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Why does English spelling have a
reputation for being difficult? English was first
written down when Christian monks came to England in Anglo-Saxon times. They
used the 23 letters of Latin to write down the sounds of Anglo-Saxon speech as they heard it. However, English
has a wider range of basic sounds (over 40)
than Latin. The alphabet was too small, and so combinations of letters were
needed to express the different sounds. Inevitably, there were inconsistencies
in the way that letters were combined. |
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With the Norman invasion of England, the English language was put
at risk.
English survived, but the spelling of many English words changed to follow
French patterns, and many French words were introduced into the language. The
result was more irregularity. |
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When the printing press was invented in the fifteenth century, many early
printers of English texts spoke other first languages. They made little
effort to respect English spelling. Although one of the short-term effects of
printing was to produce a number of variant spellings, in the long term it
created fixed spellings. People became used to seeing words spelt in the same
way. Rules were drawn up, and dictionaries were put together which printers
and writers could refer to. |
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However, spoken English was not fixed and continued
to change slowly - just as it still does now. Letters that were
sounded in the Anglo-Saxon period, like the 'k' in 'knife', now became silent. Also, the pronunciation of vowels then had little
in common with how they
sound now, but the way they are spelt hasn't changed. |
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No wonder, then, that
it is often difficult to see the link between sound and spelling. |
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