Spelling and Pronunciation

Irregularity of English Spelling

We saw that the ideal alphabetic system should have a one-to-one relationship between the graphemes and the phonemes of a language. In other words, the ideal writing system should be phonemic in representation. This ideal one-to-one relationship is violated very frequently in English; the same phoneme can be represented by different letters (e.g. /i/ each, either, scene) the same letter may represent different phonemes (e.g. a in gate, any, father, above), and phonemes may be represented by a combination of letters (e.g. th for /θ/ or /ð/ as in thin and this respectively, gh for /f/ as in enough).

The reasons for such discrepancies, embedded in the history of English, are many-fold. To start with, Christian missionaries used a 23-letter alphabet for the 35 or so phonemes of Old English, which forced the deviation from a one-to-one principle.

After the Norman Conquest of England in the eleventh century, French scribes introduced several new spelling conventions. Accordingly, the following changes occurred: Old English cw was replaced by qu (e.g. quick), h was replaced by gh (e.g. might), c was replaced by ch (e.g. church), u was replaced by ou (e.g. house). Thus, by the beginning of the fifteenth century, the spelling of English had become a mixture of Old English and the changes made by French scribes.

Some of the discrepancies were due to changes in pronunciation that took place after the spelling system was established. For example, /l/ before a /d/ in ‘modal verbs’ such as would, could, and should, which was pronounced, but then disappeared from the pronunciation, is retained in other words (e.g. cold, hold). Velar stops, /k, g/, disappeared from the pronunciation before a nasal in syllable-initial position (e.g. knee, knife, gnat, gnaw); however, they are retained if the two sounds are in different syllables (e.g. acne [æk.ni], agnostic [æg.nɑ.stɪk]). Also noteworthy is the disappearance of /l/ before /f/, /k/, /m/ when simultaneously preceded by a standing for a low vowel /æ, ɑ, ɔ/: a __ /f/ (e.g. calf, half), but not in self; a __ /k/ (e.g. walk, talk), but not in silk, elk; a __ /m/ (e.g. calm, almond), but not in film, helm. Also, the deletion of final [ə] from Old English (OE) to Middle English (ME) gave us the so-called ‘silent e’, as in nose, name, and so on.

The fricative system underwent significant changes; OE had only voiceless fricative phonemes /f, θ, s/ (and /x/, which was lost from OE to ME). The sounds [v, ð, z], which appeared as allophones of the voiceless ones, became phonemic in ME. The sound /ʒ/ arose in the seventeenth century from the palatalization of the [zj] cluster (e.g. vision [vɪzjən] → [vɪʒən]). Mention also should be made of [ŋ], which was an allophone of /n/ before velars. Later in the sixteenth century /g/ was dropped after [ŋ] in certain positions and gave rise to the phonemic contrast between /n/ and /ŋ/ (e.g. sin [sɪn] sing [sɪŋ]).

The Great Vowel Shift, which took place from the Middle English period through the eighteenth century, introduced a very significant reorganization of the vowel system by means of a series of modifications. Briefly stated, earlier long vowels were raised (e.g., geese [gε:s] → [gis]), and vowels already produced with high tongue position became diphthongs (e.g. tide [tid] → [taɪd], loud [lud] →[laʊd]). Since these changes occurred after the introduction of printing, no corresponding shift in spelling was made. Also, the fact that many printers came from the continent (for example, Dutch printers introduced the Dutch spelling of word-initial /g/ as gh, as in ghost), as well as there being a lack of standardization (there was no spelling authority), contributed to the problem.

Borrowings from French (e.g. bizarre, bouquet, beige, debris), Italian (e.g. motto, mezzanine, stucco, grotto), Spanish (e.g. junta, galleon, marijuana), German (e.g. schnapps, Gestalt, poltergeist), Portuguese (e.g. macaque, verandah), Russian (e.g. czar, intelligentsia), and Hungarian (e.g. goulash, czardas) retained their original spelling and created more irregularities. Not all borrowed items, however, came with their original spelling. In some cases, they were introduced with ‘transliteration’ (e.g. items from Greek such as pneumonia and mnemonic). Since these violate English phonotactic rules, they are pronounced without the first consonant.

In some cases, problems arose because of the zealotry of some academics in making the spelling reflect Latin and Greek etymology. For example, the words debt and doubt came to English from French dette and doute, respectively, without a b. The so-called ‘silent b’ was inserted to make the words resemble the original Latin debitum and dubitare, respectively.

Finally, for some words, confusion resulted because of sheer carelessness. For example, French coronelle, from which English colonel is derived, is adapted from Italian colonello. When the word entered the English vocabulary in the sixteenth century, it was spelled with an r. The confusion was resolved by the combination of Italian spelling and French pronunciation.