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Alphabetic writing systems use graphemes to represent phonemes. But in their “Psychology of Reading” chapter of 2003’s Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, researchers Simon Garrod and Meredyth Daneman observe that English has one of the most complicated grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences among languages that use alphabetic (or even syllabic) writing systems, rather than logographic writing systems like Chinese.

This property makes it difficult—at times even impossible—to guess the correct way to say an unknown English word you have only ever read, or the correct way to write an unknown English word you have only ever heard said.

And because English dictionaries order entries alphabetically, when you do not know the correct way to write a word, you also cannot reliably look it up in a dictionary.

The many problems all this creates affect both L1- and L2-learners of English alike.

  • How did English come to use a writing system which makes spelling it so hard? What specific contributing causes gave rise to this painful complexity in English that is so much worse than in almost any other language that uses an alphabet to spell its words with?
tchrist
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Louis Liu
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    Basically because the spelling system doesn't work; it's designed for Middle English and didn't change when Modern English came along. Since it doesn't represent the pronunciation, you have to learn to spell each word individually, with a few "rules" that are full of holes and often don't work. The real villain, though, is the supposition that every word always hasta be spelled the same way. Whose idea was that? Nothing would happen if everybody speld thingz the way they liked. – John Lawler Nov 19 '21 at 16:51
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    Compared to some other languages, English has had a lot of disparate influences—Latin, Germanic, French, Anglo-Saxon—and has elements of the grammar, vocabulary, and spelling from all of them. – Andy Bonner Nov 19 '21 at 17:24
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    I don't see that this question is "opinion-based." There are clearly reasons why English spelling should be less consistent than that of, for instance, Spanish. – Casey Nov 20 '21 at 03:55
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    Related: Does the quirky spelling in English actually make it easier to read? and Why does English spelling use silent letters? – Mari-Lou A Nov 22 '21 at 06:37
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    Another reason is that the vowel system isn't consistent across dialects, with some merging and some splits. There are dozens of questions about individual vowels on here, which will illustrate some of the variations and the complexity in answering the question. – Stuart F Nov 22 '21 at 09:47
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    In the word "Scent", is the S or the C silent? – Mari-Lou A Nov 22 '21 at 09:50
  • I've read somewhere [reference needed] that it was at least partially a deliberate choice from say 18th-19th dominant classes to assert their superiority over the uneducated. Same in France [some references I can provide] at the same time with the nonsensical spelling rules and exceptions there.. – bonob Nov 23 '21 at 23:20
  • @tchrist: what kind of canonical answer are you looking for? The question as posed is silly and doesn't have a good answer, let alone a canonical one. – John Lawler Nov 28 '21 at 03:20
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    @JohnLawler Ten things I quickly thought of: § Speech changes faster than print, and not respelling words when pronunciations change. § Using a foreign alphabet unsuited to our phonemes. § Mischievous meddlers adding phantom letters we never said like in debt/receipt/island. § No 1:1 mapping between sequences of graphemes and phonemes, it’s many-to-many w/lotsa conflicting multigraphs yet still has bugs/gaps like the/thin/rathouse or phonemic stress. § Triggered phonologic/phonetic effects unaccounted for in spelling. ... – tchrist Nov 28 '21 at 04:38
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    @JohnLawler ... § “Deep orthography” conveying nonphonemic info like etymology and morphology. § Unrespelled morphophonemics like -s in cats/cads and -ed in flayed/shipped/raided. § Not respelling loanwords but semi-importing source language’s alien rules. § Spoken by a billion people globally w/countless mutually incompatible splits and mergers making any single representation unfaithful to millions of speakers. § No global hegemon/autarch to enforce change via imperial fiat sub poena capitis. :) – tchrist Nov 28 '21 at 04:38
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    @tchrist for these points, please encourage emphasis in any answer how they address to what extent English goes much further than other languages. The question isn't about why spelling in general lags behind pronunciation, but why is it so specially different for English as opposed to many other languages/orthographies. – Mitch Nov 28 '21 at 15:41
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    @Mitch That's merely an accident of circumstance, and perhaps a result of wide success (evolutionarily speaking). But none of these things were done with a view to making spelling harder. Spelling is just a way English speakers have of dealing with our terrible system. Many other literate languages don't have a special verb 'to spell'; they just use 'to write', meaning to represent language with letters. – John Lawler Nov 28 '21 at 20:08
  • Related. – tchrist Oct 23 '22 at 16:52

1 Answers1

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Adding to the comment by John Lawler:

According to An Introduction to Language, 5th Edition (Victoria Fromkin & Robert Rodman, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1993):

"The spelling of most of the words in English today is based on the Late Middle English pronunciation (that used by Chaucer) and on the early forms of Modern English (used by Shakespeare).... When the printing press was introduced in the fifteenth century, not only were archaic pronunciations "frozen," but the spelling did not always represent even those pronunciations."

In short, spellings started to become standardized with the invention of the printing press, while pronunciation continued to change. The best example I remember from my Linguistic course was the word "night." The letters "gh" are silent now, but at the time standardized spellings were being established, they were pronounced. At that time, the word was actually pronounced closer to a throaty, German "Nacht."

Greybeard
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Syntax Junkie
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    The most famous illustration of this problem is the phonetic spelling of the word 'fish' as "G-H-O-T-I": GH (as in 'enouGH' for the F); O (as in 'wOmen'); TI (as in 'staTIon'). Your problem is about the so-called Great Vowel Shift, which took place over a long period somewhere between 1400 and 1700. The possible reasons for it are still disputed and are well set out in the Wikipedia entry for GFS. Have you considered that regional accents are stronger in the UK than in most other countries? So 'grass' is pronounced 'grarce' in standard 'BBC' English but as ... 'grass' in Yorkshire! – Tuffy Nov 24 '21 at 20:21
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    @Tuffy Spelling pronunciations always fail. "GRARRRRCE" makes no sense to anybody who actually says their R’s. :) We would say "GRAHHHHHHHZ" for that. – tchrist Nov 25 '21 at 01:42
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    Can you elaborate on how this is specific to English? That is, all languages have changes over the centuries...why were other languages better able to maintain spelling to pronunciation correspondence? – Mitch Nov 25 '21 at 02:42
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    @tchrist You are right, as my ex-US wife regularly reminds me. – Tuffy Nov 25 '21 at 07:58
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    @Mitch This is a dark topic because the further back in time we go, the more limited the proportion of any population has its pronunciation or spelling (if it was literate) preserved. The only example I know is ancient Greek, in which three or four 'dialects' were preserved in writings. Because the dialects (as reflected in the use of vowels) are preserved in the writings of the people. Sappho and Alkaios of Lesbos were famous, widely respected poets, Sappho as the best poet ever. The 'Attic' dialectes of Athens came (with some modifications) to dominate writing after Alexander's conquest. – Tuffy Nov 25 '21 at 08:19
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    @Mitch Another factor is the longer history of our alphabet. The writing systems of most European languages are based on the Roman alphabet. This was already inadequate for Latin: it failed to distinguish long vowels from short. It has likewise proved inadequate for English which has had a complicated vowel system with long & short ones, both before and after the Great Vowel Shift. It isn't so bad for languages that use accented or umlauted letters. Unfortunately, English has made little use of such marks, except in unassimilated loans & fudges like blessèd. – Rosie F Nov 25 '21 at 08:32
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    French is similar, with an orthography that was introduced in the 15th century, with reforms proposed since the 16th, and which was outdated by the 17th century - its spelling system is also awful, with lots of silent letters, not always consistent (e.g. T and C at the end of words), a variety of ways of spelling vowels (especially nasalised vowels), and diacritics illustrating historical spellings rather than pronunciation (notably the caret). It also had a lot of foreign influence and changed pronunciations. See Wikipedia – Stuart F Nov 25 '21 at 15:41
  • @StuartF: When the caret is positioned above a character (as opposed to free-standing) it's called a circumflex. – Robusto Nov 27 '21 at 02:44
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    I'd also add the fact that English spelling is generally resistant to uniformity at the expense of etymology, so you basically have three systems of spelling that cover most words -- Germanic, Romance-derived (you could split this further into "French" and "Latin" if you wanted), and Greek-derived, plus many other words that don't fit into any of those. That's a contrast to other languages that will change the spelling of borrowings to conform to their rules. – Casey Nov 27 '21 at 06:43
  • See also https://childrenofthecode.org/interviews/venezky.htm. Venezky was a leading authority on English orthography, arguing that it’s structured, although complex. – Xanne Nov 27 '21 at 07:17
  • http://orianit.edu-negev.gov.il/english/files/reading/articles/Moats.pdf argues that understanding the English spelling system makes children better readers. – Xanne Nov 28 '21 at 00:49
  • @Tuffy: Though the rough cough plough me through! – Drew Dec 01 '21 at 21:16
  • @Drew Thanks for this good thought. – Tuffy Dec 01 '21 at 21:19
  • Accidents of history: English in flux – Drew Dec 01 '21 at 21:20
  • @Tuffy: Though the rough cough ought not plough me through, it doooo. – Drew Dec 01 '21 at 21:21
  • Sloughing in the slough. – Xanne Dec 01 '21 at 23:17
  • @Mitch A comparison to Spanish would be interesting, it shares diverse political entities with English and separated populations. – Xanne Dec 01 '21 at 23:35