Posted on 06/15/2015 1:44:50 AM PDT by Cronos
You may have seen a poem by Gerard Nolst Trinité called The Chaos. It starts like this:
Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
In its fullest version, the poem runs through about 800 of the most vexing spelling inconsistencies in English. Eight hundred.
Attempting to spell in English is like playing one of those computer games where, no matter what, you will lose eventually. If some evil mage has performed vile magic on our tongue, he should be bunged into gaol for his nefarious goal (and if you still need convincing of how inconsistent English pronunciation is, just read that last sentence out loud). But no, our spelling came to be a capricious mess for entirely human reasons.
The problem begins with the alphabet itself. Building a spelling system for English using letters that come from Latin – despite the two languages not sharing exactly the same set of sounds – is like building a playroom using an IKEA office set.
So what happened with English? It’s a story of invasions, thefts, sloth, caprice, mistakes, pride and the inexorable juggernaut of change. In its broadest strokes, these problems come down to people – including you and me, dear readers – being greedy, lazy and snobbish.
First, the greed: invasion and theft. The Romans invaded Britain in the 1st Century AD and brought their alphabet; in the 7th Century, the Angles and Saxons took over, along with their language. Starting in the 9th Century, Vikings occupied parts of England and brought some words (including they, displacing the Old English hie). Then the Norman French conquered in 1066 – and replaced much of the vocabulary with French, including words which over time became beef, pork, invade, tongue and person.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
The most significant instance of this in English was the Great Vowel Shift. From the 1400s to about 1700, for reasons that remain unclear, our long vowels all shifted in our mouths like cream swirling slowly in a cup of tea. Before it, see rhymed with "eh"; boot was said like “boat”; and out sounded like “oot.” But when the sounds shifted, the spelling stayed behind.
ping as you may find the article on the bbc fascinating as I did....
Thank you for the ping. :)
Actually, the French origin words were usually added to the language, but did not displace the earlier English words.
For instance, beef, pork and venison were added and eventually wound up describing the meat, which was mostly eaten by the French speaking aristos. Cow, pig and deer remained in the language of the peasants, who had to deal with the live animals.
English wound up incorporating both. It did that a lot, giving it by far the largest number of words of any language that has ever existed. This gives it an amazing ability to express fine shades of meaning.
I’ve heard the English language described as the result of Normal soldiers attempting to make dates with Saxon barmaids.
Thank you for posting this.
As part of the negotiations, directors at Chrysler conceded that English spelling has some room for improvement and have accepted a five-year phase-in plan.
In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c". Also, the hard "c" will be replased with "k". Not only will this klear up konfusion, but komputers have one less letter.
There will be growing kompany enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replased by "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20 persent shorter.
In the third year, DaimlerKhrysler akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reash the stage where more komplikated shanges are possible.
DaimlerKhrysler will enkourage the removal of double letters, whish have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent "e"'s in the languag is disgrasful, and they would go.
By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps sush as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" by "v".
During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be droped from vords kontaining "o", and similar shanges vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.
After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis, and employes vil find it ezi to kommunikat viz eash ozer.
Ov kors al supliers vil be expekted to us zis for all busines komunikation via DaimlerKhrysler.
Ze drem vil finali kum tru ….
Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.
If zis mad yu smil, plez pas on to oza pepl.
A fortunate side effect is that French, the second largest language with 150,000 words in common usage is less than a third the size of English with 500,000 words.
If the country knew who it is it would adopt one language as official and set standards for its use.
I am an avid fan of philology, the study of language using historical sources and, of course, English is the most varied and illogical language in known history. I have always enjoyed the tug-of-war between the prescriptive versus descriptive roles undertaken by the various ‘mavens’ of academia. An example of the uniqueness of English is that I believe that no other language has annual, national spelling-bee contests.
I’ll remind all that this spelling topic is a perennial. A famous earlier example is the crusade by the Chicago Tribune & its publisher, Col. Robert McCormick, to change spelling by example. In the 1940-50s, articles in this leading non-NYC newspaper would be written in a simplified English spelling (frate = freight.) Deemed as quixotic (Don Quixote), this effort caused more humor than change.
Interestingly enough (enuf?) though (tho?), this mongrel Anglo-Saxon, Indo-European language is still the most spoken language in this world and through (thru) many uses (software?), stands a good chance to become a permanent defacto world language.
I think the English language is wonderful. Language complexity is related to brain development and intelligence.
I keep on hearing how complex and difficult English is, but compared to the different Chinese and Japanese?
SMILE! Just to use your words in an example, saying "I'll have a cow" is far different than "I'll have a beef" as is saying "You're a pig" is accepted while people look at you askance if you say "You're a pork!" Sometimes they'll adopt a Viking attitude by saying this with their arms akimbo! Beware if they add denigration to this while waving a knife!
The fellow who gave us Webster’s dictionary attempted to simplify spelling in much the same way, he was partly successful, but the English didn’t budge so the differences between us remain, such as theater vs theatre.
If they score, do they have Saxon the bar?
Well, it can be personal attitude, but to me, what makes English a difficult language, especially as a second language, is the number of synonyms and non-rule for spelling. Take two, too and to or there and their! For spelling, take the "I before E except after C" and then spell 'Wierd!' I can site many examples where spell-check will leave you in tiers!
Which then returns to us here across the pond when pretentiousness has advertisers and developers using British spelling for effect, 'Centre' being one I have seen many times!
Of course recently in discussion of the May GB Election, I did see reference to the "British Labor Party" which is an error in the opposite direction! /grin!
Very true...I find this subject fascinating!
When I taught French, I’d tell parents “if you want your children to learn the language of the future, have them study Spanish. If you want them to learn about their ‘native’ language, English, have them learn French.”
Amazing that we still live with the effects of what the Bastard of Normandy wrought in 1066....
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