On a cold December day in 1855, London publisher Charles Ollier sat down at his desk to write a letter to his friend, the critic and essayist Leigh Hunt.
When he stood back up, Ollier’s letter was at least three pages long. We know this because history records it was on page three that he informed Hunt: “My son William has hit upon a new method of spelling Fish.”
That method, which I’m sure you’ve guessed, was ghoti. William’s argument was as follows:
gh as in cough
o as in women
ti as in nation
The point was simple: English spelling is all over the place and, what’s more, often lacks even a passing acquaintance with pronunciation. One result is that spelling cannot be learned phonetically. To the chagrin of schoolchildren the world over - not to mention their long-suffering mentors - many words must be learned, painfully at times, by rote.
Although English is not the only language to suffer this obvious flaw, many major ones, such as Spanish, Italian, Serbian and even the notoriously difficult Finnish, do not. If you hear a new word in those languages clearly and are reasonably fluent, you’ll probably nail its spelling at the first attempt.
Languages that share English’s obstinacy include French and Irish. However, unlike English, their pigheadedness is in one direction only - while you may not be able to confidently spell a word first time you hear it, you can still confidently guess its pronunciation from its spelling. (I know that sounds illogical, but that’s all I’m saying about it here. I only have 1000 words or so to play with.)
English suffers from what linguists call deep orthography, or what I prefer to call 360 degree bastardry. Not only can spelling not be derived consistently from pronunciation, but neither can pronunciation be consistently derived from spelling.
Ollier was far from the first person to point out the weirdness of English spelling, but you might be surprised how late in the piece the issue arose. Modern English spelling, which developed from about 1350, was passably straightforward and consistent to start with. But it suffered a big blow with the development of the printing press in the 1400s and the fact that the early ones were operated by Belgian assistants who didn’t speak, read or write English. Suddenly, the printed word was appearing everywhere, in wildly varying spellings, produced by people who, quite literally, didn’t know their arse from their elbow.
As printing developed and typesetters began to be paid by the line, the temptation to also squeeze a new letter or two into the odd word was too great for some.
It took until the 16th century for calls for spelling reformation to become rife. Rife, and largely unheeded. Sure, the odd word was rescued from the clutches of insanity: logique, it was agreed, was more sensibly arranged as logic. Warre was two letters too many for one of humanity’s favourite pastimes, as was sinne for another. But those were the exceptions.
In fact, while many people were pushing for simpler, more rational spellings, others were pulling in the opposite direction. Most at fault were scholars of Greek and Latin, who believed English had become sullied over time by the common people and would be infinitely improved by the application of a little classical spelling. So it was that the eminently sensible sissors became scissors, det became debt, dout likewise assumed a demonstrably unnecessary b, and iland became island on the mistaken assumption that it came from the Latin insula (it’s actually from the Old English igland).
By the mid-1600s, spelling reformers had largely given up, but 200 years later a new generation bravely took up the cudgels with, it must be said, a respectable degree of success. Among them was American dictionary writer Noah Webster, who excised the u from words such as colour and labour, and reversed the final two letters of other words like centre and litre to better reflect their pronunciation. Thus it was that US and British spellings began diverging (although much of what Webster did was simply codify what his compatriots were already doing) and the two countries now found another reason to regard one another with suspicion.
Webster’s first dictionary, published in 1806. A second, more comprehensive edition, was to follow in 1828. For his troubles, Webster was plunged into debt from which he never recovered.
In 1906 the Simplified Spelling Board was founded in the United States. (That it didn’t name itself the Simplified Spelling Bord was surely an opportunity gone begging.) One of its main contributions was to simplify the spelling of words like anaemia, aeon and aesthetic. The ae pairing is a relic of a time when it signified a pronunciation similar to the long vowel sound in my. That distinction got lost over time, however, causing modern readers to wonder whether antennae is correctly pronounce an-ten-ee, an-ten-ay or something more difficult and posh.
But as a portion of the language as a whole, these reforms - which were hardly universally adopted in any case - are not even a drop in the ocean. English’s bastardry continues unabated.
That hasn’t put off the reformers, who have included famous writers like Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and HG Wells, heads of state like Theodore Roosevelt, scientists like Charles Darwin, playwrights like George Bernard Shaw (often wrongly credited with coming up with ghoti), and even royalty such as Prince Philip.
In my view, you could add King Canute to that list without doing it any harm, such are the chances of anyone achieving more than the most modest results.
The barriers to success are both varied and sizeable. First, how should we reform spelling? By making it more phonetic? The question then arises: phonetic for whom? Please, God, not the Scottish. Or, as the Scottish might say: please, God, not the Kiwis. You get the problem.
What about simplified spelling, as per Noah Webster? For example, surely we can agree there’s no harm in standardising the spelling of all words pronounced with a short e followed by a d, which would give us red, led, hed, sed, etc.
But it won’t happen, at least not by decree. Unlike many peoples who are blessed (cough, cough) with a language academy, English speakers have never shown any interest in having a committee tell them how their language should be written or spoken. (That they do seem willing to kowtow to the rulings of self-appointed individuals, often completely lacking in credentials, is another matter and one that puzzles me deeply.)
Organised spelling reform is doomed not because it’s a bad idea, but because English speakers are just as obdurate as their language - maybe more so.
And much as I admire Twain, Darwin, Shaw, etc, I’m with the refuseniks on this one. Det instead of the delectably overendowed debt? Over my ded body.
Bits and specious
George Bernard Shaw was going strong well into his nineties. Born in 1856, in 1950 he put together a paper called The Problem of a Common Language, where he wrote “children should be taught to spell phonetically (as they speak) and only corrected when their spelling betrays a mispronunciation…”. You can find the article here.
To help him compile his dictionaries and better understand the etymology of the words he was defining, Webster learned 28 languages. The Merriam-Webster dictionary, widely regarded as among the world’s best, owes the second half of its name to him.
In defence of merit in science.
Quote of the week
It is a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word.
Andrew Jackson