What’s the point of spelling?
By James Harbeck
English spelling is, obviously, a mess. We’ve taken words from just about every place and time you can think of. But so have some other, less messy, languages! An extra factor in English is that we can’t agree on what the point of spelling is. I don’t mean “Why spell at all?” I mean “What purpose does spelling serve?” There are two main lines of thought.
One line is that spelling should show where the word came from. That has long been our principle when stealing words from other languages, but it also has a historical aspect. We have some words that show their pedigree through inertia: they’ve been handed down from older versions of English and their spelling has stayed intact while the pronunciation has changed. That’s why you can hear your daughter’s laughter as she puts her head on your heart.
Others show their pedigree through deliberate interference: some people noticed a debt to Latin and decided that the spelling should once again manifest it. For example, since peple and det traced to populus and debitum, they got snobby little o and b stuffed in. Sometimes the pronunciation changed to follow – it’s the snobs’ fault that we don’t say it’s their faut.
Which leads us to the other line: that spelling should match how the word is said. This might seem obvious, but it’s obviously not what we actually do much of the time. And anyway, if the spelling is to match the pronunciation, what are the rules it should follow? English pronunciation has changed a lot over the centuries, and the changes have ranged from as poetic as Kahlil Gibran to as brutal as Genghis Khan.
Our alphabet has changed, too, partly because we bought movable type sets from Europe. For example, we lost the character ȝ, which sounded similar to g but looked more like z; that’s how the name Menȝies became sometimes Menzies and sometimes Mingus. And those type sets came with typesetters — Dutch typesetters, for example, decided that gost needed an h after the g.
But starting even before that, English scribes thought French rules were better (since we were getting so many words from French anyway); cwen became queen and ys and mys became ice and mice. We’re still only gradually moving away from the French influence, which is why we write Genghis and Gibran rather than Jingiz and Jibran.
So while a language with clear, consistent spelling can re-spell words (Norwegians took chauffeur and made it sjåfør), in English it’s just easier to leave them as we got them, or — if transliterating from a language not written with the Latin alphabet — to follow an international phonetic style (from which we learn that if it looks like English spelling, it’s probably wrong). And when we make up new words? Most of the time, we just mix and match familiar chunks in familiar ways, as when you buy a Yorkie-poo with cryptocurrency for Galentine’s Day. What’s the point of spelling out the sounds?
James Harbeck is an experienced professional editor, a linguist, a public speaker, the author of many popular articles on language on sites such as TheWeek.com, BBC.com, Sesquiotica.wordpress.com, and StrongLang.wordpress.com, and the winner of the 2017 ACES spelling bee. Find out more about him at jamesharbeck.com.
James will also be presenting a session on “Why is English spelling so wierd?” at the 2018 ACES national conference in Chicago. If you’re attending, you won’t want to miss it!
Photo by Jelleke Vanooteghem on Unsplash
