Phonetic spelling
Many languages aspire to a strict correlation between the sounds of the spoken language and the characters in which they are written. Italian, for example, has a fairly complete one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters. This makes it comparatively easy for children to learn to read and write - to become literate, or to avoid being illiterate - analfabeto ('without alphabet') in Italian, where the rendering of a Greek φ (transliterated as '-ph-' in English) as -f- illustrates phonetic spelling.
English has no strict relationship between sounds and letters. G. B. Shaw, a great campaigner for spelling reform, is said to have illustrated this by inventing the spelling 'ghoti' as a rendering of 'fish': the 'gh-' to be pronounced as in 'cough', the '-o-' as in 'women', and the '-ti' as in 'station.
Old and Middle English had been written with strict correlation between sounds and letters. (To cope with some of the sounds, they used some letters outside the current 26: aesc (Æ, lower case æ), eth (Ð, l.c. ð), thorn (Þ, l.c. þ), wynn (Ƿ, l.c. ƿ)and yogh (Ȝ, l.c. ȝ). After the Norman Conquest (1066), English came to be written by scribes who spoke French, with a different range of sounds, and probably some feelings of contempt towards the defeated English.
The difficulty of English spelling is compounded by the fact that it 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-'. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA: /kniːχtə/) 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. AWE's 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.
