The answer to the weirdness of English has to do with the timing of technology. English wasn’t the only language to pick the pockets of others for useful words.

True, other languages did have official academies and other government attempts at standardisation – but those interventions have largely only ever succeeded at implementing minor changes to existing systems in very specific areas. Various conquests installed a ruling-class language in control of a population that spoke a different language: there was the Nordic conquest of Normandy in the 10th century (where they now write French with a pretty regular system) the Ottoman Turkish rule over Hungary in the 16th and 17th centuries (which now has very consistent spelling rules for Hungarian) Moorish rule in Spain in the 8th to 15th centuries (which also has very consistent spelling). The remnants of the Roman Empire comprised Germanic, Celtic and Slavic communities spread over a huge area. Courtesy the Trustees of the British Librayīut just how does spelling factor into all this? It wasn’t as if the rest of Europe didn’t also contend with a mix of tribes and languages. Amongst other directives, children are told Bulle not as a bene were in thi throote (Don’t burp as if you had a bean in your throat) and Pyke notte thyne errys nothyr thy nostrellys’(Don’t pick your ears or nose).

The opening pages of The Lytille Childrenes Lytil Boke, an instructional book of table manners dating from around 1480 and written in Middle English. As the blogger James Nicoll put it in 1990, English ‘pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary’. English travelled and wandered and haphazardly tied pieces together. No language Academy was established, no authority for oversight or intervention in the direction of the written form. The contact with the Continent and the balance among Germanic, Romance and Celtic cultural forces. The moving and mixing of populations, the growth of London and the merchant class in the 13th and 14th centuries. So why did English end up with a far more inconsistent orthography than any other? The basic outline of the messy history of English is widely known: the Anglo-Saxon tribes bringing Old English in the 5th century, the Viking invasions beginning in the 8th century adding Old Norse to the mix, followed by the Norman Conquest of the 11th century and the French linguistic takeover. The most comprehensive description of its spelling – the Dictionary of the British English Spelling System by Greg Brooks (2015) – runs to more than 450 pages as it enumerates all the ways particular sounds can be represented by letters or combinations of letters, and all the ways particular letters or letter combinations can be read out as sounds.įrom the early Middle Ages, various European languages adopted and adapted the Latin alphabet. French has plenty of rules, and exceptions to those rules, but they can all be listed on a reasonable number of pages.Įnglish is in a different league of complexity. There are lots of silent letters, but they’re in predictable places. Even French, notorious for the spelling challenges it presents learners, is consistent enough to meet the bar. Your pronunciation might be terrible, and the pace, stress and rhythm would be completely off, and no one would mistake you for a native speaker – but you could do it. You can spend an afternoon familiarising yourself with the pronunciation rules of Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Polish and many others, and credibly read out a text in that language, even if you don’t understand it. Part of the problem is that English spelling looks deceptively similar to other languages that use the same alphabet but in a much more consistent way. Yet not only do most people raised with English learn to read and write it millions of people who weren’t raised with English learn to use it too, to a very high level of accuracy.Īdmittedly, for a non-native speaker, such mastery usually involves a great deal of confusion and frustration. The English spelling system, if you can even call it a system, is full of this kind of thing. Those two options cover most of it – except for a handful of cases, where it’s ‘ay’ ( break, steak, great). The ea vowel is usually pronounced ‘ee’ ( weak, please, seal, beam) but can also be ‘eh’ ( bread, head, wealth, feather). When you see an ough, you might need to read it out as ‘aw’ (thought), ‘ow’ (drought), ‘uff’ (tough), ‘off’ (cough), ‘oo’ (through), or ‘oh’ (though).

Spelling alphabet letters in english