ACTIVITY 2
Read the text below and choose from
the menus the suitable answer. Then
check your answers. The first
alternative [
character -
credit
- fame
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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.
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.
