BOOK: David Crystal, "Spell It Out"

David Crystal: Spell It Out: The Singular Story of English Spelling. London: Profile Books, 2012, 2013. 9781846685682. vii + 328 pp.

English spelling is, of course, universally regarded as an unholy pile of hot garbage, a shapeless, nameless monstrosity, a gibbering Lovecraftian abomination of a spelling system, which, if you were to place the various spelling systems on an alignment chart, would certainly occupy the ‘chaotic evil’ slot.

This is an opinion with which I have always been happy to agree, but at the same time I also couldn't help feeling that there is a good deal of regularity in it, many patterns lurking here and there amidst the mess; and this is precisely what the present volume, Spell It Out, is about: the author argues that English spelling isn't really all that chaotic at all, describes explicitly the various patterns and regularities (it might be too bold to call them ‘rules’) that underlie it, and shows how they gradually emerged over the course of history.

Armed with this sort of knowledge, one could in principle find some sort of explanation or justification for why any given word is spelled the way it is. Crystal hopes that this approach could be the basis of a better way to teach English spelling (both to children who speak it natively and to foreign learners), which in his opinion currently relies too heavily on simple memorization of words and on the use of half-baked nineteenth-century rules which have so many exceptions that they are more misleading than useful.

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For me, the most interesting aspect of this book was the history of English spelling, which fortunately accounts for maybe 3/4 of the book. For example, some important patterns that emerged early on have to do with representing the length of vowels. It is really a tragedy that, although Latin also had phonemic vowel length, it did not occur to the Romans to do something about representing vowel length in the Latin alphabet. In (Old) English, various patterns emerged: to indicate that a vowel is long (pp. 44–5), you might use two vowel letters (not necessarily the same ones; cf. meed and mead) or add a silent e (e.g. these). Those ‘silent’ e's used to be pronounced in Old English, but were lost in pronunciation somewhere in the transition to Middle English (p. 43); but they were found to be useful in spelling as an way to show that the previous vowel was long, so they now only kept them but also got into the habit of adding them to words newly entering the language at a later point (if they had a long vowel in the last syllable).

There's an interesting explanation of how you get different combinations of vowel letters that represent the same vowel sound, e.g. in piece and peace. The explanation is that the pronunciation used to be different, /e/ vs. /ε/; they represented /e/, which is the more close of the two sounds, by combining <e> with a letter representing an even more close vowel, <i>, resulting in <ie>; and they represented /ε/, which is more open, by combining <e> with a letter representing an even more open vowel, <a>, resulting in <ea> (pp. 47–8).

The typical pattern to represent that a vowel is short is to have it followed by two consonants (or, very often, two copies of the same consonant). This again seems to rely on a pronunciation change: in Old English, a short vowel was usually followed by a long consonant (as is still the case in e.g. Swedish today); in Middle English, those consonants were no longer pronounced long, but keeping them doubled in spelling was a useful hint that the preceding vowel is short. But this pattern also had a number of exceptions, e.g. it usually wasn't applied to words of one syllable (e.g. up) or when the vowel was written with two letters (e.g. sweating); pp. 56–7. And in some words the vowel later lengthened, /æ/ → /ɑ:/, but the spelling remained unchanged (e.g. grass; p. 65). The spelling also remains unchanged when one word is derived from another, even if the length of the vowel changes in the process (e.g. type and typical; p. 67).

Another interesting pattern: lexical words are at least three letters long, which explains why the preposition is spelled in but the hostelry is spelled inn (p. 263).

In the 16th century, the idea emerged that words originating in Latin should be spelled the way they are there; thus e.g. timid has one m even though the vowel before it is short (p. 73). The same idea led to the introduction of many silent consonants on etymological grounds; I knew about the silent b in debt (p. 154), but was surprised to learn that the c in arctic also started as a silent consonant of this type, but people eventually started pronouncing it. The l in falcon also started as silent, but I was saddened to learn, from the wiktionary, that most people apparently do pronounce it now.

I was also surprised to learn that nephew used to be nevew, borrowed from French; then a p was inserted for etymological reasons (Latin nepos), pv looked too odd and was changed into ph, and this eventually affected the pronunciation too (p. 164).

Some of these etymologically motivated silent consonants were based on false etymologies and misguided analogies. Probably the most famous of these is the s in island, added by analogy with the one in isle; but the words are etymologically unrelated and island had never been pronounced with an s. A similar case that I hadn't heard of before is that of author: in English it used to be autor, then sometimes got a silent c (auctor, correct), sometimes a silent h (author, wrong), and the latter won (Crystal suggests that this happened because of the analogy with authentic) and eventually even affected the pronunciation; p. 158. The p in ptarmigan was also added because of a mistaken idea that it is related to the Greek ptero- (wing); p. 161.

Another useful principle was that if several words had the same pronunciation but different etymology, they would be spelled differently; e.g. yew, ewe and you (p. 114).

The letter ȝ (yogh), which fell out of use in the late Middle Ages, had been used for various sounds: /g/, /d͡ʒ/, /j/, /γ/, /x/. In Scotland it was occasionally replaced with <z>, resulting in words where this letter represented the sound /j/. These spellings were later mostly regularized, but sometimes the pronunciation changed instead, to /z/ (e.g. Mackenzie; p. 82).

Sometimes the spelling of one word was changed by analogy with others. For example, /x/ was usually written with ȝ and later gh, but then stopped being pronounced; and people got so used to this ‘silent gh’ in words like light, night etc. that they sometimes even added it to words that had never had a /x/ to begin with, e.g. delight (p. 122) and haughty (p. 170), both of which were borrowed from French. Similarly, the words whole and whore got their initial w by analogy with the other wh-words, though they had always been pronounced with a simple /h/ (p. 124).

I knew that th in thyme was pronounced /t/, but now I learned that the same is true of the words Thomas, Anthony, Thames, Thai and a few others (p. 125).

Some odd spellings in early printed books in English apparently came about because the first English printers, having learned their craft on the Continent, mostly employed Flemish typesetters, whose command of English was shaky and influenced by Flemish spelling. This e.g. often led them to spell word-initial /g/ as <gh>, and in a few cases this even because the standard spelling (e.g. ghost; p. 140).

I was interested to learn that in Old English, /f/ and /v/ were not distinct phonemes, just allophones; and likewise /s/ and /z/ (pp. 96, 98).

In Old English, the letter y represented the sound /y/, like German ü today. But as this sound later changed into /i(:)/, the letter <y> came to be used as an alternative to <i> at the end of words (but only there; thus holy, but holier); p. 106.

There's an interesting discussion on the -ise vs. -ize spellings. If you consider the words as coming from Greek or Latin, -ize makes more sense; if from French, -ise; but often it's hard to say where a word came from. American usage prefers -ize, while British usage seems to be a good deal more mixed than I thought (pp. 102–3, 207). Crystal also mentions that using -ise means fewer exceptions, as some verbs can't be written with -ize (e.g. advise).

The verb to knife was originally to knive, with pronunciation to match, but this form is very uncommon now (p. 97).

The dot on the i was invented by medieval scribes to make the i easier to distinguish from adjacent characters that likewise consisted mostly or entirely of vertical strokes, such as u, n or m (p. 105).

Apparently, when a word had several possible spellings, some medieval scribes preferred those with more letters, since they were paid by the inch (p. 111).

The well-known unusual spelling of bury apparently emerged because the pronunciation was based on the dialect of Kent but the spelling on that of the Midlands (p. 148).

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Along the way I learnt many interesting bits of information about words I have been mispronouncing. Thus e.g. canon is not pronounced with /eɪ/ but with /æ/, same as cannon, and both spellings were actually used for both senses until the 18th century (p. 75).

There's a chapter on the -ough words, explaining how they got their various pronunciations; this was interesting, but there isn't really any simple and elegant explanation that would help one remember them. I learned that lough is pronounced the same as loch (p. 173; which makes sense given that they are etymologically the same word), and I can only be thankful that I have never had to say it out loud, because I would have guessed it's pronounced the same as low :| I have also learned, though not from this book but by hearing it pronounced in an audiobook on youtube, that trough rhymes with cough, and not with throw as I would have guessed.

Apparently the o in omit is long (like e.g. the one in note) and not short (like e.g. the one in not) as I thought it was; p. 284.

I never quite understood how hyphenation works in English, but Crystal provides a useful-looking summary: the British prefer to put hyphens between morphemes, the Americans between syllables (p. 259).

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Starting from the early modern period, people began noticing that English spelling is a bit chaotic, and tried to find rules for it; the problem is that many such rules have too many exceptions to be useful, and without the exceptions they are misleading and do more harm than good (p. 179). Crystal focuses on what is probably the most famous such rule, ‘I before E except after C’, and spends about six pages explaining what the actual exceptions to the ‘I before E’ part are (pp. 180–5).

Sometimes the pronunciation of a word changes under the influence of its spelling, and there are several interesting examples of this on pp. 192–3. Originally, it appears, travail was pronounced like travel (and they are etymologically the same word); the p in empty used to be silent, as was the t in often, the first i in medicine, and the h in herb; forehead was pronounced as if it were forrid; etc. I found that I'm using the spelling pronunciations of all these words, which I guess is unsurprising since one learns a foreign language more from reading it than from hearing it spoken.

There are a couple of interesting chapters on the influence of the major dictionaries on spelling, Johnson's in Britain and Webster's in America. Webster, of course, is famous for his innovations such as dropping the u in -our, but I didn't know that he also proposed several other changes, such as tung and fether (p. 199). I can only be glad that these didn't catch on.

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Towards the end of the book there are a few chapters on the current and possible future developments in English spelling, especially due to the impact of the internet, and that was of course a painful and uncomfortable topic for me, since I'm one of those unfortunate people who cannot help regarding all language change as degeneration (I don't say that it wouldn't in principle be possible for a language to change in a way that makes it better, it's just that this somehow almost never seems to happen, and certainly doesn't seem to be happening now).

Most of the recent and ongoing changes, unsurprisingly, are some form of simplifications, e.g. the removal of full-stops in many abbreviations (p. 214) and the loss of certain irregularities due to the spread of misspellings (e.g. rubarb, whose meteoric rise in the early 21st century Crystal chronicles on p. 221). Interestingly, there are also factors that make the spelling more unpredictable, e.g. the tendency to keep foreign loanwords in their original spelling, which didn't use to be the case (Crystal points out that German Nudel was borrowed as noodle in the 18th century, but the more recent borrowing of Strudel remained strudel; p. 237).

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Finally there's a “teaching appendix”, in which Crystal presents some more concrete ideas on how the teaching of English speling could be improved based on the awareness of the sort of patterns (and their historical development) that he described earlier in the book. This can probably be quite relevant for those interested in the teaching of spelling, but it wasn't very interesting for me.

I can agree easily enough that some of the old approaches that he criticizes are really bad, e.g. having to memorize more or less random lists of difficult-to-spell words without anybody trying to explain the patterns behind them; though I'm pretty sure that we didn't learn English spelling in quite so inconvenient a way when I was in school. But he also strongly objects to teaching easily confused words together, e.g. with sentences like “The principal had principles” (p. 282) — it isn't obvious to me why that would be a bad idea, but he just bluntly asserts that it is one, without trying to explain why.

But I was happy to agree with his recommendations to teach the actual patterns behind English spelling (like the ones described in this book) instead of misguided 19th-century rules (of the ‘I before E except after C’ type), and to encourage people to read more so as to absorb more spelling information that way (pp. 287–9).

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I enjoyed this book a great deal. It is short, very readable, and I learned something interesting on almost every page. I think it can be recommended to everyone with an interest in English spelling.