The Mother Tongue (19 page)

or so for most Western languages) and that whereas Western let-ters can be represented on computer screens by as few as 35 dots of light, Japanese characters can require up to 576 dots to be clearly distinguishable.

It is a disarming reflection of their determination and ingenuity that they have become such a technological powerhouse with such a patently inefficient system of orthography.

In comparison the Western way of writing begins to look admi-rably 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 some-times stumble. The first printing of the second edition of
Webster's
New World Dictionary
had
millennium
spelled
millenium 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 prescriptivists who regard "innovation as dan-gerous 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 Univer-sity 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?

S PELLING

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

supercede

conceed

procede

idiosyncracy

concensus

accomodate

impressario

irresistable

rhythym

opthalmologist

diptheria

anamoly

afficianado

caesarian

grafitti

In fact, they all are. So was
misspelled at
the end of the pre-ceeding 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, cir-cumflexes, and so on—and, above all, English preserves the spell-ing 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,
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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 d00zies, 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 scant-est regard to their spellings, or
four
and
forty,
one of which clearly has a u and the other of which 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 disap-pears. 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 cen-tury, 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
SPEI.LING

with inimitable illogic we settled on the French pronunciation and Italian spelling.

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

Chaucer spelled it with a u, as indeed did most people until the end of the seventeenth century, and some for half a century or so after that. But then, as if by universal decree, it just quietly van-ished. No one seems to have remarked on it at the time. Bernstein suggests [in
Dos, Don'ts and Maybes of English Usage,
page 87]

that it may have reflected a slight change in pronunciation—to this day many people aspirate
four
and
forty in
slightly different ways—but this begs the question of why the pronunciation changed for the first word and not for the second. In any case, it would be most unusual for the spelling of a word to change to reflect such a minor adjustment of pronunciation.

Usually in English we strive to preserve the old spelling at al-most any cost to logicality. Take
ache.
The spelling seems desper-ately inconsistent today, as indeed it is. Up until Shakespeare's day,
ache
was pronounced
aitch
when it was a noun. As a verb, it was pronounced ake—but also, rather sensibly, was spelled
ake.

This tendency to fluctuate between "ch" and "k" sounds was once fairly common. It accounts for such pairs as
speech/speak, stench/

stink,
and
stitch/stick.
But
ache,
for reasons that defy logic, adopted the verb pronunciation and the noun spelling.

English spelling has caused problems for about as long as there have been English words to spell. When the Anglo-Saxons became literate in the sixth century, they took their alphabet from the Romans, but quickly realized that they had three sounds for which the Romans had no letters. These they supplied by taking three symbols from their old runic alphabet: w, p, and 8. The first, literally double u, represented the sound "w" as it is pronounced today. The other two represented the "th" sound: p (called thorn) and 8 (called eth and still used in Ireland).

The first Norman scribes came to England and began grappling with what to them was a wholly foreign tongue—a fact clearly evident in many of the spellings from Domesday Book. In just one small parish in Yorkshire, Hanlith was recorded as Hagenlith, Mal-ham as Malgham, and Calton as Colton—all spellings that were
THE MOTHER TONGUE

probably never used locally. Many such errors can be attributed to carelessness and unfamiliarity but others clearly reflect Norman orthographic preferences. The Normans certainly did not hesitate to introduce changes they felt more comfortable with, such as substituting
qu
for
cw.
Had William the Conqueror been turned back at Hastings, we would spell
queen
as
cwene.
The letters z and
g
were introduced and the Old English d and v were phased out.

The Normans also helped to regularize such sounds as
ch
and
sh,
which in Anglo-Saxon could be rendered in a variety of ways. They substituted o for u in certain words such as
come
and
one,
and they introduced the
ou
spelling as in
house
and
mouse.
These changes made things more orderly and logical for Norman scribes, but not necessarily for later native speakers of English.

As we have seen elsewhere, the absence of a central authority for the English language for three centuries meant that dialects pros-ered and multiplied. When at last French died out and English words rushed in to take their place in official and literary use, it sometimes happened that people adopted the spelling used in one...

__

part of the country .and

pronunciation used in another. That is

-- - --

___

why we use the western England spellings for
busy
and bury, but give the first the London pronunciation "bizzy" and the second the Kentish pronunciation "berry." Similarly, if you've ever wondered how on earth a word spelled
one
could be pronounced "wun" and
once
could be "wunce," the answer in both cases is that Southern pronunciations attached themselves to East Midland spellings.

Once they were pronounced more or less as spelled—i.e., "oon

"and "oons."

Even without the intervention of the Normans, there is every reason to suppose that English spelling would have been a trifle erratic. Largely this is because for the longest time people seemed emphatically indifferent to matters of consistency in spelling. There were exceptions. As long ago as the early thirteenth century a monk named Orm was calling for a more logical and phonetic system for English spelling. (His proposals, predictably, were en-tirely disregarded, but they tell scholars more about the pronun-ciation of the period than any other surviving document.) Even so, it is true to say that most people throughout much of the history of
S PELLING

the English language have seemed remarkably unconcerned about niceties of spelling—even to the point of spelling one word two ways in the same sentence, as in this description of James I by one of his courtiers, in which just eight words come between two spell-ings of
clothes:
"He was of a middle stature, more corpulent though in his clothes than in his body, yet fat enough, his cloathes being ever made large and easie. . . ." Even more remarkably perhaps, A
Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words
by Robert Cawdrey, pub-lished in 1604 and often called the first English dictionary, spelled
words
two ways on the title page. [Cited by Crystal,
The English
Language,
page 204]

Throughout this period you can find names and words spelled in many
ways—where,
for instance, has been variously recorded as
wher, whair, wair, wheare, were, whear,
and so on. People were even casual about their names. More than eighty spellings of Shakespeare's name have been found, among them Shagspeare, Shakspere, and even Shakestaffe. Shakespeare himself did not spell the name the same way twice in any of his six known signatures and even spelled it two ways on one document, his will, which he signed Shakspere in one place and Shakspeare in another. Curi-ously, the one spelling he never seemed to use himself was Shake-speare. Much is often made of all this, but a moment's reflection should persuade us that a person's signature, whether he be an Elizabethan playwright or a modern orthodontist, is about the least reliable way of determining how he spells his name. Many people scrawl their signatures, and Shakespeare was certainly one of his-tory's scrawlers. In any case, whether he used the spelling himself or not, Shakespeare is how his name appears on most of the sur-viving legal documents concerning him,
as
well as on the title pages of his sonnets and on twenty-two of the twenty-four original quarto editions of his plays.

Still, there is no gainsaying that people's names in former times were rendered in a bewildering variety of ways—some of which bore scant resemblance to the owner's preferred name. Christo-pher Marlowe was sometimes referred to by his contemporaries as Marley. The foremost printer of the Elizabethan age variously signed himself, in print, John Day or Daye or Daie. Charlton Laird
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in The Word
cites a man of the period whose name is variously recorded as Waddington, Wadigton, Wuldingdoune, Windidune, Waddingdon, and many others.