Complex Numbers

Speling Iz Dificult

Ever wonder why spelling is so damn hard?

Typos, tricks and misprints  
Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable? Don’t blame the mix of languages; look to quirks of timing and technology

Yeah, I don't know about that, a bunch of stolen words from other languages has to take at least part of the blame.

Part of the problem is that English spelling looks deceptively similar to other languages that use the same alphabet but in a much more consistent way. You can spend an afternoon familiarising yourself with the pronunciation rules of Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Polish and many others, and credibly read out a text in that language, even if you don’t understand it. Your pronunciation might be terrible, and the pace, stress and rhythm would be completely off, and no one would mistake you for a native speaker – but you could do it. Even French, notorious for the spelling challenges it presents learners, is consistent enough to meet the bar. There are lots of silent letters, but they’re in predictable places. French has plenty of rules, and exceptions to those rules, but they can all be listed on a reasonable number of pages.

Sure, but consider the French translation of "birds:" oiseaux. Not one single solitary goddamned letter in that word is pronounced the way it ought to be pronounced.

The answer to the weirdness of English has to do with the timing of technology. The rise of printing caught English at a moment when the norms linking spoken and written language were up for grabs, and so could be hijacked by diverse forces and imperatives that didn’t coordinate with each other, or cohere, or even have any distinct goals at all. If the printing press had arrived earlier in the life of English, or later, after some of the upheaval had settled, things might have ended up differently.

Okay. This author is a linguist so I'm inclined to give more weight to what they're saying than, for example, what I'm thinking.

I don't have much more to say about the article, but it's a fascinating brief history of written English.

I will say this, though: At some point, the spelling/pronunciation link becomes a shibboleth. I think people use it to identify in-groups. For example, in my area, there's a road with the name Rio Road. We use it to spot tourists. "Yeah, I hear (business) is on Ree-oh Road." Oh, they must be from out of town; the proper pronunciation is Rye-oh. Or there's a nearby town named Staunton. You hear someone pronounce it "stawn-ton" and you know they ain't from around here and need to be watched carefully and maybe lynched.

Probably the worst offender in the orthography world, though, is the geoduck.

You see a word like that, and you think: oh, it must be gee-oh-duck. And it's probably a bird, right? An... earth bird? Well, obviously you're an ignorant rube and unworthy of respect because you didn't know it's pronounced "gooeyduck" and it's actually an enormous mollusk. How in the inconsistent hell do you get "gooey" from "geo?" I mean, seriously, goddamn, STOP IT.

So my contention is a language's inconsistencies are mostly there to fool outsiders to the language. It's like a secret code between club members: there to distinguish the cool people from the out-of-touch. You can also identify nerds with it: people who read more than they ought to tend to pronounce words they way they sound in their heads. For example, I know someone who, upon seeing a picturesque scene, always called it "picture-skew." Because that's a perfectly legitimate reading of the pronunciation of all those letters.

Now, I'm not one of the long line of idiots who try (and certainly fail) to "reform" English spelling to something more consistent. Such efforts were always doomed to failure, because, as I noted, it's a private club and you can't get in until you familiarize yourself with, at least, 90% of the silly rules, and even then, we'll still mark you as an outsider because you'll certainly have an accent. But dammit, I'm tempted.

Merit Badge Mini-Contest!

What's your favorite example of a word that ought not to be spelled like it is? Comment here before midnight tonight WDC time (Monday night) and you might get a Merit Badge on Tuesday.