ACTIVITY 24: Read
the text below and choose from the menus the suitable answer. The
first alternative [ character -
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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.
Englishsurvived, 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.
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