The English Spelling System.
Orthography concerns itself with the spelling of words in the English language, and outlines in detail some of the factors that have led to the disconnection between how a word is spelt, and how that same word sounds.
- The first reason why English undoubtedly has this disconnection is that we began with over 35 definite sounds in Old English and only a 23 letter alphabet, which made spelling even our original words difficult, let alone words borrowed from other langages.
- On top of the rather dodgy start English had, we then confused our spelling system even more after the Norman Conquest, where we basically confounded our mistakes by mixing our spelling system with the French systems.
- Then with the invention of printing presses English faced the problem of having to justify lines (making entire paragraphs fit in one neat column, like we see in the newspaper). Rather than adjust the spacing between the words, the lines were justified by adding letters and changing the spelling of words in order to create neat columns of text. This didnt have so much of an effect at the time, but is another factor in our current, confused spelling system.
- These printing presses worked wonders in solidifying our spelling. Then the Great Vowel Shift happened. So by the time we settled on the current pronunciations used today, most spelling was already permanent, and so words are spelt how the would have been pronounced at the time of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
- Renaissance scholars in the 16th century then tried to add 'logic' to the system by essential adding more quirks. for example the letter b was added to 'debt' to express it's Latin roots and 'delite' was changed to look more like 'light'. These may have been cool ideas but they did nothing to regularise our spelling system.
- And lastly, the fact that English 'borrows' so many words from other languages means that a lot of our words have very foreign spelling.