English is different from other European language because it is a mix of several very different languages, a creole. It is that mix why words are spelled so differently, they follow the different orthographies of these languages.
This is why English orthography is so random and also why it is so hard to change. I could write English in a Germanic or Romance way but most anglophones without training in these languages would not be able to make any sense of it.
Book printing in English underlined this issue but it did not create it. The fire alarm did not set the house on fire.
25th October is a day of celebration and remembrance in my house.
…names, Familiar in his mouth as household words— Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester— Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red. This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be rememberèd—
And of course they are most remembered unknowingly by the phrase that follows those words
Some blame the German printers for not including the letters “thorn” ( þ) and “eth” (ð), representing two of the most common sounds in English. We had to fake it with a more-or-less arbitrary “th”, or at one time a “Y” (as in Ye Olde BoingBoing Shoppe).
I think the Norman French did it to piss off the Anglo-Saxons. “Eh, what are zees strange sounds? We don’t need zat merde (Gallic shrug)”.
A good thing we reached back to Latin to make a word for workers in that metal, “plumber”, otherwise we would’ve been stuck with using the word “leader” for that too.
Yeah, that’s the popular explanation for why English is messed, up, but it relies on believing English is special and fundamentally different from other languages. But it simply isn’t true - even among European languages, English isn’t particularly special in being a mix of different languages, and the different language roots aren’t even the core issue with the most problematic spelling in English. (E.g. the various, incompatibly-pronounced “ough” words come from Old English.) English in that regard isn’t all that different from French (a language with Celtic and Roman origins with Germanic influences), which doesn’t have the same kind of inconsistent spelling issues English does.
No, it didn’t. If you read the article, they talk about the unique circumstances in English. When the Normans invaded, people stopped writing English entirely. The literate classes spoke French and Latin, and those were the languages that got written down. So while English was changing, being “French-ified,” no one was even considering the spelling. Printing came in just as the literate classes started speaking and writing (the new version of) English, which basically hadn’t ever been written before and the rules hadn’t been hashed out yet. (On top of which there was a huge vowel shift going on at the time.) Printing became inextricably connected with the problem, because the process of figuring out spelling was being done by printers. Who, again, often didn’t speak English as a native language and were jettisoning letters that provided distinctions that were then lost, e.g. in those problematic “ough” words. (And who provided more “gh” word confusion, as, for example, the Old English word “gast” became “ghost” thanks to Flemish printers who arbitrarily inflicted their own spelling rules on the language.)
The same ossification happened last century with radio. Once radio broadcasts reached a vast audience simultaneously via The CBS Radio Network et al, people across the country started hearing a common pronunciation, and the creation of new regional dialects slowed way down. Flat midwestern voices started appearing from Boston to Texas and started tempering the more extreme variations in pronunciation.
Oddly enough I think the internet is reversing the trend a bit. As groups of people are self-selecting their areas of interests, they stop tuning into the mass media that everyone used to be exposed to, and start picking up the dialect of their group. And that’s fascinating because these new dialects are not bounded by geographies, but by ideologies. This is somewhat different than an argot, in that those describe a private language around the topic (e.g. the Thieves Cant); this would be the adoption of the custom dialect for all speech (e.g. a Texan accent.)
Then how do you explain the logic in the irregularities? Note that the printing press happened centuries after Hastings. By then Germanic Old English was dead and buried, people spoke very recognizable early modern English. We all can read Shakespeare…
Yet the ei-ie weirdness in English makes sense if you know the Germanic cognates. All those weird -gh endings? Even in modern Dutch and Fries they are hard fricatives. Gost/Gost/Gast etc.btw already existed in Middle English… Bough-bow-beaux is the best example where the spelling clearly shows where the words came from, and this process happened before printing, centuries before.
All those strange vowels? Pronounce them with the orthography of the original language and you have the cognate.
People wrote Old English even with his own letters like the thorn (ye for the.) But they didn’t write much. Modern English was born from the pidgin servants spoke, nobody wrote that. You find that with every creole language, early forms were low-class unwritten dialects.
People only started to write a lot in native European languages (again, not a unique thing for English) in the same period book printing became common so that is when we get a lot of English books. And then the first bible got published in English and that pretty much set the standard spelling, again like all in many other European languages.
Oh, and William de Worde would be really upset if you called him Flemish. He was from the Pfalz.
To be fair, the post-internet dynamics of written language are quite different. Pre-internet (and post- telephone and television) almost everything that you saw written down (unless you were a teacher, etc.) was printed material that had been written by (at least semi-professional) writers and had undergone editing. If you were a reader, your notion of grammar and spelling came from those adhering (mostly) to the standard conventions. Now you can spend all day reading and never come across material like that. Readers’ notions of “correct” grammar and spelling have radically changed because their conventions are heavily influenced by other people who are using “wrong” grammar and spelling (and thanks to the borderless nature of the internet, many are non-native speakers who learned grammar and spelling from the internet in the first place).
Not that people’s grammar and spelling is any worse than it was, pre-internet (when more people did no reading at all, so probably the opposite is true), you just didn’t get to see it, nor did it have an influence on how other people wrote. So I think more people have greater literacy, but among literate people, more have adopted non-standard grammar and spelling conventions that are very strange to those of us who came of age pre-web. I sometimes find myself typing something like “should of” instead of “should have,” a mistake I never would have made a few decades ago, just because I see it so often it has invaded my brain.
Modern English did not exist then! From 1066 to about 1550 most people in England spoke… Old English, a germanic language most related to Fries and Dutch. And it was written, there are written sources in the native tongue from England from every century since the early medieval period…
Modern English was then a pidgin, slowly formed by Normandic elites yelling at servants. Nobody writes that down! By the time it was a language (Early Modern English 15th century) Gutenberg had done his work. English spelling was not born out of the printing press, they just came about at the same time.
Uh, no. During that period English was going from Old English to something that was pretty firmly Middle English. There is very little evidence that anyone had declensions and the word order flexibility of Old English in say 1500. Chaucer certainly doesn’t have them. I’m sure you can read Canterbury Tales just fine. My OE is rusty enough that I wouldn’t want to try to read anything I don’t already have pretty well memorized without a good dictionary. The numbers you pick out are practically the definition of Middle English.
Right, which was my point - while the language was being transformed by the Norman influence, it wasn’t being written. (Besides not reading the article, are you not reading my comments? This is getting a bit frustrating, to be honest.) The whole point is that English as a written language only started coming back a little over a hundred years before printing was introduced. It wasn’t a settled written language.
"Experience, though noon auctoritee
Were in this world, were right ynogh to me
To speke of wo that is in mariage;
For, lordynges, sith I twelf yeer was of age,—
5 Y-thonked be God, that is eterne on lyve!
Housbondes at chirchė dore I have had fyve;
For I so oftė have y-wedded bee;
And alle were worthy men in hir degree.
But me was toold certeyn, nat longe agoon is,
10 That sith that Crist ne wente never but onis
To weddyng, in the Cane of Galilee,
Bý the same ensample taughte he me
That I ne sholdė wedded be but ones.
Herkne, eek, which a sharp word for the nones,
15 Biside a wellė Jhesus, God and man,
Spak in repreeve of the Samaritan:
“Thou hast y-had fyve housbondes,” quod he,
“And that ilk man that hath now thee
Is noght thyn housbonde”; thus seyde he certeyn.
Old English
Fæder ure
ðu ðe eart on heofenum
si ðin nama gehalgod
to-becume ðin rice
geweorþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofenum.
Urne ge dæghwamlican hlaf syle us to-deag
and forgyf us ure gyltas
swa swa we forgifaþ urum gyltendum
ane ne gelæde ðu us on costnunge
ac alys us of yfle.
Hey, I can read that Old English. Maybe take something that less than half of the population has memorized next time? Always a good cross-linguistic comparison.
Old Saxon (don’t confuse it with Old English or Anglo-Saxon):
Fadar ûsa
firiho barno, thu bist an them hôhon
himila rîkea, geuuîhid sî thîn namo
uuordo gehuuilico
Gothic:
Atta unsar, þu in himinam,
weihnai namo þein.
qimai þiudinassus þeins,
wairþai wilja þeins,
swe in himina jah ana airþai.
To be fair, the grammar argument is often used to dismiss various vernacular versions of english as inferior to the way certain people write and talk - meaning white, educated people.
Has it? What proof do you have of that other than your opinion of what the “best” way to communicate is? Are there less interesting writers today? Who qualifies as a high quality writer? Would you compare rap less favorable to some obscure academic poet for example, despite the obvious powerful communication tool that rap has proven itself to be?
