English Spelling and Sound, and English's Roots in Many Languages

For thought:

English is not always spelled the way it sounds: when is it necessary to spell correctly? When is it o.k. to spell according to your own--or someone else's--phonetic system?

Should texts you read be available in 'phonetic spelling?'

A Little History . . .

• Old English: "We Gar-dena*" ('We spear people'): 450 A.D. to 1050 A.D.

  
  

  Beowulf (Anglo Saxon Poetic Records edition; from Georgetown University)

  http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/medieval/labyrinth/library/oe/texts/a4.1.html

  Old English Language (from Wikipedia)

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English

  Words from Old English include "dagum" ('day') and "hat" ('hot'). Old English is in some ways close to the North Germanic languages (such as Norwegian) in which "dag" means 'day' today.

  The k sound in words such as "know" and the g sound in words such as "gnaw" would have both been pronounced in the related Old English words.

  The sound that is spelled ch in the German words "nacht" ('night'), "nicht" ('not'), and "recht" ('right'); and in the Scottish word, "loch" ('lake'), may have entered English from either the Celtic languages (see ibiblio.org, Who Were the Celts?) or (more probably) from the Central Germanic languages (such as German). This sound is spelled gh in modern English words such as "night" and "right," but it's no longer pronounced.
  (NOTE: I do not find this sound anywhere in the West Saxon dialect of Old English used in Beowulf; so it either entered English through other dialects--or else entered English after Beowulf was composed (the latter occurred between 700 and 1100 A.D.)

• The Norman Conquest: the Influx of French/Norman Roots: 1066 A.D.

  "And French she spake full fair and fetisly, after the schoole of Stratford atte Bowe, for French of Paris was to her unknowe"

  --Geoffrey Chaucer; see http://www.fullbooks.com/The-Canterbury-Tales-and-Other-Poems1.html)

  Norman Conquest of England (from Wikipedia)

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest

  By Middle English, the v and f alternated; thus, for example, a v in some word forms alternated with f in related word forms. Thus Old English heofon became Modern English Heaven (Creightonian University Department of English; retrieved online 2007; http://mockingbird.creighton.edu/english/worldlit/teaching/upperdiv/mideng.htm).
  (For more on this, see TABLE ONE: F and V alternation in English.

  Words with French spelling include those in which the final k sound is spelled que (as in, for example, "plaque") or the final g sound is spelled gue (as in, for example, "plague"), as well as words in which ci or ti is pronounced like sh (as in "ancient" and "nation"), and words in which there is a 'soft g sound (such as "gentle" [French 'gentil,' pronounced jEntil]).

• The Great Vowel Shift, the Influx of Greek & Latin Roots, and the Renaissance: 1400 A.D. to 1600 A.D.

  From Marilyn Vos Savant (2001), The Art of Spelling: the Madness & the Method; illustrations by Joan Reilly (New York, London: W. W. Norton & COmpany)
  

  (available through Amazon.com, http://www.amazon.com/Art-Spelling-Madness-Method/dp/0393322084/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199898781&sr=1-3):

  "The years from 1400 to 1600 were arguably the most dramatic for English spelling because in that two-century span, three influential events occurred: the Great Vowel Shift, which still torments us today; the birth and flowering of the Renaissance, which brought a renewed interest in the civilizations of classical Greek and Rome and thus an influx of Greek and Latin words and spellings; and the stabilization of spelling as the result of the printing press.

  "The remarkable phenomenon now known as the Great Vowel Shift occurred in London and then throughout England from 1400 to 1600 as a result of the streams of young immigrants entering the capital and introducing disparate dialects into speech. This had a profound effect on the relationship of spelling to sound in many English words."

  "The Great vowel Shift" is the reason why the a in "lake" is pronounced so much like the ei in reign; the a in "lake" was originally a lower vowel, pronounced much like the a in "lagoon," a modern word related to "lake."
  (NOTE: to see which vowels are high and which vowels are low, check out the chart showing the Vowels either at The Sounds of English (http://teacherweb.com/Fl/Cocoa/CEWhitehead/EnglishSounds.html) at this site, or at the International Phonetic Alphabet chart published online by the University of California at Los Angeles.)

  In words with Greek Roots, the f sound may be spelled with the letters, ph (from the Greek letter, phi), the s sound with the letters ps (from the Greek letter, psi), the k sound with the letters ch (from the Greek letter, chi), and finally, the r sound with the letters rh (from the Greek letter, rho).
  (For more on this, see TABLE TWO: Greek Roots.)

• Noah Webster's Call for the Reform of Spelling: 1789

  
  (see http://edweb.sdsu.edu/people/DKitchen/new_655/webster_language.htm.)

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TABLE ONE: F and V alternation in English

Activity:

Think of at least two or three more words in which f alternates with v.

TABLE TWO: Greek Roots

Activity:

Complete the table above! You can look in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary to find the meaning of the Greek roots in words you know with these roots. If you know the names of fraternities and sororities, that might help you name the Greek letters!

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Activity: Creating a Spelling System

Working in groups of two-to-three students, choose several words from the list below.

1. First, pronounce the words to yourself. Underline those letters that do not seem to be 'phonetic spellings' of the sounds they spell.
2. Then, identify whether the root(s) in each word are Greek, Latin, French/Norman, or Germanic.
3. Finally, create a 'phonetic spelling' for each word. (You can look at my phonetic spelling system below, or create your own chart to show how your are re-spelling certain letters that do not seem to be 'phonetic spellings.')

Example 1: oak. o-a-k. Root: Germanic. Possible phonetic spelling: ok.

Example 2: Francophone. F-r-a-n-c-o-p-h-o-n-e. Root: Greek (phone is Greek, and means "sound;" another root is "franc," a French root which means 'free' or 'French'). Possible phonetic spelling: frankofon.

• believe
  (NOTE: the origin of this word sheds light on why the noun related to it--"belief"--is spelled with an f; at one point, the e at the end of "believe" was pronounced, and in English at one point in history (and in some languages related to English today), some consonants, such as v and f, were pronounced differently between vowels than at word's end.)
• knowledge
• right
• antique
• pageant
• party
• graphic
• phone
• phonetic
• symphony
• phenomenon
• sophomore
• psychic
• alumnus
• amorous
• aquifer
• conifer

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TABLE THREE: My Phonetic Spelling System

Vowels

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Links

• Online Dictionary

  (Look up word pronuncations and origins!)

  Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary Search

  http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/Enter%20a%20word%20or%20phrase... (at Merriam-Webster.com, http://www.m-w.com/).

• Varying Pronunciation in the U.S.

  Professor Bert Vaux's Dialect Survey Results

  http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/maps.html
  (How do you pronounce the words in this survey? Remember there is no absolutely 'right' way; but your pronunciation says something about where you are from.)

• Ways of Spelling Phonetically

  "Noah Webster Urges Reform of Spelling"
  (reprinted from Noah Webster [1789], "An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages, and Practicality of Reforming the Mode of Spelling and of Rendering the Orthography of Words Correspondent to Pronunciation;" published online D. E. Kitchen and San Diego State University's College of Education.)

  http://edweb.sdsu.edu/people/DKitchen/new_655/webster_language.htm

  Ben's Phonetic Spelling at Washed Ashore.com

  http://www.washedashore.com/rants/spelling/index.html
  (Here's another phonetic spelling system! Invent your own!)

  The Sounds of English

  http://teacherweb.com/Fl/Cocoa/CEWhitehead/EnglishSounds.html
  (Based on the International Phonetic Alphabet)

• The International Phonetic Alphabet

  UCLA International Phonetic Alphabet.

  http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/chapter1.html (Click to hear the sounds.)

  Omniglot: International Phonetic Alphabet.

  http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ipa.htm

  Type IPA(International Phonetic Alphabet) symbols online at Typeit.org

  http://ipa.typeit.org/

• Words With Different Roots, Different Ways of Spelling the Sounds

  Words with German Roots: Cognates: English, Dutch and German Words from A Common Root

  http://homepage.mac.com/schuffelen/duengero.html

  Words with Latin and Greek Roots: Preparation for an American University Program (TOEFL) Vocabulary Workshop at The Southampton Graduate Campus

  http://www.southampton.liu.edu/academic/pau/course/webroot.htm

  The Greek Alphabet (from Wikipedia

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_alphabet (see especially, the "Main Letters," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_alphabet#Main_letters)

• Most Commonly Misspelled Words in English

  Your Dictionary.com's 100 MOST OFTEN MISPELLED MISSPELLED WORDS IN ENGLISH

  http://www.yourdictionary.com/library/misspelled.html
  (Can you identify the roots or origins of any of the words on this list?)

• A Little About Style and Grammar

  H. W. Fowler, The King's English at Bartleby.com

  http://www.bartleby.com/116/ (A little difficult reading, but this is the standard!)

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Spelling Checkers & "The Spelling Chequer"

Write things using invented spelling; then run them through your spelling checker and find the correct spellings; if you are not sure which spelling to choose, use your dictionary--and be careful--or you might end up with something like the poem below!

I have a spelling chequer.
It comes with my pea sea.
It plainly marks for my revue
Miss Steaks eye cannot see.

I've run this pome thru it . . .

For fun, try pasting the above-poem into your word processor and running the spelling checker on it. (Mine does not catch that many errors [but mine also does not seem to recognize "pome" as an English word--which it is, but it does not mean 'poem.']

 * * *

(The above poem was shared with my education class at the University of Central Florida by Dr. Joseph Evans of the University of Central Florida's Multilingual-Multicultural Education Department.)

* dena: 'people.' Variations of the word, dena, are used to mean 'people' in a number of languages, for example, there are Danes of Denmark; the Danae of Ireland; the Dene, or 'Basque people;' another word, Dene, encompasses various loosely related peoples of North America, including the Navajo, the Apache, and some Indian groups of Northwestern Canada; and finally, there are the Din-ka of the Southern Nile. Other words that mean people in different languages include in (the "Inuit"), and ain (the "Ainu").

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