The origins of languages are buried deep in time and teasing out why they have the features they do is not easy and hence often speculative. For those of us whose language is English, one mystery is the way things are spelled, which is a source of humor for comedians like Eddie Izzard.
Arika Okrent says that English is unusual in the level of weirdness of its spelling
Part of the problem is that English spelling looks deceptively similar to other languages that use the same alphabet but in a much more consistent way. You can spend an afternoon familiarising yourself with the pronunciation rules of Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Polish and many others, and credibly read out a text in that language, even if you don’t understand it. Your pronunciation might be terrible, and the pace, stress and rhythm would be completely off, and no one would mistake you for a native speaker – but you could do it. Even French, notorious for the spelling challenges it presents learners, is consistent enough to meet the bar. There are lots of silent letters, but they’re in predictable places. French has plenty of rules, and exceptions to those rules, but they can all be listed on a reasonable number of pages.
She argues that the reason is, like so many things that have evolved over time, because of contingent factors, in this case the state of technology.
The answer to the weirdness of English has to do with the timing of technology. The rise of printing caught English at a moment when the norms linking spoken and written language were up for grabs, and so could be hijacked by diverse forces and imperatives that didn’t coordinate with each other, or cohere, or even have any distinct goals at all. If the printing press has arrived earlier in the life of English, or later, after some of the upheaval had settled, things might have ended up differently.
…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. But when a tool comes along, you don’t wait to figure out the optimal way to use it or worry about what the effects of using it might eventually be. Instead, you just start.
…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. People had the access and exposure necessary to learn, practise and become literate. That access and exposure was created, in stages, by the competing and conflicting demands of history. That history and its lumps, bumps, silent letters and all, was pressed in with metal and ink.
One thing that I was not aware of was that beginning with the Norman invasion of 1066, for the next 300 years, written English almost completely disappeared in England.
French was the language of the conquerors, and became the language of the state and all its official activities. Latin remained the language of the Church and education. English was the spoken language of daily life for most people, but the social class that had previously maintained and developed the written standard for English – landholders, religious leaders, government officials – had all been replaced.
English began its return as a written language in the 14th century. Over generations, it had crept back in among the nobility, as well as the clergy, although French and Latin were still the languages of educated and official pursuits. By then, English had changed. A few centuries of language evolution had led to different pronunciations. And Old English writing habits had been lost. As English started to make its written comeback, these people found themselves not only trying to figure out how to spell English words but also reaching for English ways to say educated, official things.
Movable type was invented by Johannes Gutenberg around 1450 and led to printing and different presses adopted different spellings for words as written Eglish started making a comeback
The printing profession played a key role in these emergent norms. Printing houses developed habits for spelling frequent words, often based on what made setting type more efficient. In a manuscript, hadde might be replaced with had; thankefull with thankful. When it came to spelling, the primary objective wasn’t to faithfully represent the author’s spelling, nor to uphold some standard idea of ‘correct’ English – it was to produce texts that people could read and, more importantly, that they would buy.
…Some spellings got entrenched this way, by being printed over and over again in widely distributed texts, very early on.
The evolution of language can be a subject of endless fascination.
One thing that I was not aware of was that beginning with the Norman invasion of 1066, for the next 300 years, written English almost completely disappeared in England.
I am neither an historian nor linguist but I doubt that statement. She is correct that legal and major works would be in French or Latin but I suspect that the merchant class may have maintained a reasonable level of “English” for commercial purposes.
If nothing else Chaucer must have had a fair depth of English to draw on.
Also, perhaps even more relevant to (non)orthography: The English language has no official Academy to regulate and standardize usage or spelling. Though such organizations don’t have the clout they once did, historically they called the shots for practically all publishers and editors.
Another consequence of this: A comprehensive dictionary of, e.g., French, Spanish, Russian, etc, will have about 60,000 words. A major English dictionary weighs in at around 300,000 words.
The reason English is such a collection of oddities is because it evolved as a pidgin version of other languages for conducting trade in -- which is also why it isn’t gendered meaning objects don’t have genders in English unlike most of the invaders languages English was a pidgin of. That’s because it’s an unneccesary complication in doing business.
Context is extremely important in English which enables it’s easy turn to humour and is another consequence of it’s trading origins -- if you know you’re there to trade the context of that helps communicate.
jrkrideau @1: There were also English monasteries which were active long after the Norman Conquest.
Rob @4: didn’t monks write mostly in Latin? English, though difficult to learn for non-English speakers because of the many exceptions to spelling and pronunciation “rules”, is an extremely adaptable language. Maybe this is because of the willingness of its speakers to borrow words and roots from other languages, and perhaps also due to the lack of rigidity in the way native English-speakers used and thought about words as a means of expression. It could also be the fact that the Anglo-Saxons came into contact with so many different peoples: Britons; Scots; Irish; Danes; Norsemen; Germans; French; Flemish; Romans; Italians; Spaniards, and all their dialects. I’m no linguist, so this is mere speculation. But the French, who guard their language jealously, have about one hundred thousand words in their modern lexicon, while modern English has about a million. Whatever the reason, it’s fun to follow the evolution of this language that began on a small island and now spans the globe.
An interesting question is why printing led to standardisation of spelling in German but not in English.
The first German translation of the bible was written in the dialect of the area lower Saxony. This has become, roughly speaking, the modern standard German (Hochdeutsch). The spellings used in printing follow the spoken word in this dialect.
Hochdeutsch is considered to be standard spoken German -- and people with different dialects will tend towards Hochdeutsch to make themselves understood. German is generally written in Hochdeutsch, even in Austria and Switzerland where the spoken language is different enough from Hochdeutsch that German television sometimes subtitles Austrian or Swiss speakers.
I wonder why English spelling doesn’t follow the dialect of south-east England that became “standard” English?
One might counter that central Europe is very diverse linguistically and trade was just as international as it is today, yet German has very consistent spelling -- I’m not sure about Polish, Czech, Swedish or Hungarian -- maybe someone can help me out there?
I love the meta-ness that the spelling of weird is… weird.
Like, can you think of any other word in English that rhymes with “weird” but has similar spelling? 🙂
Silentbob:
I guess “premiered” and “cashiered” are as close as it gets, but they obviously have “i” before “e,” in accordance with that rule that has lots of exceptions (including weird of course). Along with -eared and -eered, that makes four different spellings for the same sound, plus a bunch of others which are near-rhymes.
Google says this:
Both “fate” and “destiny” are from Latin, by the way, and we do of course use those in English too (not very literally in either case). But besides Macbeth, I’ve never heard “weird” used in that original sense, since the much more generic bizarre/strange meanings have totally replaced it.
‘Weir’ has the same pronunciation of the ‘eir’ part.
Well, now that I think about it, there’s also the weirding way in Dune, which is sort of connected to a notion of destiny. But not in ordinary speech.
Rob:
If you verbify that, it would be “weired.”
And maybe it would also be weird.
And there’s Bertrand Russel’s “ghoti” which is pronounced like “fish”
Irish also has very consistent spelling, with a few twists
Publicola @#5
For example, Latvian writing system was created at the beginning of 20th century by linguists. It is extremely consistent, and there are no exceptions for the rules.
The older a writing system, the less consistent it is. In addition, writing systems created by a committee of linguists (or even a single linguist) are more consistent and make much more sense than those created by numerous monks, writers, and publishers over several centuries.
Whenever two communities of people who speak different languages interact, both languages will influence each other. That happens always. English speakers are no more willing to borrow words from other languages than the rest of humanity.
Again, this is the same for every language.
In Europe everybody came in contact with everybody else for millennia. Study the ancient history of Italian language and its development, and you will find words from all over the place. Study new words of foreign origin in modern German, and you’ll spot all kinds of fun developments. For example, in German there are several words for “mobile phone”—“Mobiltelefon,” “Smartphone,” “Handy.”
Many French speakers worry about maintaining the purity of their language and bemoan the adoption of any foreign loans words. On the other hand, English has a much more laissez-faire attitude on the subject.
Marcus Ranum @ # 13: … Bertrand Russel’s “ghoti” which is pronounced like “fish”.
I was about to set you straight with an attribution to George Bernard Shaw, but a search set me straighter: we owe that one to the prolific and almost-infallible Anonymous.
Andreas @15: As I said, I’m no linguist, which has now bee proven. This is what happens when ignorance opens his mouth. Appreciate the insights.
> For example, in German there are several words for “mobile phone”—“Mobiltelefon,” “Smartphone,” “Handy.”
Handy seems to be the most common word -- though how it came to mean mobile phone is something of a mystery -- naturally there are a number of different theories.
The origin of Bulli to mean a VW camper van is equally unclear.
German is pretty open to loan words -- for example “abchillen” -- to chill out.
@15 Andreas Avester
I had a look at the political manifesto of the FDP for the upcoming election here in September -- “One-Stop-Shops”, “Transfer-Know-how”. Not that I am considering voting for these neo-liberal Arschlöcher, but I do wonder if they have a translation of their program into German or English.