English Spelling is A ‘Pseudo-historical and Anti-educational Abomination’ ❤️ Otto Jespersen ❤️

To Hell with Spell!? 😊

#newspaperinlearning

Seriously? Is English Spelling a ‘pseudo-historical and anti-educational abomination’?

This article in Today’s The New Indian Express, Chennai Edition, was short yet witty and highly insightful as well!

It’s about a drawing teacher in Himachal Pradesh who got suspended for their atrocious spelling while writing out a cheque. The words were called a ‘disaster’!

Many have this tendency to blame it on the native language interference of ‘writing what we hear!’, which connotes a connect between the sound and the letter, or the phoneme and the grapheme.

However, the main culprit is not the Mother-Tongue Interference!

It’s English orthography that’s to blame! [Cambridge English Dictionary defines Orthography as the accepted (right) way of spelling and writing words].

English orthography has always been ‘notorious’ for its non-phonetic spelling system, which poses a significant challenge for all non-native speakers.

There’s this amazing book on how our English spelling has evolved over the years. It’s written by  Christopher Upward and George Davidson and it’s titled, The History of English Spelling. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

In fact, Christopher Upward is quite famous for advocating a significant spelling reform system, particularly known for designing Cut Spelling (CS), a system of English-language spelling reform.

Coming back –

The History of English Spelling by Christopher Upward and George Davidson is unique because it presents a highly detailed, letter-by-letter analysis of the historical development of the English spelling system over the ages. It has a repertoire of information relating to English spelling that’s quite rare to find elsewhere.

Upward gives a very interesting reason for the difficulty that we face with English spelling. He attributes it to the polysystemic view of English spelling. He argues that, English spelling combines the spelling systems of various contributing languages (Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, French, Latin, and Greek) through the Roman alphabet, one reason it’s quite complex as we ‘experience’ it today.

Sample this -

The g in ghost (ME gost < OE gast) was introduced by Flemish printers on the basis of Flemish spelling (gheest); the spelling of ghastly is influenced by ghost. Aghast (< agast ‘to frighten’) first appears in Middle Scots (the ME dialect of lowland Scotland) in the early 15th century and in English in the early 16th century.

Says Upward -

Certainly, no one who reads any passage of modern English can fail to notice the frequent mismatch between the sounds of English and the letters used to record them, as, for example, in the well-known set of -OUGH words cough, rough, though, through, thorough, plough, or in the case of -OW as in now, know, knowledge.

Given that in many languages there is a clear and predictable relationship between speech-sounds and the written characters that represent them, one might well ask why this is not the case with English. The answer lies in the history of the English language, and the purpose of this book is to trace that history in so far as it pertains to the development of modern English spelling and its relationship to modern English pronunciation.

I found the introduction to the book quite humorous and engaging as well. So here goes –

English has frequently been criticized for the complexity of its spelling rules and for a lack of system and consistency in the relationship between the sounds of the spoken language and the symbols of the written language.

The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, for example, refers to English spelling as a ‘pseudo-historical and anti-educational abomination’; an American linguist, Mario Pei, has described it as ‘the world’s most awesome mess’ and ‘the soul and essence of anarchy’;

Mont Follick, a former professor of English who as a British Member of Parliament twice, in 1949 and again in 1952, introduced bills into Parliament advocating the simplification of English spelling, said of our present-day spelling that it is ‘a chaotic concoction of oddities without order or cohesion’; and more recently the Austrian linguist Mario Wandruszka pronounced it to be ‘an insult to human intelligence’.

Only slightly gentler in its reproach is Professor Ernest Weekley’s opinion that the spelling of English is, in its relationship to the spoken language, ‘quite crazy’.

The symbols used in spelling modern English are the 26 letters of the Roman or Latin alphabet as it is currently established for English. (When speaking about English, we can refer to this particular set of letters as the English alphabet, in order to distinguish it from the different sets of Roman letters used in writing other languages, such as the German alphabet or the Spanish alphabet.) As we will see, however, the English alphabet did not always consist of 26 letters.

The sound-to-symbol/symbol-to-sound simplicity of that original system, however, was undermined by subsequent events, such as the Norman Conquest itself, after which French-speaking scribes applied some of their own spelling rules to English.

The introduction of printing from continental Europe (with Flemish printers introducing Flemish spellings for English speech-sounds, and by the desire of many scholars in the 16th century to add into English words letters reflecting the Latin and Greek words from which the English words were derived!

In the second half of the 18th century Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) became widely used as a source of reference by the literate section of the population and hence contributed to the general acceptance of a standard, and by the late 19th century there was a fair degree of unanimity among printers, dictionaries and private writers as to how most English words should be spelt.

[To be continued… Part II]