Why does English spelling make no sense?
Whether you've been writing English for a year or a lifetime, I think we can all agree that English spelling is inconsistent (to say the least).
There was a time before English was standardized. A time when no grammar books or dictionaries existed. And yet scribes still wrote. Without a standard, they wrote the way that they heard the words in their own dialect.
So, a given word could take on numerous spellings. There were even great inconsistencies in the ways one author would spell the same words, sometimes favoring one spelling over another.
But there was a new invention in the 1400s. An invention that would be a lot easier to use if there was an agreed spelling of words. That invention was the printing press.
In this newsletter, we’re going to explore how the printing press affected English to answer the question of why English spelling is so idiosyncratic.
The Time Before the Printing Press
The English language changed drastically in the Middle Ages. Last newsletter talked about how much Latin flooded the English language during that time period. What I didn’t tell you is that Latin and Greek continued flooding the English language in the Renaissance.
There were thousands of new words being used, mainly in certain domains, like law, medicine, science. But over time, Latin words spread beyond those domains, and writers had more options to express themselves; they could choose to use older English words or newer Latin words.
With new words came new pronunciations and new spellings. (If you take this as a general rule, and you realize that there was plenty of language contact between English and other languages before Latin and after Latin, you realize that a huge reason for English’s inconsistent spelling is how many words English has taken from other languages.)
The Great Vowel Shift
A vowel shift is when one sound changes in a language and it cause subsequent sounds to change in a similar way. The biggest example of this is called the Great Vowel Shift, which completely changed the pronunciation of long vowels in English. It’s the reason why Old English looks and sounds so different from Modern English.
The Great Vowel shift took 200 years (between the 15th and 18th century) to complete. And if you were a speaker at the time, you weren’t consciously changing the way you pronounced sounds. Rather, the sound changes started in some parts of the country and spread. Over hundreds of years, such a drastic change happened that we retroactively call it The Great Vowel Shift.
So, to back-track a little, many Old English words were written based on their pronunciation. For example, book and moon were written with double vowels to signify that they were long vowels. After The Great Vowel Shift, though, the pronunciation of words changed. The spelling; however, did not change.
While all this was happening, in 1476, William Caxton brought the printing press to England.
The Printing Press
The printing press forever changed the English language. Before the printing press, writers would use their own dialect (or even idiolect). After the printing press, English had a standard.
To quote David Crystal:
A standard can evolve without printing; but printing makes it spread more rapidly and widely. And once the standard is in the hands of the printers, they do not let it go. (p. 262)
It didn’t happen overnight. It took 100 years for the printing press to start using a standard.
At first, the printing press had different editors to set and fix the type. But they all used different conventions, so the printing of the same edition of a book could have different spellings depending on which editor worked on it.
One of my favorite tidbits from this section of The Stories of English is that there were many bilingual editors at the printing press, many were also Dutch speakers. And some English words changed their spelling because of them. For example, ghost used to be written in Old English as gast, but due to the Dutch editors who spelled it more similarly to the Dutch version, the word was printed as ghost, the spelling we still use today.
Put differently, this “spelling mistake” was reprinted so many times it became the recognized spelling of the word.
The Reformers
During this time, there were people who wanted to reform the spelling of English to make it make sense. Most reforms were unsuccessful, but there were slight changes, like swapping out the letters ʒ for g and θ and þ for th. They also expanded the number of letters in the alphabet by differentiating j and i and u and v.
Other than that, the sound-to-letter matching didn’t improve. Eventually, certain spellings were agreed upon and were spread through books, especially the King James Bible, which was widely read both at home and at church. Having literature and religious texts which used consistent spellings spread these spellings to the masses.
Conclusion
English has more vowel sounds than it has vowel letters. That is a fundamental reason why English spelling has always been inconsistent and difficult. But for a long time, words were spelled how they were pronounced. That’s why words like knight and knee have what we consider today to be a silent k; at the time, they were pronounced.
In other words, Old English was a phonetic language, like Spanish.
But if you add an influx of words that come from different languages, which each have their own sounds and pronunciations, and The Great Vowel Shift, you end up with a language with a rather inconsistent spelling system. And that spelling system spread through the printing and reading of books to end up on this page today.
Keep Reading
I mainly used information from the book The Stories of English by David Crystal. I also found this article on the subject that I found interesting.