English spelling really does make

cents sense

Paul Stapleton
March 4, 2017
Faculty of Humanities
?
 Two questions
1. What is spelling?
2. Why is English spelling so difficult?
1. What is spelling?
 Transition 1
(In our ancient past before we had oral language)
Imagine you are hunting
together with a partner.
Two of you are behind a
bush.
You see a deer but your
partner doesnt.
You need to stay quiet so
the deer doesnt run away.
Your partner looks at you.
What do you do?

Wright, E. (2005). Narrative, perception, language, and faith. Basingstoke:

Palgrave MacMillan.
 Symbolism begins
You point to the deer
and make a gesture.
Pointing and gesturing
may have been our first
use of symbolism.
 Transition 2: Symbolism becomes
abstract
Visual symbolism;
Around 100,000 ago
likely East or southern
Africa;
Color as a visual symbol
separate from bodily
gestures.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/science/14paint.
html?_r=1&ref=science
Symbolism grows in sophistication
From colors to holes
Oldest known
ornamentation shells
with bored holes circa
75,000 yrs. before
present
 Transition 3
(from 35,000 years ago)
 Cave paintings
Still far from spelling but
giant leap forward in symbolism.
Ideas could be conveyed over time (we can
still speculate on the meaning).
Sophisticated techniques in shading and
perspective to convey 3D and movement.
 In the human brain
the shapes and strokes in
ancient paintings often
resemble our present-day
letters.
Several dots followed by a
deer indicates the
number of animals, and
the vocalization of such a
drawing would have been
spontaneous with reading
as the inevitable result.
Dehaene, S. (2009). Reading in the brain.
New York: Viking.
 In the human brain
Our present writing systems are much more
advanced;
Present remarkable uniformity among our
many systems of writing in their method of
combining meaning with sound.
This in turn reflects the human brains nature
(discussed later).
 Transition 4
(from 10,000 years ago)
 Transition 4
Economic reason to write
when agriculture began
(about 10,000 years ago).
a need for accounting to
keep track of who owed
what to whom, especially
ownership of sheep and
in the case of taxes*
*Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1993). Gesture and speech.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Poe, M. (2011). A history of communication.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
From realia to
but not yet spelling
 Increasing complexity

http://pipux.
net/index.ph
p?id=20
 Transition 5
Cuneiform script ancient Sumerian
(southern Iraq 6000 years ago)
 First phonetic script

http://ww
w.calligrap
hylearn.co
m/cuneifor
m-
alphabet.ht
ml
China (4,000 years ago)
The same concept exists today

;)
 Ancient scripts
Rune (northern Europe) Ancient Roman alphabet
 Transition 6
Gutenberg (1450) and
moveable type;
Before the printing
press, all documents
were written by hand;
Literacy rate in Europe
was very low.
 Result of Gutenbergs printing press
Books were no longer
expensive and rare.
Books were available
widely;
Literacy expanded;
Spelling needed to be
regularized;
Led to Renaissance and
scientific revolution.
 Early example
Geoffery Chaucers Canterbury Tales (1400 AD)
 Here bygynneth the Book of the Tales
of Caunterbury.
1 Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
When April with its sweet-smelling showers
2 The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
3 And bathed every veyne in swich licour
And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
4 Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
By which power the flower is created;
5 Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,
Putting things in perspective
 Summary of spellings origin
1. Discovery of symbolism, e.g., pointing;
2. Increasingly abstract symbolism, colors;
3. Jewelry, art, e.g., cave paintings;
4. Pictures, strokes and dots representing
numbers and ideas;
5. Symbols representing sounds;
6. Books became widespread;
7. A need for regularized spelling arose.
 What is spelling?
Spelling is the visual representation of a word
or words with letters;
Spelling attempts to transcribe the sounds of
the language into alphabetic letters.
2. Why is English spelling so difficult?
 Spelling and intelligence
We often associate
good spelling with high
intelligence
and bad spelling with
stupidity
but of course it is
more complex than
that.
 Spelling quiz
Go to
https://kahoot.it
Or google kahoot
Enter a game pin and
nickname
DONT shut down your
browser until the end of the
lecture!!!
 How many words are misspelled?
1. It was a lovely occasion.
2. We have no accommodation.
3. I received a promotion from my boss.
4. Try to separate the fighting boys.
5. This word is definitely misspelled.
6. Its important to be consistent.
7. Do you have a 2017 calendar?
8. You need a good explanation.
 Misspellings in English
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/co
mmon-misspellings
Spelling bees

Cro-Magnon spelling bee

 Why is English spelling difficult?
This lecture would not take place if we were
discussing Spanish or Finnish.
These languages map letters onto sounds in a
transparent way.
English does not.
There are at least five reasons why English
spelling is difficult.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/30/spelling-bees-are-only-fun-in-english-heres-what-
other-countries-do-instead/?utm_term=.93a3771acd15
 Why is English spelling difficult?
Reason 1

1. English has 12 vowel

sounds but only five
letters (a, e, i, o, u).
 Our ancestors...
had to come up with a system to cope with
the fact that there were so few letters to
represent so many vowel sounds:
Spoken language came first; writing came
later.
beat, bit, bait, bet, bat, but, boot, book, boat,
bought
And then there are diphthongs:
Bite, bout, boit
Position of tongue
(Cross-section of the mouth)
 The nature of the English sound
system consonents
And 24 consonant
sounds but only 20
letters.

and some of those letters

are not very useful
q (sounds like a k)
x sounds like a ks
 Many consonant sounds in English...
...need to be represented by two letters.
Th- think , three voiceless
and father weather voiced
ch chance, chocolate voiceless
But the equivalent voiced sound uses a j
Justice, Jason
 Other languages
Japanese
Italian
and later Chinese
 Japanese
http://www.realkana.com/katakana/
Japanese uses three scripts
Hiragana=46 characters (only for Japanese words)
Katakana=46 characters (only for foreign words)
Kanji=thousands
Each character represents one of the sounds in
Japanese (one character for one sound)
Actually a syllabary (not an alphabet)
Example of katakana:
Mini-Japanese lesson:

 English can adapt Japanese words

The alphabet is quite good at representing the
sounds of Japanese:
Sayonara
Kounichiwa
Chinese is another story.
 Italian
http://italian.about.com/cs/pronunciation/ht/
pronounceconson.htm
http://italian.about.com/cs/pronunciation/ht/
pronouncevowels.htm
 Japanese and Italian
In both languages, the writing system maps
transparently onto the pronunciation.
Children learn to read much faster than
English-speaking children
or Chinese speaking children too
But thats another story
And dyslexia () is less common (in
Finnish and Spanish too)
 Summary of reason #1
The 26 letters of the alphabet do not align well with the
English sound system.
English has at least 13 vowel sounds and 24 consonant
sounds
but there are only 26 letters
and two of those letters are pretty useless
q (sounds like a k)
x sounds like a ks

In other words, if we had an alphabet with over 40 letters

that were completely dedicated to the English sound
system, spelling would be much more consistent. But our
sound system is not the only problem.
Why is English spelling difficult?
Reason 2
Whos accent?
They are
This is
What is this?
What is this room called?
 How do you pronounce

mandatory
 Summary of reason #2
English is spoken using many different
accents.
The spelling of any one word cannot satisfy all
of the different accents.
 Can we remove the irregularities of
modern English?
Five-years phased plan for
[Euro-English] :

[1st year Removing soft &

hard C]
In the first year, s will be
used instead of the soft c.
Sertainly, sivil servants will
resieve this news with joy.
Also, the hard c will be
replaced with k. Not only
will this klear up konfusion,
but typewriters kan have
one less letter.
 Sekond year
[2nd year Replace ph
by f]
There will be growing
publik enthusiasm in
the sekond year, when
the troublesome ph
will be replaced by f.
This will make words
like fotograf 20 per
sent shorter.
 Third year
[3rd year Remove the double
letters]
In the third year, publik
akseptanse of the new speling
kan be expekted to reach the
stage where more komplikated
changes are posible.
Governments will enkorage the
removal of double letters,
which have always ben a
deterent to akurate speling.
Also, al wil agre that the horible
mes of silent es in the languag
is disgrasful, and they would go.
 Forz and fifz yer
[4th year Replace th and w by z and v]
By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as
replasing th by z and w by v. During ze fifz year, ze
unesesary o kan be dropd from vords kontaining ou,
and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer
kombinations of leters.

[5th year]
After zis fifz yer, ye vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be
no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu
understand ech ozer.

Ze drem vil finali kum tru!

 Could there be some hidden logic to
English spelling?
Spelling helps to distinguish word meanings
To, two too
I, eye,
Cue, kew, queue, Q,
 Why is English spelling difficult?
Reason 3
English has many
homonyms
 Homonym exceptions
(Same spelling, different meaning)
Can you think of two meanings for each of
these words:
Check
Book
Fat
Glass
Fire
Seal
Watch
 Hidden logic
Some spellings help with meaning and
pronunciation
Insane (inseyn)
Insanity (insanity)
Column (silent n)
Columnist (n is pronounced)
Christ
Christmas
 Summary of reason #3
Basically, the differing spellings of these
English homonyms represent our ancestors
efforts to help us distinguish meanings as we
read
Although this means when we are children
learning to read, it requires more time, say
compared to Spanish, Finnish or German
children, once we learn the code, reading
becomes easier.
 Borrowing from other languages
Reason 4
The British Isles, the home of English has had
a long history of invasions and with these
invasions, many new words have entered the
language.
In many cases, the original spelling has been
retained.
French has had a profound influence.
 French
Most words ending in the letters tion such
as information or participation come from
French, but our instinct of English spelling
suggests that tion should be spelled shun
Most words ending in que such as boutique,
come from French. Wouldnt it be easier to
simply use a k?
Schadenfreude
()
 Unstressed syllable are pronounced the same
Reason #5
Professional
/prfnl/
Summary of five reasons why English
spelling is complex
1. English has many more vowel and consonant sounds
than there are letters in the alphabet.
2. English is pronounced very differently according to
where one comes from but one standard spelling is
needed.
3. English has many homophones that need to be
distinguished from each other, e.g., sale and sail.
4. Many English words come from other languages and
retain their original spelling.
5. Unstressed syllables mostly have the same sound []
but often various letters represent this sound.
 Why didnt Chinese
develop an alphabet instead of characters?

Lets look at a Chinese poem written in
pinyin.
 << Sh Shshsh sh >>

ShshshshSh Sh, shsh, shshsh.

Shshshshshshsh.
Sh, shsh shsh.
Shsh, shSh Shshsh.
Shshshsh, shsh sh, sh shsh shsh.
Shshshsh sh, shshsh.
Shshsh, Shsh shshshsh.
Shshsh, Shshshshshsh.
Shsh, sh shshsh, shsh sh.
Shshshsh.
https://youtu.be/VJs0Wu7plZ8
A middle
 Orthographic transparency
(How clearly the writing system maps onto the sound system)

Chinese
French
English
German
Finnish
Spanish
Italian
Japanese*
*for hiragana and katagana only
 Chinese and Italian
These two languages are at
the two extremities of a
continuous scale of spelling
transparency:
Italian has relatively few
sounds so the alphabet
suits it well.
Chinese is made up of
single syllables; therefore,
homophones are relatively
frequent.
The alphabet is not suitable
English is in the middle
Chinese spelling
Each of the symbols could be understood in
hundreds of different ways
Chinese writing also relies on several hundred
phonetic markers () that further specify
how a given root should be pronounced,
 Could there be some hidden logic to
our writing systems?
How did our
ancient
ancestors use
our brains visual
system to
transfer
thoughts and
speech into
writing?

Letterbox area
Sight to sound
 fMRI
(functional magnetic resonance imaging)

MRIs can detect iron in

the blood.
Using very powerful
magnets, the MRI can
show where blood is
flowing in different
parts of the brain.
 Many new understandings
about the brain in the
past 20 years.
 How do we read?

When we read, only four or five letters are in focus

at one time
Our eyes do not move smoothly across the page,
but start and stop 3 to 4 times a second.
We notice only 3-4 to the right and 7-8 to the left.
 Neurological domain
There is a strong
similarity among all
the worlds writing
APPLE
systems with regard

Apple
to the shapes and
strokes used.
Only a very small
number of shapes
and strokes.
The irrelevance of
size.
 The flexible brain
yOu CaN pRoBaBlY rEaD ThIs
SeNtEnCe aT ClOsE tO NoRmAl
sPeEd.

Five, six, seven, eight

 Chinese too

 Do we actually silently pronounce a
word when we read?
Read the following For the familiar words,
words: you probably processed
Rabbit them based on meaning
Bountary But for the unfamiliar
Culdolt words, you pronounced
them first, then tried to
Money bring meaning.
Dimon
Karpit
 Sound into meaning
Try this sentence:
Ay fink u shud stop yr dok frum baaking.
Pal iz a wary gud teechr.
(This is how you read a sentence when you
were a child.)
 Spelling in the brain
In general, there are two reading routes of spelling
1. Indirect route:
First decipher the letter string
convert it into pronunciation
access the meaning of the sound
This how we read as children (or how we read a new
foreign language
This route plays a role when learning new words or
reading the sentence in irregular language
Donald Trump has a dystopian view of the world.
 Spelling in the brain
2. Direct route: From spelling
immediately to meaning
first recovers the identity and
meaning of the word;
and then uses the lexical
information to recover its
pronunciation;
Happy, sad,
 For example Mistake in Chinese sentence

SAD hard to pass through (the drain)

If worse than juice

innocent today is really hot
 Even punctuation carries meaning
A woman without her man is nothing
Punctuate this sentence to create meaning
from a mans point of view or a womans point
of view.
 Mans point of view
A woman without her man is nothing
 Mans point of view
A woman: without her, man is nothing.
 Case studies
In English, we can observe many irregularities of
spelling, for example:

Why do we spell <-ce> & <-se> in different words?

dense, worse VS dominance, evidence

Why do we use <c>, not <s>, to represent the sound

/s/ ?
grace, face, city, ice

Why are there are so many silent consonant in

words Knight, night or light?
 Influence from French
Since Britain was
conquered by
Nomandie in AD1066,
English has borrowed
many French words
[grace, face, city, ice]
Other examples of borrowed words from French:

English French
ask demand
wish decide
room chamber
answer respond
order command
freedom liberty
 Some rules of irregularities of spelling

French adjectives: Nouns related to adjectives

ending in <ant/ent> are spelled with a <c>, for
example dominant/dominance
evident/evidence.
Adjectives generally have <s>, such as dense, worse
(Horobin, 2013, p.14)

Mark the sound of the vowel: Silent final e makes

the vowel say its name, such as
con cone
cut cute
mat mate
 Case study <gh>
Night, light, sight, etc
In Old English (before the 12th century), the
spelling was niht, liht and siht
The h sound was pronounced.
But in Middle English (12-15 century), some
dialects dropped the h sound.
Remember, travel at this time was by horse
and carriage (by the rich only) and there were
no telephones.
 Case study <gh>
But London was becoming
the center of power and the
dialect there was more
conservative keeping the h
sound.
Spelling with a gh was
adopted to reflect the
London accent, but about
500 years ago, the h sound
disappeared all over Britain,
even in London..
However, the spelling did
not change.
 Troublesome <gh>
In some cases, the <gh> has changed its sound
to /f/ and now survives into modern English,
such as :
laugh, enough, rough, through
Why didnt English invent new letters?
In English <th> sound is represented by two
letters, but it has two different sounds

think, without, both

this, father, breathe
(an old letter used for both forms of <th>)
Why did these old letters disappear?
 Answer
were non-Latin
Printing presses imported to England from the
European continent did not have these letters.
Also, was considered to close to d and
would cause confusion.
Therefore decisions were made to simply use
th
 Case study: Vowels
English has many different spellings of vowels
that are not transparent.
Meat, meet, me, receive, relief, police
This is just one example of one vowel sound.
Basically, the spelling of English vowels is a
mess.
 Case study: Vowels
The Great Vowel Shift (from 1500)
 Causes
Black Death 1350 when
over 30% of Europes
population died from a
bacterial disease called
the plague.
Imagine up to half of the
population dying!
One theory: Great
migrations of people and
mixing of new accents
created new
pronunciation.
 Vowel sounds changed
but over 200-300 years.
This slow change of vowel sounds over
generations could not easily be reflected in
the spelling.
At the same time, migration of people to
America, forming new dialects and
pronunciation also had to be considered.
 In a perfect world
English would have its own alphabet of over
40 letters.
Everyone would speak the same dialect with
the same pronunciation.
No new words would have entered English
from other languages.
 Dyslexia ()
A genetic disorder in
the ability to decode
letters into sounds.
For example
pa, ba
Dyslexic children have
trouble noticing the
difference.
 British vs. American
In the early 18th century, English
spelling was not standardised.
Differences became noticeable
after the publishing of
influential dictionaries.
Today's British English spellings
follow, for the most part, those
of Samuel Johnson's A
Dictionary of the English
Language (1755),
Many American
English spellings follow Noah
Webster's An American
Dictionary of the English
Language (1828).[1]
 British vs. American
Webster was a strong
proponent of English
spelling reform.
Many spelling changes
proposed in the United
States by Webster himself,
were not accepted.
In England, the original
spelling of words coming
from French was preferred.
 Shortlist of differences
Or-our
Or-our labo(u)r, colo(u)r
but glamor
 Shortlist of differences
re-er
Many words ending in er were originally
ending in re (from French).
Letter, December, thermometer, number
Theater, theatre
Center, centre
Exceptions: mother, anger, danger, quarter,
river (words from German)
and program(me)
 Spelling today and tomorrow
L84AD8
Late for a date.
OMG
BTW
CU
IMHO
WTF
What the f@#%
 Kahoot
you think these shortcuts are damaging the
language and hurting students literacy?
 Many are critical but
havent we always been doing it?
two
And
E.g.
i.e.
lb.
@
 Is there a danger for students?
IMHO
 Non-standard spelling
Parents recently are spelling their childrens
names creatively perhaps to grant them
individuality.
Kathryn
Stefani
Rachyl
?
 Common creative spellings

Fish n chips
Im lovin it.
Kwik
 Future spelling
(Irregular verbs)
English has many irregular verbs (about 300)
Be, have, do, go, say, get, make, know, see, think
50% of the verbs you see when reading
English are irregular!
Between 6,000 and 12,000 years ago, the
ancester of English was Proto-Indo-European.
Past tense was formed by an ablaut which
changed the vowel sound of a word.
E.g., sing sang sung
 Therefore,
in the ancestral language of English, all verbs
might have been irregular.
Then a process of regularization occurred in
early German for new words.
That process was adding an ed sound to
verbs in the past tense, e.g., Google= googled
Slowly over 100s of years, the original
irregular verbs were regularized
So help-holp became help-helped
 Thinking question
Why didnt all the verbs change to the regular
spelling?
E.g., go-went goed
Maked
Knowed
 Answer
The regularization of verbs is ongoing and
based on frequency.
Whats the past tense of :
Sneak
Fly
Wed (presently changing to regular form)
Theory: less frequent verbs get regularized.
 Answer
Big data tells us that one or two of the
following verbs may become regularized by
2500:
Begin, break, bring, buy choose, draw, drink,
drive, eat
Based on frequency of usage, eventually (if
English remains a language) all verbs will
become regular.
 Similarly
(comparatives)
What is the English rule for making
comparatives?
Beijing is _______than Hong Kong in winter.
(temperature)
Apartments are _____________ in Wanchai than
Taipo. (cost of rent)
Humid,
safe,
cheap
 Burn, smell, spell, spoil
Burnt, smelt, spelt, spoilt regularized in the
United States first and have mostly regularized
in the UK (but not completely)
 MS Word
Auto spell checker helps to
regularize spelling and provides
less opportunity for spelling to
change.
As more and more written
communication is performed
on the keyboard (not
handwriting), the software
controls our spelling.
Therefore there is less
opportunity to introduce a new
variety.
 Spellchecker
1. It was a lovely occassion
2. I recieved a promotion
from my boss.
3. Try to seperate the
fighting boys.
 Fun spelling
What sentence contains every letter in the
alphabet?
The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown
dog.
What word contains all the vowels: a,e,i,o,u
automobile
What word contains all the vowels in order:
facecious
 Fun spelling
What word has the most double letters?
Committee
Is there a word that has four vowels in a row?
Queue
Q&A
 The public lecture series goes on line!
Open in late March 2017

deor deer Topics:

English spelling really does make sense

Idioms: Revealing the colors of English Expressions

World Englishes

Connected Speech Across the Boundaries

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