30. Spelling (part-2)

In comparison the Western way of writing begins to look admirably simple and

well ordered. And yet in its way it is itself a pretty imperfect system for

converting sounds into thoughts. English is particularly hit or miss. We have

some forty sounds in English, but more than 200 ways of spelling them. We can

render the sound "sh" in up to fourteen ways (shoe, sugar, passion, ambitious,

ocean, champagne, etc. ); we can spell -6" in more than a dozen ways [(go, beau,

stow, sew, doe, though, escargot, etc.) and "a" in a dozen more (hey, stay, make,

maid, freight, great, etc.). If you count proper nouns, the word in English with

the most varied spellings is air with a remarkable thirty-eight: Aire, Ayr, heir,

e'er, ere, and so on.

Spellings in English are so treacherous, and opportunities for flummoxing so

abundant, that the authorities themselves sometimes stumble. The first printing of the second edition of Webster's New World Dictionary had millennium

spelled millennium in its definition of that word, while in the first edition of the

American Heritage Dictionary you can find vichysoisse instead of vichyssoise.

In The English Language [page gi], Robert Burchfield, called by William Safire

the "world's most influential lexicographer," talks about grammatical

prescriptive who regard "innovation as dangerous or at any rate resistable." It

should be resistible. In The Story of Language, Mario Pei writes flectional on

page 114 and flexional just four pages later. And in The Treasure of Our Tongue,

Lincoln Barnett laments the decline of spelling by noting: "An English

examination at New Jersey's Fairleigh Dickinson University disclosed that less

than one quarter of the freshmen class could spell professor correctly." I wonder,

for my part, how many of them could spell freshman class?

Just as a quick test, see if you can tell which of the following words are

mispelled.

In fact, they all are. So was misspelled at the end of the preceeding paragraph.

So was preceding just there. I'm sorry, I'll stop.

But I trust you get the point that English can be a maddeningly difficult language

to spell correctly.

Some people contend that English orthography is not as bad as all that—that it

even has some strengths. Simeon Potter believed that English spelling possessed

three distinguishing features that offset its other shortcomings: The consonants

are fairly regular in their pronunciation, the language is blessedly free of the

diacritical marks that complicate other languages—the umlauts, cedillas,

circumflexes, and so on—and, above all, English preserves the spelling of

borrowed words, so that people of many nations "are immediately aware of the

meanings of thousands of words which would be unrecognizable if written

phonetically." We might dare to quibble with the first of these observations.

Potter evidently was not thinking of the c in bloc, race, and church or the s in

house, houses, and mission, or the t in think, tinker, and mention, or the h in

host, hour, thread, and cough, or the two g's in garage and gauge, or indeed most

of the other consonants when he praised their regularity of pronunciation. On the

other hand, English does benefit from the absence of diacritical marks. These

vary from language to language, but in some they play a crucial, and often

confusing, role. In Hungarian, for instance, toke means capital, but toke means

testicles. Suit-means stem, but take away the accent and it becomes the sort of

word you say when you hit your thumb with a hammer. David Crystal in The

English Language observes that there are only 400 or so irregular spellings s in

English (only ?), and, rather more persuasively, notes that 84 percent of English

spellings (e.g., purse/nurse/curse, patch/catch/latch ) while only 3 percent of our

words are spelled in a really unpredictable way .

A mere 3 percent of our words may be orthographically trouble-some, but they

include some doozies, as we used to say. Almost any argument in defense of

English spelling begins to look a trifle flimsy when you consider such anomalies

as colonel, a word that clearly contains no r and yet proceeds as if it did, or ache,

bury, and pretty, all of which are pronounced in ways that pay the scantest regard

to their spellings, or four and forty, one of which clearly has a u and the other ofwhich just as clearly doesn't. In fact, all the "four" words—four, fourth,

fourteen, twenty-four, and so on—are spelled with a u until we get to forty when

suddenly the u disappears. Why?

As with most things in life, there are any number of reasons for all of these.

Sometimes our curious spellings are simply a matter of carelessness. That is

why, for instance, abdomen has an e but abdominal doesn't, why hearken has an

e but hark doesn't. Colonel is perhaps the classic example of this orthographic

waywardness.

The word comes from the old French coronelle, which the French adapted from

the Italian colonello (from which we get colonnade).

When the word first came into English in the mid-sixteenth century, it was

spelled with an r, but gradually the Italian spelling and pronunciation began to

challenge it. For a century or more both spellings and pronunciations were

commonly used, until finally with inimitable illogic we settled on the French

pronunciation and Italian spelling.

The matter of the vanishing u from forty is more problematic.