Warning: This post is directed at upper-intermediate and advanced learners of English.
In the past few months, I’ve given my intermediate-level students (and above) a multiple-choice spelling test. My best students have also attempted a second – harder – test, showcasing some common words that are often misspelled, even by native speakers. My students’ scores have varied quite a bit, with the average being somewhere in the 60–70% range for the first test, and 40–50% for the second. As I keep telling people, these are not terrible scores. Native speakers often struggle their whole lives with spelling, and I’m going to spend this series of three posts explaining why. (The best performer on both tests so far is a young Italian man. As you’ll see in Part 3, that might not be a coincidence.)
So just why is English spelling such a nightmare?
English is a real mish-mash. In the last 1500 years, it has acted like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up words from anywhere and everywhere. It started out as a Germanic language, which already had its fair share of Latinate words. When the Vikings arrived they added their own twist, then the Norman Conquest brought many thousands of French words into the mix. Later, English became swamped by Latin and Greek words as educated people began to travel more (and learn Latin and Greek!). Most recently, English has adopted words directly from languages as diverse as French (faux pas), Japanese (kimono) and Sanskrit (karma).
Why is this a problem? Well, for a start, it increases the number of words in the English language that you have to learn and could potentially spell wrongly, but more importantly, every time you borrow from a new source, you borrow whatever spelling rules that language happens to have. And they might be completely different from anything your own language had previously. Take the word pizza, for example. I recently read that this word has only existed in English since 1935. It’s incredible, really, to think that when my grandparents were growing up, English had no word for what is now an extremely popular food item. When the word did enter the lexicon, they were suddenly confronted with a double Z that stood for a “ts” sound. That might sound fine, but English already had a number of double-Z words, like fizz, puzzle and blizzard, where the double Z represented a simple “z” sound. So this one new word added an extra complication to English spelling all by itself. (The English language could have got round this problem by spelling pizza phonetically, but unlike other languages it has a strong tendency not to do this, and anyway, what spelling would it have adopted? Peetsa? Peetsuh?)
As English borrowed more and more words from its various source languages, it took its sounds from those languages at the same time. Standard British English, which I speak and teach, has 44 sounds (24 consonants, 12 vowels, and 8 diphthongs, which are basically two vowel sounds pronounced as one). That’s a lot. But English never let go of the Latin alphabet, which only has 26 letters! To enable an undersized 26-letter alphabet to spell every word in a language with 44 sounds, you have to allow either (a) some letters to stand for more than one possible sound, throwing all hope of a phonetic alphabet out the window, or (b) employ digraphs or trigraphs: two or three letters that are used together to make a single sound. Unfortunately, English has done both, and in a very unsystematic way. Of course, English could have done what many other languages have done, and use diacritics like é or ç, or other weird letters from outside the standard Latin set, but by the time anybody might have thought to do this, English spelling was already such a mess that adding a few lines and squiggles wouldn’t have achieved all that much.
When English was swamped by all these new Latin and Greek words, some crazy people successfully changed the spellings of existing English words to make them look more Latin or Greek, even when the changes were unjustified. The word island used to be spelt without an S, but the S was added to make it look more like the Latin word insula, even though the word doesn’t have Latin roots. The same thing happened with debt and doubt, which were once (sensibly) spelt without a B. The influx of Greek words brought the ph combination (for the “f” sound) into play, and these same mad people started putting ph into words that weren’t Greek-derived at all (like nephew) just because they thought it looked more impressive. While having nothing to do with Latin or Greek, another example of a spelling becoming more complicated for unjustified reasons is the word hiccup, which is that feeling and noise you get in your throat that you can’t stop, and is often caused by fizzy drink or spicy food. Some people thought it would be a clever idea to include “cough” in the spelling of this word, so hiccough was born, even though the pronunciation remained the same. Thankfully sanity seems to have prevailed with this word, and most people now spell hiccup in the original way.
That’s more than enough for Part 1, but please check out Part 2 for more background into the weird and wacky world of English spelling.