History
English spelling
- History
- Spelling today
- Further reading
English spelling has long been a curse to most schoolchildren and to many adults. It is true that English is more difficult to spell than most of the languages which use a version of the Latin alphabet. A well-known illustration of a difficulty concerns the pronunciation of <gh>, as in tough, bought, ghastly. Some of the pronunciations are shown in Table 1.1. These pronunciations have led to the notorious suggestion that a potential misspelling of fish is ghoti. This has commonly been attributed to Bernard Shaw, but it is apparently nowhere to be found in his writings; the earliest confirmed use is in a letter to Leigh Hunt in 1855. The joke (for it must be taken as a joke, even though learners often take it seriously) depends on <gh> representing /f/ as in cough, enough and similar words (but this pronunciation never begins a word); on <ti> representing /ʃ/ in the ending <-tion> as in, for example, action, position (but this pronunciation never occurs at the very end of words); and on <o> representing /i/ as in the one word women. And it can be seen from Table 1.1 that the spelling of <gh> more generally is not as arbitrary as at first glance it appears. Before a vowel it is /ɡ/; otherwise, it is unpronounced, except in a few words where it is /f/. English spelling is not as irregular as that implied by ghoti or by <gh> generally. Nevertheless, English spelling is difficult.
Table 1.1 The spelling <gh>
| → /C/ | → /VC/ | Examples |
<gh> → /f/ | <ough> → /ɒf/ | cough, trough |
<ough> → /ʌf/ | tough, rough, enough |
<augh> → /f/ | laugh, draught |
<gh>→ /p/ | <ough> → /p/ | hiccough (but this has the alternative spelling hiccup) |
<gh> → zero | <ough> → /aʊ/ | bough, plough, drought |
<ough> → /əʊ/ | though, although, dough |
<ough> → /u/ | through |
<ough> → /ə/ | borough, thorough |
<ough> → /ɔ/ | bought, brought, fought, nought, ought, sought, thought, wrought |
<augh> → /ɔ/ | caught, daughter, taught |
<igh,eigh> → /aɪ/ | night, bright, high, right, slight, height, sleight |
<eigh> → /eɪ/ | eight, freight, neighbour, weight, sleigh |
<gh> → /ɡ/ | before a vowel | aghast, burgher, dinghy, ghastly, ghat, ghee, gherkin, ghetto, ghost, ghoul, sorghum, spaghetti, yoghourt |
Notes
1 The digraph <gh> was introduced in ME to replace OE <h> or <ᵹ> ‘yogh’ after vowels. <gh> has sometimes become /f/ and sometimes its sound value has altogether disappeared. It occurs after various vowels. See Table 1.2 for explanation of the vowel symbols.
2Dinghy also has the pronunciation /dɪŋi/ without the /ɡ/.
History
- Old English
- Middle English
- Printing
The difficulty of English spelling arises from the variety of influences on it over the last 1,400 years.1 A spelling system based on the Roman alphabet was used in the Old English (OE) period 600 to 1100; this was much influenced by (Norman) French in the period 1200–1500 and then later influenced again by continuous importation of Greek, Latin and more French words, many of which often kept their foreign spellings.
Some very early writing of OE was as runes, which seems to have been a lingua franca of the Germanic peoples covering much of northern Europe including Scandinavia.2 It has been linked to Etruscan3 and other languages used in Italy before Roman times (and from which the Latin letters were themselves derived). Runic letters avoided horizontal lines, as in, for example, the usual name given to the alphabet ᚠ ᚢ ᚦ ᚩ ᚱ ᚳ fuθark ‘futhark’ (in OE the pronunciation was /fuθork/ due to a sound change). Runes were written only as inscriptions on wood (very few now remaining), stones, coins and personal belongings. In England, the earliest inscriptions have been found dating from the fifth century and runes remained in use for 300 years before being finally ousted by the Latin alphabet.
Apart from the limited use of runes, the spelling of OE (also known as Anglo-Saxon) made use of the Latin alphabet, using a version of the so-called insular script, i.e. as previously used in Ireland, which had been Christianised and introduced to Latin somewhat earlier than England. By the tenth century, the language and its writing were relatively stabilised in the dialect known as West Saxon in the area to be equated with what today would be understood as Wessex (roughly the county of Hampshire and some of its surrounds). Reconstruction4 of the pronunciation of the letters of a dead language can never be more than approximate, but we can make reasonable deductions about OE, and later English, based on what we know about the pronunciation of letters in other languages, particularly Latin; what we know about the earlier pronunciation of words in Germanic, the parent language of English, Dutch and Scandinavian languages; and using the evidence of rhymes and metrics from within the language itself.
OE used letters with roughly the same values as in Latin, supplemented by the invented ligature <æ> called ‘ash’, and by various runic letters. These were <þ> (called ‘thorn’) and <ð> (at first ...
