And the rules can be hard to grasp: if a Latin prefix ends in "s", and the root word begins with "s" followed by a consonant, there is no doubling: so, "ascribe" rather than "asscribe". Does spelling always respect etymological origins? No: the spelling of "island" is based on a mistake. Can a short vowel be followed by a single consonant? Yes: "criminal", "typical". Is a long vowel never followed by a double consonant? No: "droll", "all", "small", and, if you're from the south, "class" and "grass". Objecting to what he saw as the many illogicalities in British English, Noah Webster set about creating a more pleasing, American orthography – color, center, defense, and so on.Īll Crystal's explanations make sense, and are highly entertaining to read, but as they accumulate they are likely to leave readers feeling that they are no closer to the key to improving their own spelling.
Sometimes, spellings came about more whimsically: Caxton's Flemish assistants introduced the "h" in "ghost" from their own language, though they failed to get "ghoos" (goose), "ghoot" (goat), or "gherl" (girl) to stick. Later, writers settled on spellings that indicated the etymology of words, so that "debt" – spelled "det", "dett", "dette", and "deytt" in the 13th century – acquired a "b" in acknowledgment of its origin in the Latin "debitum". How was one to distinguish between short and long vowels? The scribes of Norman Britain came up with the silent "e", to turn "hop" into "hope" for example, and with letter doubling, to turn "hoping" to "hopping", or "met" into "meet". For example, what were the monks to do about the sound "th"? The eventual answer lies of course in the letters I have written, but the scribes' solution was to create two new symbols, since discontinued. "That, in a nutshell, is the problem of English spelling," he writes. The rest of us may often remain puzzled.Ĭrystal begins his story with the arrival in Britain of Christian missionaries, who rapidly discovered that they had at their disposal only about half the number of letters required to denote the sounds – phonemes – of the Germanic tongue of the natives. A prolific author and editor of language books, he can write with authority on trends in the spelling of "rhubarb" ("rubarb" is gaining ground, he reports), and indeed on the history of the spelling of any tricky word you care to mention. David Crystal, author of this sprightly survey, would challenge the word "haphazard".
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