Phonetic spelling
The position is compounded in English by the fact that the spelling of our English came to be fixed in a period when the sounds of the language were changing. The current conventions of English spelling began to be accepted from about 1500, although they didn’t become very firmly fixed until the eighteenth century. Over the hundred years from 1450 to 1550, there was a huge upheaval in the way English was pronounced. This is called the Great English Vowel Shift. (It is why the vowels a, e, i, o and u are pronounced in a different way in English from that in any other European language.) As well as vowels, there were linked changes in much of our pronunciation. The word ‘knight’, for example, is now pronounced with two consonants and one vowel glide between them, just like ‘night’, or as it is sometimes spelled phonetically in advertising ‘nite’.
In the time of the poet Chaucer, the ‘father of English poetry’, ‘knight’ was pronounced with an initial ‘-k-’ followed by ‘-n-’; the vowel was a single sound, not a glide or diphthong (it sounded like ‘-ee-’); and the ‘-gh-’ before the ‘-t-’ was pronounced as a kind of guttural quite like the modern Scots ‘-ch-’. This International Phonetic Alphabet version of it shows both that the sounds of our language have changed; and that the writing is the relic of an original phonetic spelling. (It also hints at the logic behind the IPA.)
From time to time, people campaign for spelling reform in English. They seek – idealistically, and logically enough – to make our writing more phonetically realistic. My own view is that the attempt is doomed to failure. This is because of the variations in the sounds of the different varieties of English. It would be unfortunate if those living in the North of England wrote ‘coop’ when those in the South wrote ‘cup’. A phonetically written language would be divisive.
And anyway, we have invested a great deal of effort in learning our current crazy system. All our libraries are full of books written in the conventional system. So no one will make the effort needed to change.
