English spelling really does make
cents sense
Paul Stapleton
March 4, 2017
Faculty of Humanities
?
Two questions
1. What is spelling?
2. Why is English spelling so difficult?
1. What is spelling?
Transition 1
(In our ancient past before we had oral language)
• Imagine you are hunting
together with a partner.
• Two of you are behind a
bush.
• You see a deer but your
partner doesn’t.
• You need to stay quiet so
the deer doesn’t run away.
• Your partner looks at you.
• What do you do?
•
Wright, E. (2005). Narrative, perception, language, and faith. Basingstoke:
Palgrave MacMillan.
Symbolism begins
• You point to the deer
and make a gesture.
• Pointing and gesturing
may have been our first
use of symbolism.
Transition 2: Symbolism becomes
abstract
• Visual symbolism;
• Around 100,000 ago
likely East or southern
Africa;
• Color as a visual symbol
separate from bodily
gestures.
•
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/science/14paint.
html?_r=1&ref=science
Symbolism grows in sophistication
• From colors to holes
• Oldest known
ornamentation – shells
with bored holes circa
75,000 yrs. before
present
Transition 3
(from 35,000 years ago)
Cave paintings
• Still far from “spelling” but…
• …giant leap forward in symbolism.
• Ideas could be conveyed over time (we can
still speculate on the meaning).
• Sophisticated techniques in shading and
perspective to convey 3D and movement.
In the human brain
• the shapes and strokes in
ancient paintings often
resemble our present-day
letters.
• Several dots followed by a
deer indicates the
number of animals, and
the vocalization of such a
drawing would have been
spontaneous with reading
as the inevitable result.
•
Dehaene, S. (2009). Reading in the brain.
New York: Viking.
In the human brain
• Our present writing systems are much more
advanced;
• Present remarkable uniformity among our
many systems of writing in their method of
combining meaning with sound.
• This in turn reflects the human brain’s nature
(discussed later).
Transition 4
(from 10,000 years ago)
Transition 4
• Economic reason to write
when agriculture began
(about 10,000 years ago).
• a need for accounting to
keep track of who owed
what to whom, especially
ownership of sheep and
in the case of taxes*
•
•
*Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1993). Gesture and speech.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Poe, M. (2011). A history of communication.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
From realia to …
…but not yet spelling
Increasing complexity
http://pipux.
net/index.ph
p?id=20
Transition 5
Cuneiform script ancient Sumerian
(southern Iraq 6000 years ago)
First phonetic script
http://ww
w.calligrap
hylearn.co
m/cuneifor
malphabet.ht
ml
China (4,000 years ago)
The same concept exists today
;)
Ancient scripts
Rune (northern Europe)
Ancient Roman alphabet
Transition 6
• Gutenberg (1450) and
moveable type;
• Before the printing
press, all documents
were written by hand;
• Literacy rate in Europe
was very low.
Result of Gutenberg’s printing press
• Books were no longer
expensive and rare.
• Books were available
widely;
• Literacy expanded;
• Spelling needed to be
regularized;
• Led to Renaissance and
scientific revolution.
Early example
Geoffery Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1400 AD)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Here bygynneth the Book of the Tales
of Caunterbury.
1
2
3
4
5
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
When April with its sweet-smelling showers
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
By which power the flower is created;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,
Putting things in perspective
Summary of spelling’s origin
1.
2.
3.
4.
Discovery of symbolism, e.g., pointing;
Increasingly abstract symbolism, colors;
Jewelry, art, e.g., cave paintings;
Pictures, strokes and dots representing
numbers and ideas;
5. Symbols representing sounds;
6. Books became widespread;
7. A need for regularized spelling arose.
What is “spelling?”
• Spelling is the visual representation of a word
or words with letters;
• Spelling attempts to transcribe the sounds of
the language into alphabetic letters.
2. Why is English spelling so difficult?
Spelling and intelligence
• We often associate
good spelling with high
intelligence…
• …and bad spelling with
stupidity…
• …but of course it is
more complex than
that.
Spelling quiz
• Go to
•
https://kahoot.it
Or google “kahoot”
• Enter a game pin and
nickname
• DON’T shut down your
browser until the end of the
lecture!!!
How many words are misspelled?
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
It was a lovely occasion.
We have no accommodation.
I received a promotion from my boss.
Try to separate the fighting boys.
This word is definitely misspelled.
It’s important to be consistent.
Do you have a 2017 calendar?
You need a good explanation.
Misspellings in English
• http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/co
mmon-misspellings
Spelling bees
Cro-Magnon spelling bee
Why is English spelling difficult?
• This lecture would not take place if we were
discussing Spanish or Finnish.
• These languages map letters onto sounds in a
transparent way.
• English does not.
• There are at least five reasons why English
spelling is difficult.
•
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/30/spelling-bees-are-only-fun-in-english-heres-whatother-countries-do-instead/?utm_term=.93a3771acd15
Why is English spelling difficult?
Reason 1
1. English has 12 vowel
sounds but only five
letters (a, e, i, o, u).
Our ancestors...
• …had to come up with a system to cope with
the fact that there were so few letters to
represent so many vowel sounds:
• Spoken language came first; writing came
later.
• beat, bit, bait, bet, bat, but, boot, book, boat,
bought
• And then there are diphthongs:
• Bite, bout, boit
Position of tongue
(Cross-section of the mouth)
The nature of the English sound
system – consonents
And 24 consonant
sounds but only 20
letters.
and some of those letters
are not very useful…
– …q (sounds like a “k”)
– x sounds like a “ks”
Many consonant sounds in English...
•
•
•
•
•
•
...need to be represented by two letters.
Th- think , three voiceless
and father weather – voiced
ch – chance, chocolate– voiceless
But the equivalent voiced sound uses a “j”
Justice, Jason
Other languages
• Japanese
• Italian
• …and later Chinese
Japanese
•
•
•
•
•
•
http://www.realkana.com/katakana/
Japanese uses three scripts
Hiragana=46 characters (only for Japanese words)
Katakana=46 characters (only for foreign words)
Kanji=thousands
Each character represents one of the sounds in
Japanese (one character for one sound)
• Actually a syllabary (not an alphabet)
• Example of katakana: マ ク ド ナ ル ド
Mini-Japanese lesson:マクドナルド
日本マクドナルド公式ウェブサイトはお得な情報が満載！
English can adapt Japanese words
• The alphabet is quite good at representing the
sounds of Japanese:
• Sayonara
• Kounichiwa
• Chinese is another story.
Italian
• http://italian.about.com/cs/pronunciation/ht/
pronounceconson.htm
• http://italian.about.com/cs/pronunciation/ht/
pronouncevowels.htm
Japanese and Italian
• In both languages, the writing system maps
transparently onto the pronunciation.
• Children learn to read much faster than
English-speaking children…
• …or Chinese speaking children too
• But that’s another story
• And dyslexia (誦讀困難) is less common (in
Finnish and Spanish too)
Summary of reason #1
• The 26 letters of the alphabet do not align well with the
English sound system.
• English has at least 13 vowel sounds and 24 consonant
sounds…
• …but there are only 26 letters…
• …and two of those letters are pretty useless…
– …q (sounds like a “k”)
– x sounds like a “ks”
• In other words, if we had an alphabet with over 40 letters
that were completely dedicated to the English sound
system, spelling would be much more consistent. But our
sound system is not the only problem.
Why is English spelling difficult?
Reason 2
Who’s accent?
They are …
This is…
What is this?
What is this room called?
How do you pronounce…
• …mandatory
Summary of reason #2
• English is spoken using many different
accents.
• The spelling of any one word cannot satisfy all
of the different accents.
Can we remove the irregularities of
modern English?
• Five-years phased plan for
[Euro-English] :
[1st year – Removing soft &
hard “C”]
• In the first year, “s” will be
used instead of the soft “c.”
Sertainly, sivil servants will
resieve this news with joy.
• Also, the hard “c” will be
replaced with “k.” Not only
will this klear up konfusion,
but typewriters kan have
one less letter.
Sekond year
[2nd year – Replace “ph”
by “f”]
• There will be growing
publik enthusiasm in
the sekond year, when
the troublesome “ph”
will be replaced by “f.”
This will make words
like “fotograf” 20 per
sent shorter.
Third year
[3rd year – Remove the double
letters]
• In the third year, publik
akseptanse of the new speling
kan be expekted to reach the
stage where more komplikated
changes are posible.
Governments will enkorage the
removal of double letters,
which have always ben a
deterent to akurate speling.
• Also, al wil agre that the horible
mes of silent “e”s in the languag
is disgrasful, and they would go.
Forz and fifz yer
[4th year – Replace “th” and “w” by “z” and “v”]
By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as
replasing “th” by “z” and “w” by “v”. During ze fifz year, ze
unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords kontaining “ou,”
and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer
kombinations of leters.
[5th year]
• After zis fifz yer, ye vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be
no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu
understand ech ozer.
 Ze drem vil finali kum tru!
Could there be some hidden logic to
English spelling?
•
•
•
•
Spelling helps to distinguish word meanings
To, two too
I, eye,
Cue, kew, queue, Q,
Why is English spelling difficult?
Reason 3
• English has many
homonyms
Homonym exceptions
(Same spelling, different meaning)
• Can you think of two meanings for each of
these words:
– Check
– Book
– Fat
– Glass
– Fire
– Seal
– Watch
Hidden logic
• Some spellings help with meaning and
pronunciation
•
•
•
•
•
•
Insane (inseyn)
Insanity (insanity)
Column (silent ‘n’)
Columnist (‘n’ is pronounced)
Christ
Christmas
Summary of reason #3
• Basically, the differing spellings of these
English homonyms represent our ancestors
efforts to help us distinguish meanings as we
read
• Although this means when we are children
learning to read, it requires more time, say
compared to Spanish, Finnish or German
children, once we learn the code, reading
becomes easier.
Borrowing from other languages
Reason 4
• The British Isles, the home of English has had
a long history of invasions and with these
invasions, many new words have entered the
language.
• In many cases, the original spelling has been
retained.
• French has had a profound influence.
French
• Most words ending in the letters “tion” such
as “information” or “participation” come from
French, but our instinct of English spelling
suggests that “tion” should be spelled “shun”
• Most words ending in “que” such as boutique,
come from French. Wouldn’t it be easier to
simply use a “k?”
Schadenfreude
(幸災樂禍)
Unstressed syllable are pronounced the same
Reason #5
• Professional
• /prəˈfɛʃənəl/
Summary of five reasons why English
spelling is complex
1. English has many more vowel and consonant sounds
than there are letters in the alphabet.
2. English is pronounced very differently according to
where one comes from but one standard spelling is
needed.
3. English has many homophones that need to be
distinguished from each other, e.g., “sale” and “sail.”
4. Many English words come from other languages and
retain their original spelling.
5. Unstressed syllables mostly have the same sound [ə]
but often various letters represent this sound.
Why didn’t Chinese…
• …develop an alphabet instead of characters?
㸃解
• Let’s look at a Chinese poem written in
pinyin.
<< Shī Shìshíshī shǐ >>
•
ShíshìshīshìShī Shì, shìshī, shìshíshī.
Shìshíshíshìshìshìshī.
Shí, shìshī shìshì.
Shìshí, shìShī Shìshìshì.
Shìshìshìshī, shìshǐ shì, shī shìshī shìshì.
Shìshíshìshī shī, shìshíshì.
Shíshìshī, Shìshǐ shìshìshíshì.
Shíshìshì, Shìshíshìshíshìshī.
Shíshí, shǐ shìshìshī, shíshī shī.
Shìshìshìshì.
https://youtu.be/VJs0Wu7plZ8
A middle
Orthographic transparency
(How clearly the writing system maps onto the sound system)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Chinese
French
English
German
Finnish
Spanish
Italian
Japanese*
•
*for hiragana and katagana only
Chinese and Italian
• These two languages are at
the two extremities of a
continuous scale of spelling
transparency:
• Italian has relatively few
sounds so the alphabet
suits it well.
• Chinese is made up of
single syllables; therefore,
homophones are relatively
frequent.
– The alphabet is not suitable
• English is in the middle
Chinese “spelling”
• Each of the symbols could be understood in
hundreds of different ways
• Chinese writing also relies on several hundred
phonetic markers (聲符) that further specify
how a given root should be pronounced,
Could there be some hidden logic to
our writing systems?
• How did our
ancient
ancestors use
our brain’s visual
system to
transfer
thoughts and
speech into
writing?
Letterbox area
Sight to sound
fMRI
(functional magnetic resonance imaging)
• MRIs can detect iron in
the blood.
• Using very powerful
magnets, the MRI can
show where blood is
flowing in different
parts of the brain.
Many new understandings…
• …about the brain in the
past 20 years.
How do we read?
• When we read, only four or five letters are in focus
at one time
• Our eyes do not move smoothly across the page,
but start and stop 3 to 4 times a second.
• We notice only 3-4 to the right and 7-8 to the left.
Neurological domain
• There is a strong
similarity among all
the world’s writing
systems with regard
to the shapes and
strokes used.
• Only a very small
number of shapes
and strokes.
• The irrelevance of
size.
APPLE
Apple
The flexible brain
• yOu CaN pRoBaBlY rEaD ThIs
SeNtEnCe aT ClOsE tO NoRmAl
sPeEd.
•Five, six, seven, eight
Chinese too
• 中文
• 中文
• 中文
• 中文
• 中文
•中文
Do we actually silently pronounce a
word when we read?
• Read the following
words:
• Rabbit
• Bountary
• Culdolt
• Money
• Dimon
• Karpit
• For the familiar words,
you probably processed
them based on meaning
• But for the unfamiliar
words, you pronounced
them first, then tried to
bring meaning.
Sound into meaning
•
•
•
•
Try this sentence:
Ay fink u shud stop yr dok frum baaking.
Pal iz a wary gud teechr.
(This is how you read a sentence when you
were a child.)
Spelling in the brain
•
•
•



In general, there are two reading routes of spelling
1. Indirect route:
First decipher the letter string
convert it into pronunciation
access the meaning of the sound
This how we read as children (or how we read a new
foreign language）
 This route plays a role when learning new words or
reading the sentence in irregular language
 Donald Trump has a dystopian view of the world.
Spelling in the brain
2. Direct route: From spelling
immediately to meaning
first recovers the identity and
meaning of the word;
and then uses the lexical
information to recover its
pronunciation;
Happy, sad,
For example – Mistake in Chinese sentence︰
 難過：我們家前面有一條大水溝，很難過去。
SAD
hard to pass through (the drain)
 如果：可樂不如果汁。
If
worse than juice
 天真：今天真熱，真是游泳的好日子
innocent today is really hot
Even punctuation carries meaning
• “A woman without her man is nothing”
• Punctuate this sentence to create meaning
from a man’s point of view or a woman’s point
of view.
Man’s point of view
• “A woman without her man is nothing”
Man’s point of view
• “A woman: without her, man is nothing.”
Case studies
• In English, we can observe many irregularities of
spelling, for example:
 Why do we spell <-ce> & <-se> in different words?
dense, worse
VS
dominance, evidence
 Why do we use <c>, not <s>, to represent the sound
/s/ ?
grace, face, city, ice
 Why are there are so many silent consonant in
words “Knight”, “night” or “light”?
Influence from French
• Since Britain was
conquered by
Nomandie in AD1066,
English has borrowed
many French words
[grace, face, city, ice]
Other examples of borrowed words from French:
English
ask
wish
room
answer
order
freedom
French
demand
decide
chamber
respond
command
liberty
Some rules of irregularities of spelling
• French adjectives: Nouns related to adjectives
ending in <ant/ent> are spelled with a <c>, for
example dominant/dominance
evident/evidence.
• Adjectives generally have <s>, such as dense, worse
(Horobin, 2013, p.14)
• Mark the sound of the vowel: Silent final e makes
the vowel say its name, such as
con

cone
cut

cute
mat

mate
Case study <gh>
• Night, light, sight, etc
• In Old English (before the 12th century), the
spelling was niht, liht and siht
• The “h” sound was pronounced.
• But in Middle English (12-15 century), some
dialects dropped the “h” sound.
• Remember, travel at this time was by horse
and carriage (by the rich only) and there were
no telephones.
Case study <gh>
• But London was becoming
the center of power and the
dialect there was more
conservative keeping the “h”
sound.
• Spelling with a “gh” was
adopted to reflect the
London accent, but about
500 years ago, the “h” sound
disappeared all over Britain,
even in London..
• However, the spelling did
not change.
Troublesome <gh>
• In some cases, the <gh> has changed its sound
to /f/ and now survives into modern English,
such as :
laugh, enough, rough, through
Why didn’t English invent new letters?
• In English <th> sound is represented by two
letters, but it has two different sounds
•
•
•
•
θ think, without, both
ð this, father, breathe
þ (an old letter used for both forms of <th>)
Why did these old letters disappear?
Answer
• θ ð þ were non-Latin
• Printing presses imported to England from the
European continent did not have these letters.
• Also, ð was considered to close to “d” and
would cause confusion.
• Therefore decisions were made to simply use
“th”
Case study: Vowels
• English has many different spellings of vowels
that are not transparent.
• Meat, meet, me, receive, relief, police
• This is just one example of one vowel sound.
• Basically, the spelling of English vowels is a
mess.
Case study: Vowels
The Great Vowel Shift (from 1500)
Causes
• Black Death 1350 when
over 30% of Europe’s
population died from a
bacterial disease called
the plague.
• Imagine up to half of the
population dying!
• One theory: Great
migrations of people and
mixing of new accents
created new
pronunciation.
Vowel sounds changed…
• …but over 200-300 years.
• This slow change of vowel sounds over
generations could not easily be reflected in
the spelling.
• At the same time, migration of people to
America, forming new dialects and
pronunciation also had to be considered.
In a perfect world
• English would have its own alphabet of over
40 letters.
• Everyone would speak the same dialect with
the same pronunciation.
• No new words would have entered English
from other languages.
Dyslexia (誦讀困難)
• A genetic disorder in
the ability to decode
letters into sounds.
• For example
– pa, ba
• Dyslexic children have
trouble noticing the
difference.
British vs. American
• In the early 18th century, English
spelling was not standardised.
Differences became noticeable
after the publishing of
influential dictionaries.
• Today's British English spellings
follow, for the most part, those
of Samuel Johnson's A
Dictionary of the English
Language (1755),
• Many American
English spellings follow Noah
Webster's An American
Dictionary of the English
Language (1828).[1]
British vs. American
• Webster was a strong
proponent of English
spelling reform.
• Many spelling changes
proposed in the United
States by Webster himself,
were not accepted.
• In England, the original
spelling of words coming
from French was preferred.
Shortlist of differences
Or-our
• Or-our labo(u)r, colo(u)r…
• …but glamor
Shortlist of differences
re-er
• Many words ending in er were originally
ending in re (from French).
– Letter, December, thermometer, number
• Theater, theatre
• Center, centre
• Exceptions: mother, anger, danger, quarter,
river (words from German)
• …and “program(me)”
Spelling today and tomorrow
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
L84AD8
Late for a date.
OMG
BTW
CU
IMHO
WTF
“What the f@#%”
Kahoot…
• …you think these shortcuts are damaging the
language and hurting students’ literacy?
Many are critical but…
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
…haven’t we always been doing it?
“two”
And
E.g.
i.e.
lb.
@
Is there a danger for students?
• IMHO…
Non-standard spelling
• Parents recently are spelling their children’s
names creatively perhaps to grant them
individuality.
• Kathryn
• Stefani
• Rachyl
• ?
Common creative spellings
• Fish ‘n chips
• I’m lovin’ it.
• Kwik
Future spelling
(Irregular verbs)
• English has many irregular verbs (about 300)
• Be, have, do, go, say, get, make, know, see, think
• 50% of the verbs you see when reading
English are irregular!
• Between 6,000 and 12,000 years ago, the
ancester of English was Proto-Indo-European.
• Past tense was formed by an “ablaut” which
changed the vowel sound of a word.
– E.g., sing sang sung
Therefore,…
• …in the ancestral language of English, all verbs
might have been “irregular.”
• Then a process of regularization occurred in
early German for new words.
• That process was adding an –ed sound to
verbs in the past tense, e.g., Google= googled
• Slowly over 100s of years, the original
“irregular” verbs were regularized
– So help-holp became help-helped
Thinking question
• Why didn’t all the verbs change to the regular
spelling?
– E.g., go-went goed
– Maked
– Knowed
Answer
• The regularization of verbs is ongoing and
based on frequency.
• What’s the past tense of :
– Sneak
– Fly
– Wed (presently changing to regular form)
• Theory: less frequent verbs get regularized.
Answer
• Big data tells us that one or two of the
following verbs may become regularized by
2500:
• Begin, break, bring, buy choose, draw, drink,
drive, eat…
• Based on frequency of usage, eventually (if
English remains a language) all verbs will
become regular.
Similarly
(comparatives)
• What is the English rule for making
comparatives?
• Beijing is _______than Hong Kong in winter.
(temperature)
• Apartments are _____________ in Wanchai than
Taipo. (cost of rent)
• Humid,
• safe,
• cheap
Burn, smell, spell, spoil
• Burnt, smelt, spelt, spoilt regularized in the
United States first and have mostly regularized
in the UK (but not completely)
MS Word
• Auto spell checker helps to
regularize spelling and provides
less opportunity for spelling to
change.
• As more and more written
communication is performed
on the keyboard (not
handwriting), the software
controls our spelling.
• Therefore there is less
opportunity to introduce a new
variety.
Spellchecker
1. It was a lovely occassion
2. I recieved a promotion
from my boss.
3. Try to seperate the
fighting boys.
Fun spelling
• What sentence contains every letter in the
alphabet?
• The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown
dog.
• What word contains all the vowels: a,e,i,o,u
• automobile
• What word contains all the vowels in order:
• facecious
Fun spelling
•
•
•
•
What word has the most double letters?
Committee
Is there a word that has four vowels in a row?
Queue
Q&A
The public lecture series goes on line!
Open in late March 2017
deor deer
Topics:
English spelling really does make sense
Idioms: Revealing the colors of English Expressions
World Englishes
Connected Speech – Across the Boundaries
Volunteers needed
For you:
• Get a taste of English public
lectures of other topics
without stepping out (or
Enjoy your professional
development experience at
home)
• Learn in a community of
English teaching
professionals (e.g. by joining
discussion and forums )
• And other unexpected
benefits…
For us
- Help us polish the first
English massive online course
(MOOCs) of EdUHK
Thanks for coming out to Taipo!