1. Why Isn’t English Written the Way It Sounds?

Star-Spangled Stories. Article 1.

Why Isn't English Written the Way It Sounds?

A story of Anglo-Saxon settlers, Vikings, Normans, wandering vowels, Shakespeare and printers, who left us all those silent letters.

Why do we say through /θruː/, though /ðəʊ/ and tough /tʌf/ when all three words contain the same -ough? And how can the same two letters oo have three different sounds in food, good and blood?

You might think English spelling was invented by someone who wanted revenge on future students. The truth is more interesting. English is not a collection of random exceptions. It is a language whose written form keeps traces of many historical periods, while its pronunciation kept on changing. To understand this, we will set off on a journey of about fifteen centuries.

The Anglo-Saxons: English that sounded like a relative of German

From the 5th century on, Germanic groups, traditionally called the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, settled in the British Isles. Their related dialects became the basis of Old English. It was not today's English with a few old-fashioned words. It had more word endings, grammatical genders and many different sounds.

The last pair is especially interesting. In Old English, the first k in cniht was pronounced, and at the end there was a throaty sound similar to Czech ch. Today's knight /naɪt/ has kept part of the old spelling, but its pronunciation has changed a lot.

The Vikings brought more than axes

From the end of the 8th century, Scandinavians sailed to the British coast. At first the chronicles show them mainly as raiders, but many of them gradually became traders, farmers and neighbours of the local people. Large parts of northern and eastern England came under strong Scandinavian influence. This area is called the Danelaw.

The Vikings spoke Old Norse, a close relative of Old English. Living side by side for a long time, the two languages influenced each other. Words such as sky, egg, take, window and knife come from this contact. Even the everyday pronouns they, them, their are of Scandinavian origin.

The picture of the language starts to come together: a Germanic base mixes with another Germanic language. But the great social change came only in 1066.

The Normans: three languages under one crown

In 1066, William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, conquered England. The Normans had Viking ancestors, but after a few generations in France they had adopted the local Romance language. So their Norman French was not "Norse in disguise"; it was a variety of French, which came mostly from Latin.

After the conquest, three important languages existed side by side. Most people spoke English. French dominated at the royal court and in parts of government and law. Latin was the language of the Church, of scholars and of written records. Their positions changed over the centuries, but together they left a lasting mark on English.

The difference between cow and beef is often explained by social class: English-speaking people kept the animals, and the French-speaking upper classes ate the cooked meat. It is a useful historical illustration, not a rule that works for every animal and every dish.

Thanks to the Normans, English gained an unusually rich vocabulary. It can have a short native word next to a more formal word taken from French or Latin, for example help – assist or start – commence. For a student this means more synonyms; for a writer, a wider range of styles.

The Black Death, war and Chaucer: English comes back

Norman French did not stay the language of the English elite forever. In the 14th century, society was changing. The Hundred Years' War with France strengthened a separate English identity, and the plague known as the Black Death shook the economy and society in 1348 and the following years. However, no single event explains why English returned to the prestigious areas of life.

A symbolic milestone is 1362, when English was ordered to be used for spoken proceedings in the law courts, although legal documents stayed connected with other languages for a long time. And at the end of the 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales (Canterburské povídky) in English. The language of ordinary people was making its way into literature again.

But writing in English still did not mean writing the same way everywhere. Pronunciation and spelling varied a lot from region to region. And this is where medieval scribes enter our story.

The scribes: how hwæt became what

Old English used letters that you would look for in vain in a modern English book. The letters þ (thorn) and ð (eth) stood for the sounds we now write as th. Under the influence of new scribal habits, the pair th gradually took their place.

And what about the question words? In Old English people wrote hwæt (what), hwær (where), hwænne (when) or hwȳ (why). Today we know what, where, when, why. The letters h and w swapped places. During the Middle English period, wh- gradually won, partly under the influence of French scribal habits.

A popular story says that Flemish printers made this change because they thought hw- was a typo. Historically, this does not work: spellings with wh- appear long before printing came to England. Medieval manuscripts had many variants; it was not a one-time correction made by a few foreigners.

The Great Vowel Shift: the great move of the vowels

Roughly from the 15th to the 17th century, the long vowels of English went through a big change that linguists call the Great Vowel Shift. Some vowels came to be pronounced with the tongue higher in the mouth, and others gradually turned into diphthongs. It did not happen in a few years, and different dialects changed in different ways.

For us, the result is what matters: words often stayed spelled in a similar way, but began to be pronounced differently. For example, the old long /iː/ became today's /aɪ/ in many words, and the old /uː/ became /aʊ/.

Imagine that over a few centuries the Czech word mír began to be pronounced roughly as "mire", but books kept spelling it mír. Something similar happened to English. And because it was a long and complicated process, not all the results were perfectly regular.

The causes of the shift are not completely clear. Linguists think about chain reactions in pronunciation, social mobility and contact between dialects. What is certain is that just at this time a new technology arrived that began to unify the written language.

Printing and the Flemish: why we write ghost

In 1476, William Caxton set up a printing press in Westminster. With printing, books no longer had to be copied by hand: hundreds of readers could see the same word in the same edition. Thanks to printing, government offices and later schools, spelling gradually became more uniform, though not immediately and not without exceptions.

Caxton had worked in Bruges before and worked with printers from the Netherlands and Flanders. They brought their own spelling habits to England. One of the best-known results is the word ghost. In older English we find forms like gāst and later gost. The Dutch habit of writing gh in similar words helped the spelling ghost to win. The letter h stayed with us, but we do not pronounce it.

This does not mean that the Flemish printers are to blame for every oddity of English spelling. Their part is just one episode of a longer story. The key was the combination of two processes: pronunciation was changing a lot, while standard spelling was starting to become fixed.

The Renaissance: scholars add letters nobody pronounces

While printers helped to fix spelling, Renaissance scholars admired Latin and Greek. Some of them wanted the learned past of words to be visible in their spelling too. So English sometimes got letters that never had a matching sound in normal speech.

In Middle English, for example, people wrote dette. Scholars knew that the word was related to Latin debitum, so a silent b went into the spelling: debt. The modern spelling doubt was created in the same way, after Latin dubitare.

Even funnier is island. Its Old English ancestor had no s at all. The letter appeared in the spelling because people wrongly connected the word with French isle and Latin insula. So today's island contains a silent s that is not only unpronounced but also misleading about the word's history.

Here we meet an important difference: some silent letters are leftovers of lost pronunciation, others are leftovers of spelling that was changed later. To a student today they look equally mysterious, but their stories are different.

Consonants disappear and -ough lives a life of its own

The Great Vowel Shift affected mainly vowels. But the consonants did not stay the same either. People stopped pronouncing the first /k/ in knee, know, knife and the first /w/ in write and wrong. The spelling kept these letters. In the same way, the old throaty sound written as gh disappeared from many words, for example night and daughter.

In words with -ough, consonants and vowels also developed in different ways. Today the result looks almost like a competition for the largest number of pronunciations of one spelling:

And why are food, good and blood different? Not only because of the Great Vowel Shift. The pronunciation of these words was also affected by later changes and the shortening of vowels, which did not happen everywhere in the same way. That is why today we say food /fuːd/, good /ɡʊd/ and blood /blʌd/. The history of English is a series of overlapping changes, not one magic event that explains everything.

Shakespeare: the playwright who gave English a new voice

Around 1600, English had already gone through most of the changes we have talked about, but it was still not completely fixed. This is when William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was writing. His plays and poems show how flexible and creative the language already was.

Shakespeare could turn a noun into a verb, combine familiar words in new ways and give ordinary words unforgettable imagery. People often say he "invented 1,700 words". It is more accurate to say that his works contain a great many early written examples of words that later became part of English. For many of them we now know older examples; we cannot prove that he created them all himself.

For today's student, his most visible legacy is fixed expressions. Some of them may have existed before, but Shakespeare's plays recorded them, made them popular or gave them a particularly striking form.

Now imagine we could see a performance in the original Globe Theatre in London. Shakespeare and his actors would sound different from today's British or American actors. Reconstructions of the pronunciation of his time (Original Pronunciation) reveal rhymes and puns that modern pronunciation has hidden. Some lines only make full sense in the sound of their own time.

Johnson and Webster: when spelling becomes a rule

English dictionaries already existed in the 18th century, but Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language from 1755 gained unusual authority. Johnson explained words, gave quotations from literature and helped to establish the idea that the correct spelling can be found in a dictionary. He was not the first English dictionary maker and he did not fix spelling in one go, but his dictionary became an important step in its standardization.

Meanwhile, American English was developing on the other side of the Atlantic. From 1783, Noah Webster published school spelling books and in 1828 a large American dictionary. He wanted clearer spelling and also an independent American standard. That is why today we often see British colour, centre, defence and American color, center, defense.

But Webster did not turn English into a phonetic language either. His changes to spelling were only partial. Written English already had too long a history and too many users to be simply "fixed" by one reform.

Conclusion: a language museum that nobody ever tidied up

English is not illogical on paper because its speakers could not write. Its spelling shows layers from different times: an old Germanic base, Scandinavian words, French and Latin borrowings, medieval scribal habits, shifted vowels, the influence of printing, Renaissance learning and later dictionary standards.

When we see knight today, we are looking at the trace of sounds that died out long ago. In beef we hear an echo of Norman French. The word ghost keeps a printers' spelling habit from continental Europe. And time is pronounced differently than it once was, because its vowel went through centuries of change.

So English spelling is a bit like a language museum that nobody ever properly tidied up. Next time you find a word that is "read wrong", you may have just discovered another piece of English history.

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