Even in 14th-century England at the time of Geoffrey Chaucer there were various approaches to spelling English the way people could be heard talking. The printer, writer and merchant William Caxton, in the following century, had to find the best way to represent in printing the sound of English the way he heard it.
The Origins of Spelling
These are the origins of spelling as far as English is concerned. From the Romans, most Europeans had already received the alphabet as one of the blessings of being made part of the Roman Empire. That's what we are basically still using today: the Latin alphabet; and as we already briefly mentioned when we talked about Greek loan words or the difference in the use of letters to represent sound.
The English – a more generic term than Anglo-Saxon – didn't have to re-invent the building blocks used for writing. The Romans hadn't done so either. In fact, writing may have been invented independently just a very few times throughout the history of humanity; it then spread by copying the idea, or the concept, rather than the exact signs that were being used. The Romans, therefore, had adapted the Etruscan alphabet to suit their needs. The Etruscans, on their part, speaking a language not related to Latin and Greek, had previously adapted the Greek alphabet.
And the Greeks before them had adapted the Hebrew invention of representing sound, rather than meaning; the speakers of Hebrew had done so by using a very small subset of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. While in Egypt, the Israelites are said to have been inspired by the use of symbols for writing and are thus likely to have been the first to represent the sounds of their language – rather than using shapes, or pictures, to represent things or meanings – by selecting and simplifying just a few dozen of the Egyptian pictographs. This was the beginning of sound versus content, phonetics versus imagery.
A Starting Point
The starting point for using signs for writing in England, as on the European Continent, had thus made things just a little easier. But still: How should one use those cleverly designed letters to represent the English language? The various monasteries around the country quickly got up to the challenge, but English was a collection of dialects – which is not an unusual state of affairs.
The Greek city states before them also had various dialects. The Athenian one in the end prevailed, as the London dialect did in the United Kingdom for business, politics and education. Even though dialects kept and keep on existing, they are often unrecorded, or writing them is simply neglected. But the dialects are not just still around, across the various regions of England and beyond, they left their mark on modern English spelling.
The difficulties a Chinese learner of English once expressed as "it's so inconsistent" can be seen in the by now proverbial sample pronunciations of the ough combination of letters showing up in through, trough, though, plough etc., resulting in at least seven different pronunciations of the same sequence of letters in modern English.
Though business is pronounced bizness or even bizniz at times, the English-speaking world has by and large learnt to live with this phenomenon much like the Chinese-speaking world has been living with their various dialects. Where China, however, uses a pictographic system to avoid a spelling collision between Mandarin and many other dialects, the English-speaking world has accepted a spelling system that does not necessarily represent the sound.
English and its Kin again
In Germany, where the spelling system more closely represents the sound of the language standard taught at school and university level, and is used for the media and administration, people still easily live with dialects. Depending on the difference between the local dialects and the national language standard, they are more or less bilingual.
For the English-speaking world, such an approach would mean the spelling system would have to be adapted to the London dialect, not to mention that within the huge city of London there are already differences, so one might have to more closely specify the Queen's English, for instance. And that would take place before the background that even at England's universities nowadays the pressure to speak this one particular version has largely disappeared, and dialects can now be heard liberally, while there is no doubt about which way assignments and theses have to be written.
But English has become an international language, and there are already differences in spelling; the American plow for plough and thru for through just being a few easy examples. And we are not talking about new Englishes such as Singlish or Indian English. We are merely, for the sake of simplicity, reducing the trouble of forging a new orthography by looking at the UK, the USA, Canada and Australia. We might add New Zealand and South Africa and then hope not to put our foot in it by making another nation feel neglected.
Is Modern English Spelling a Nightmare?
This is difficult to answer for someone who is used to it. It may be much like a Mandarin speaker being used to speaking Mandarin Chinese, not understanding many of the regional dialects, but happily reading a newspaper from another province since it is written in the Chinese system of pictographs which is very much like a language in its own right – a written language.
So, can we just ignore the trouble learners of English have – and at times the native speakers, too – and stick with the current spelling system that may at times be perceived as inconsistent, and basically claim that it is impossible taken there are so many local and regional dialects followed by the Englishes of the world?
We may not be able to come to a conclusion, but we may keep thinking about the matter when we compare the Queen's English with Tok Pisin, where the spelling is a much stronger indicator of the pronunciation.
Thomas Wimmer - Having studied Linguistics, French, German, Latin, Classical Greek and Old English, and finding no end to exploring and learning about ...
