Curso First Certificate Exam

LOS CURSOS DE INGLES GRATIS PREFERIDOS POR LOS HISPANOHABLANTES

 

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Multiple-choice gap-filling

ACTIVITY 24: Read the text below and choose from the menus the suitable answer. The first alternative [ character - credit - fame - reputation ] is already done for you.

ENGLISH SPELLING

Why does English spelling have a for being

so difficult? English was first written down when Christian

monks came to England in Anglo-Saxon .

They used the 23 letters of Latin to write down the sounds

of Anglo-Saxon as they heard it.

However, English has a range of basic sounds (over 40) than Latin.

The alphabet was too small, and so combinations of letters were needed to

the different sounds. Inevitably, there were inconsistencies in the way that letters were

combined.

With the Norman invasion of England, the English language was put risk.

English survived, but the spelling of many English words changed to follow French

, and many French words were into the language. The result was

more irregularity.

When the printing press was in the fifteenth century, many early printers of

English texts spoke other first languages. They little effort to respect English

spelling. Although one of the short-term 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 , and dictionaries

were put together which printers and writers could to.

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 . Also, the pronunciation of vowels then had little in

with how they sound now, but the way they are spelt hasn't changed.

No , then, that it is often difficult to see the link between sound and spelling.

En la última página de esta lección podrás ver un videoclip para desarrollar tu primera práctica de SPEAKING...

 

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