of historical influences on the form of written English. The spelling of written English was largely fixed in the form that was used when printing was introduced into fifteenth-century England. At that time, there were a number of conventions regarding the written representation of words that had been derived from forms used in writing other languages, notably Latin and French. For example, “qu” replaced older English “cw” in words like queen. Moreover, many of the early printers were native Dutch speakers and could not make consistently accurate decisions about English pronunciations, hence the “h” in ghost.

Perhaps more important is the fact that, since the fifteenth century, the pronunciation of spoken English has undergone substantial changes. For example, although we no longer pronounce the initial “k” sound or the internal “gh” sound, we still include letters indicating the older pronunciation in our contemporary spelling of the word knight. These are sometimes called “silent letters.” They also violate the one-sound-one-symbol principle, but not with as much effect as the “silent” final -e of so many English words. Not only do we have to learn that this letter is not pronounced, we also have to know the patterns of influence it has on the preceding vowel, as in the different pronunciations of “a” in the pair hat/hate and “o” in not/note

If we then add in the fact that a large number of older written English words were actually “recreated” by sixteenth-century spelling reformers to bring their written forms more into line with what were supposed, sometimes erroneously, to be their Latin origins (e.g. dette became debt, doute became doubt, iland became island), then the sources of the mismatch between written and spoken forms begin to become clear. Even when the revolutionary American spelling reformer Noah Webster was successful (in the USA) in revising a form such as British English honour, he only managed to go as far as honor (and not onor). His proposed revisions of bred (for bread), giv (for give) and laf (for laugh) were in line with the alphabetic principle, and are often the preferred forms of young children learning to write English, but they have obviously not found their way into everyday printed English.