The nation's capital always draws its share of protesters, picketing for causes ranging from health care reform to immigration policy. Four peaceful protesters, some dressed in full-length black and yellow bee costumes, represented the American Literacy Council and the London-based Spelling Society and stood outside the Grand Hyatt on Thursday, where the Scripps National Spelling Bee is being held.
Their message was short: Simplify the way we spell words. Roberta Mahoney, 81, a former Fairfax County, Va. As opposed to " nite "? And why "eight," "bight", "blight", "fight," "sight", "flight", "might," "weight," "freight," etc? Between i and t? It's the way it used to be spelled but pronunciation has changed. As opposed to "nite"?
Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. It was spelled GH in those cases, because it was pronounced [x], instead of [h]. Improve this answer. John Lawler John Lawler How was it pronounced?
The roaming habits of the 'r' have gotten a lot of word spellings into trouble. See: different, temperate, separate. Those sneaky 'r's also like to disappear completely, especially when there are two of them near each other see: surprise, berserk, governor.
February also came into English from French. The French feverier first became English feverere, or feverell. But in the 16th and 17th centuries, a craze for all things classical caused writers to start re-Latinizing their spelling—making words look more like their ancient language sources, whatever their current pronunciation.
It was a way to make your documents look more intelligent and fancy. And so, in writing, they made February look more like Februarius.
Receipt is also a victim of the Latinizing craze. When the word came into English from French it had no 'p', and no one pronounced it as if it did. Enthusiastic Latinizers later added the 'p' on analogy with the Latin receptus.
This is also how debt and doubt got their 'b's, salmon and solder got their 'l's, and indict got its 'c. Most of the words that got Latinized did have some distant connection, through French, with the ancient Latin words that dictated their new spellings. For example, in speech, cent and sang might be pronounced the same, but there was also the implicit knowledge that cent came from centum and sang came from sanguinum.
This Latin connection served as a reference point that helped stabilise French spelling, even when it was disconnected from pronunciation. Had the Norman invasion not interrupted the literary tradition of Old English, we might have ended up with a similar situation — a spelling system with silent letters and shifted sound values, but grounded in the spellings of their earlier forms. Old English would have continued to be the basis of the writing tradition that would have later been set into type.
Instead, we had a number of parts, moving and changing independently from each other, often with no anchor at all. In broad terms, over the course of a few centuries, sounds changed and vowels moved around. Moon also goose , food , school ended up with the June vowel, while book foot , good, stood with the push vowel. These changes happened at different times in different places.
In some places in Scotland and the north of England, moon , book, goose and foot still have the same vowel. The changes that came to be grouped under the Great Vowel Shift were gradual and went unnoticed as they were happening. When an English speaker sat down to write something at the end of the Middle Ages, the way they wrote it could depend on where they lived and what the dialectal pronunciation of vowels was there.
It would also depend on what they had read and incorporated into their spelling habits. When a printer was setting type for that writing, they had their own pronunciation and spelling preferences. When a piece of writing was set in type and spread to other towns, it would be received by people of varying literacy levels, and that would influence how it was incorporated into their habits. In other words, there was tremendous variation at each of these waystations on the journey to being read.
When a text was set in type and distributed, it had the effect of propagating the habit it represented, but how much it propagated depended on how widely it was distributed and where. Which specific aspects of the habit would stick and which fall away? The answer could be some or none. The result, ultimately, is a very irregular habit. Writing attaches to language in the way that the fork is a technology that attaches to our eating habits.
If English had been later to the technology of printing, further behind in the expansion of literacy, it might have been able to approach the development of its spelling system with a cleaner slate and a more stable idea of what was to be represented.
Instead, you just start. When a technology spreads, so does a habit of using it. Before we had printing, we had writing. Can we go back further? This is arguable, a philosophical question. I would say no. In any case, language is much, much closer to our very natures as humans than is any invented or discovered tool passed along for practical problem-solving.
Put a group of humans without a language together as has happened in some cases with Deaf communities and they will do language. A language will emerge from what they do.
Writing is unquestionably a technology. It attaches to language in the way that the fork is a technology that attaches to our eating habits.
Eating is undeniably a necessary part of our nature. The fork is a recent, unnecessary no matter how useful innovation. There are very few things that capture the relation between language the behaviour and writing the technology that represents the behaviour. The point is that the eating happens whether we have the fork or not.
Language happens whether we have writing or not. When we first got the technology of writing, the people who used it represented a tiny fraction of the speaking population, in most cases for hundreds of years. Throughout the history of writing, most people have been illiterate. It was the technology of printing that made it possible to put writing into widespread use.
The written word got cheaper and more plentiful.
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