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  • It starts back around the year 600 A.D. when Christian missionaries arrived in England

  • with their Roman alphabet.

  • They found the Anglo-Saxons, who spoke a Germanic language, with different kinds of sounds like

  • "th" and "x" that Latin didn't have

  • So scribes came up with their own ways to write them. Over a long time everyone finally

  • settled on gh for the x

  • But there's no x in thought?!

  • Anymore.

  • The pronunciation changed. Over hundreds of years. x turned to f, in words like cough

  • and enough or disappeared entirely in words like though or thought.

  • As those changes were getting underway, the printing press was invented and that was great

  • for the spread of written English, but unfortunately it was also great for the spread of the spellings

  • that printers had decided on before the pronunciation changes already in progress were complete.

  • Other pronunciation changes that happened over this time period were the loss of certain

  • sounds at the beginning of words, and an almost complete overhaul of the entire vowel system

  • of English known as the great vowel shift.

  • As if that wasn't complicated enough, the French-speaking Normans had taken over in

  • 1066, and French was the language of educated culture, courts and universities in England

  • for a few hundred years. Those years left their mark on English vocabulary and spelling

  • So for the most part, the answer to "why do we spell it that way" is either "because we

  • used to pronounce it that way" or "because that's how they did it in French."

  • But sometimes we can't blame either of those things.

  • In the late 1500s, English spelling had stabilized well enough, but some renaissance scholars

  • who were all fired up about classical Latin and Greek decided not to leave well enough

  • alone. They thought the glory of the ancient world should be better reflected in the current

  • one. They decided words like receipt, salmon, indict, and debt, needed to put their Latin

  • roots on better display, so they purposely added letters that no one had ever pronounced

  • in English. They also found ways to connect words to their Greek roots and give them a

  • fancier, classical look to replace homlier, but more sensible spellings.

  • And sometimes the classical craze went a little too far. The word Island, for example, came

  • from an Old English word iglund. It didn't come from Latin at all. And people were happily

  • pronouncing it and writing it as iland until someone picked up an s from the Latin insula

  • and stuck it where it was never meant to be.

  • Finally, we have a whole bunch of words that we simply borrowed from other languages as

  • is, including a another later wave of French words that we left in their original spellings.

  • English loves to borrow from everywhere. Sometimes we borrow from languages that bring their

  • own silent letters and spelling issues, and they then become our spelling issues too.

  • And sometimes, we borrow the same word from two different places. That's what happened

  • with colonel. We borrowed it from French, along with a lot of other military vocabulary,

  • in the 1500s. Back then they said it and spelled it as coronel. Later English scholars stared

  • translating old Italian military treatises, where it was colonello. Time goes by, and

  • wouldn't you know it, people are spelling it the Italian way and pronouncing it the

  • French way.

  • Meanwhile, the French switched over to colonel. In spelling AND pronunciation. How boring

  • is that?

  • So there's a lot of blame to go around for the spelling situation we find ourselves in.

  • You might not find any comfort in that the next time English sneaks up on you with another

  • crazy spelling prank, but try not to get too mad at English. It's not an arbitrary meanie.

  • It/s just a victim of a complicated history.

It starts back around the year 600 A.D. when Christian missionaries arrived in England

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英語のスペルが変なのはなぜ? (Why is English Spelling So Weird?)

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    SylviaQQ に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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