Why English Spelling Is So Strange

Spanish speakers learning English are often told, sooner or later, that English spelling simply cannot be trusted. Why should "though", "through", "tough" and "cough" look so similar and sound so different? Why is there a "b" in "debt" that nobody pronounces? The short answer is that English spelling is not so much a system as a museum, in which the remains of more than a thousand years of history have been carefully preserved.

The story is usually said to begin in 1066, when England was conquered by the Normans, who spoke a variety of French. For roughly three centuries afterwards, French was the language of the court, the law and much of the written record, and the scribes who wrote English were often trained in French conventions. Old English "cwen" came to be written "queen", and "hus" eventually became "house". Thousands of French words were also borrowed, frequently keeping spellings that suited French rather than English.

The next turning point was the printing press, which William Caxton brought to England in 1476. Printing made spelling far more consistent, but it also froze many spellings in place at a moment when the language was still changing. Early printers were not always native English speakers, and some historians believe that the "h" in "ghost" may reflect the habits of Flemish typesetters, although the evidence is not conclusive.

Meanwhile, something dramatic was happening to pronunciation. Between roughly 1400 and 1700, the long vowels of English moved, one after another, in a process now known as the Great Vowel Shift. A word like "bite", whose vowel had once sounded much like the «i» of Spanish «vida», came to be pronounced with the vowel it has today. The spellings, however, had largely been fixed already. This is one of the main reasons why English vowel letters correspond so poorly to English vowel sounds.

Renaissance scholars then added a further layer of confusion. Admiring Latin, some of them inserted silent letters to show where a word had come from. "Dette", borrowed from French, became "debt" to recall Latin «debitum», and "doute" became "doubt". Occasionally they got it wrong: the "s" in "island" was added by analogy with "isle", even though the two words are historically unrelated.

By the time Samuel Johnson published his famous dictionary in 1755, most spellings were treated as settled. It was in the United States that the most influential attempt at reform was made. Noah Webster, whose American dictionary appeared in 1828, argued that a new nation deserved simpler spelling. Many of his proposals were rejected, but some were widely adopted, which is why Americans write "color", "center" and "traveler" where the British generally prefer "colour", "centre" and "traveller".

Is any of this good news for learners? Perhaps, in a way. Once you know that a spelling often records where a word came from rather than how it sounds today, many oddities begin to make a kind of sense. English spelling may be inconsistent, but it is rarely random. It is, above all, a record of everyone who has ever borrowed, printed, corrected or argued about the language.