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∵ leothelion ∴ 2024-07-16 ∞ 8'
While mainland Europe boasts itself as a powerful union of nations, inventor of many ingenuities and the origin of democracy, it has never produced an alphabet of its own. Our own alphabet has its roots in pictographs. For example, the letter A comes from the Semitic aleph, meaning ‘ox’, and originally was a rough depiction of an ox’s head. B comes from the Semitic bēth, meaning ‘house’. Unlike those in the Far East, these Middle Easterners made a commitment so monumental that turned out to be most beneficial to us. They used their pictographs to depict sounds, rather than meaning such that–for example–the Egyptian hieroglyph for re did not also mean the Sun but for any syllable that sounded like ray.
To truly appreciate the simple beauty of such a system, we should look at the headaches that manifest in Chinese languages. When rendering speech into writing, there are typically two ways: one is with an alphabet, like the one we have, and the other is with a pictographic-ideographic system like Chinese. In Chinese–regardless of simplification–the basic unit of writing is a character component called a radical. For example, radical for earth, ground and similar concepts is 土; water and related qualities is 水. All words in Chinese are formed from these two, as well as 212(!) other radicals. The Chinese are grateful though, because there used be staggering 540 radicals until an emperor named Kang Xi said enough is enough. Coming back to radicals, they are just building blocks. Radicals also compound with others to form new words. grain (禾) and fire (火) maketh autumn (秋); arrow (矢) and bean (豆) maketh short (短) and so on. Such words also compound with other words to form new meanings e.g., bright (明) and dim (暗) combine to mean contrast. Since every word requires its own symbol, Chinese script is immensely complicated. It possesses some 50,000 characters of which “only” about 4,000 are in common use. Writing in Chinese using the radical system is an enormous task and, before the age of smartphones and auto-completions, people could not type more than ten characters a minute. To be fair, if we had a key for every word in English, we would not be very fast typers either.
However, Chinese way of writing possesses one advantage over other ways–it can be read everywhere. Chinese is actually not a language at all, but more a family of loosely connected dialects. A Hokkien speaker can no more understand the speech of Shanghainese speaker than a Swede can understand a Spaniard. Dialects vary greatly by the region, especially in the south, where dialects can change every couple of kilometres. Hold on, this does not sound like an advantage? Hear me out. Even though speakers of Shanghainese, Cantonese, Hokkien and Dunggan may not understand each other very well when spoken, they can all share memes, read the same magazines, articles and newspapers because the written language is the same. The character might be read differently but they mean the same everywhere, similar to how characters 1, ? and 🍆 mean the same to us as it does to a French, though we see it as ‘one, question mark and some degree of promiscuity’ while they may as ‘une, point d’interrogation and Oh là là’.
Over here in l’Occident, our way of writing begins to looks stupidly simple and ordered. It just makes sense. Yet, it is itself a pretty imperfect system for converting speech into thoughts. English is particularly hit and miss. We have about 40 sounds in English, but only 26 letters–resulting in some 200(!) ways of spelling them. Take the ‘sh’ sound for example. It is one and the same sound denoted in linguistics as /ʃ/, but we can write it in 14 ways (sh in shoe, s in sugar, ss in passion, t in ambitious, c in ocean, ch in champagne, etc.); the long ‘o’ /oʊ/ (/əʉ/ in Australian English) in about a dozen ways (o in goat, eau in beau, ow in stow, ew in sew, oe in doe, ough in though and so on), long ‘a’ /ɛɪ/ (or /æɪ/ in Aust. Eng.) in many many more (ey in hey, ay in stay, a in make, eigh in freight, ai in maid, ea in great etc.). the most remarkable example is ‘air’ /ɛə/ which, with proper nouns included, has 38 variations of spelling for the same sound: Aire, Ayr, heir, e’er, ere and so on.
In fact, spellings in English are so messed up that even so-called figures of authority in English spelling fuck up, given every chance. To illustrate a few examples, in the printing of James Webster’s New World Dictionary had millenium in lieu of millennium. Robert Burchfield, an Oxford Dictionary editor of many years, wrote in The English Language while describing that grammar “prescriptivists regard innovation as dangerous or at any rate resistable …”–Ha, ha! It’s resistible. On personal account, a public health poster made by the Australian university I work at confidently used “practice good hygiene”–it should’ve been practise.
Think you’re the exception? Let’s take a quick test. Identify which of the following words are mispelled:
supercede
conceed
procede
idiosyncracy
concensus
accomodate
tripthong
rhythym
opthalmologist
diphteria
caesarian
grafitti
anamolous
To much surprise, they are all wrong. So was mispelled at the end of the preceeding paragraph. So was preceeding just then. You get the point–English is a really, really hard language to spell correctly.
Some say English does have some niceties that other European languages do not. For example, we don’t litter our words with what’s called diacritical marks. These are marks that go above, below, around, through or inside letters to manipulate how they sound, think the umlauts in German as in über and schön. In languages where these marks do matter, they can be quite a pain too. In Hungarian, tőke means stock, but töke gives you balls. In Turkish sıkıldım means ‘I am bored’ while sikildim means ‘I have been fucked’. Messing up the diacritical mark can cost you very heavily. And then there are observations about how spelling in English actually follow a kind of pattern (84% to be exact, according to David Crystal’s The English Language), such as in latch/hatch/snatch, purse/curse/nurse, train/pain/rain, and that “only” about 3% of such are irregular.
Those 3% of irregularities may seem negligible but they are absolutely maddening to a point where any argument in defence of English spelling can be thrown out the door. Why is colonel pronounced with an r? Why is 4 four in almost every instance–as in fourteen, fourth, thirty-four–until you get to forty? Where did the u go? Why does ache sound more like hake but not arch or niche; bury like a berry and not fury; pretty like gritty but not petty?
All things happens for a reason, and sometimes it’s a matter of laziness and inattentiveness to yield some curious spellings. For example, abdomen has an e but it goes off somewhere with abdominal. Same for hearken, where e just goes missing in hark. Colonel is another classic example of such waywardness, and it’s for a historical reason as well (see Wiktionary entry). The word originates from Middle French coronnel which the French adapted from the Old Italian colonnello. When the word first came into English in 1548, it was spelled with an r, but gradually, the Italian spelling and pronunciation began to challenge it. For centuries we’ve had both pronunciations and spellings until eventually settled on the most illogical result of French pronunciation with Italian spelling.
Remember how we talked about patterns in spelling? There are also complete anti-patterns, because, the old ways must be preserved regardless of how (il)logical it is. Take ache. The spelling of the word is not even trying to be consistent in today’s standard of spelling. But here is the thing: ache was a noun, and was pronounced aitch prior to Shakespeare. It also had a verb counterpart which was pronounced ake and–quite sensibly–was spelled ake. This ch/k conjugate pairing was and is quite prevalent e.g., speech/speak, stitch/stick and stench/stink. Despite all these sensibilities, ache decided to defy logic and adopted the verb pronunciation while retaining the noun spelling.
How about forty? Mixed accounts of both fourty and forty exist. Chaucer certainly used it with a u in the 14th century e.g., “… And I was fourty, if I shal seye sooth;” in Canterbury Tales, as did others throughout the 16th century. Then, it quietly vanishes as forty takes over. It’s most unusual for a word to change its spelling while the pronunciation has not–unless, of course–there was some universal decree.