Did you ever wonder why some words are so difficult to spell?

Question

why are some words so difficult to spell?

Answer 1

Many of the things popularly blamed for English spelling difficulties have little if anything to do with them. Chief among these may be the fact that we have borrowed words from so many different languages. In fact, for MOST of the words we borrow, we have adapted the spelling of those words to fit into English patterns. So a Chinese or Japanese word brought into English is usually easy to spell correctly.

I especially notice people blaming Latin. Not fair. Latin itself has caused very few of our spelling problems .... UNLESS you are referring to originally Latin words borrowed into English through FRENCH. French has had a few of its own spelling oddities (esp. due to silent letters still found in ITS spelling) that have been handed on in some of the words the Norman French donate to (Middle) English. But the problem is a bit more complex than that.

So what IS the big problem?

The most important ones might be summarized as "bad timing" and "competition" on who standardized the spelling when... And if I were to blame one great EVENT, it might just be the Black Death! (see below)

1) A large part of "standard spelling" for Modern English took place, not too surprisingly, shortly after the invention of the printing press. Unfortunately, that was PRECISELY the period when English was undergoing major changes -- in the transition from Middle to Early Modern English.

These included some very significant and fairly rapid changes in PRONUNCIATION. I'll list a couple of the most important below, but for now I'll note that apparently MANY of the changes were connected to sudden massive population shifts and mixing of various groups. These shifts themselves owed something (perhaps a LOT) to the major population LOSSES from the Black Death. Thus this plague seems to have contributed to some rapid language changes which (less directly) led to spelling confusion.

Key changes:

a) The "Great Vowel Shift" in which many English "long vowels" a, i and e changed. Before this they were all pronounced much as they STILL are in most other European languages (Latin, Italian and Spanish are good examples). For an example of the earlier pronunciations, look at the syllables we use to sing the scale (DO, RE, MI, FA). The shift of long i (from what we now would write with "ee" to "ah-ee") is particularly confusing.

[Note, by the way, that we STILL use the old "long i" sound -- as you can see in the preceding paragraph in the words "earlier" and "confusing"]

b) A number of letters PREVIOUSLY pronounced letters became silent. SOME of these were directly related to the "Great Vowel Shift" -- esp. the confusing variety of pronunciations for "ough"

Now NOTE that these changes did NOT happen all at once across the language. Some dialects adopted them quickly, others did so much later (and SOME of the sounds may STILL be found in certain dialects... e.g. some sounds of Scottish English).

In fact, a careful study of POETRY helps us to see that even around 1600, some cases of "gh" that are NOW silent, were NOT in a number of dialects. (Example -- we find a case in Shakespeare in which "daughter" rhymes with "after".)

**One other little note on spelling and the printing press, since another answer remarked on it: The way folks pronounce "Ye olde" when they see it is a modern misunderstanding. The "Y" was used as a substitute for a traditional ENGLISH letter not used by printers on the continent -- the "thorn", which indicated a "th" sound. In other words, if someone wrote "YE OLDE", they would say "THE old".


2) The issue of WHO establishes the spelling. As already noted, some standardization was related to the introduction of the printing press (late 15th century). So the dialects of those the main writers and printers of THAT time exerted a strong influence on what became "standard" (even though there was a lot that was fluid at this time). BUT....

One oddity of this is that a traditional spelling might be established based on how the word was pronounced in a 'dominant (writing) dialect'. But then the PRONUNCIATION of OTHER dialects became dominant.. yet the earlier SPELLING was kept. (Nice example -- of two pronunciations for a word we borrowed from French the pronunciation "kernel" won out in ordinary spoken English, but the OLDER spelling "colonel", which fit the earlier pronunciation, was kept .)

Another piece of the "who decides" issue is that the elite of society -- more likely to be literate AND more able to exert control over such things-- was very conservative about such matters. They tended to want to KEEP traditional or 'historical' spellings, even if they no longer matched the pronunciation. Spelling reformers could not make much headway against these groups.

(Actually, in the late 18th to early 19th century, SOME spelling simplifications advocated by such people were adopted -- but more in North America [think Noah Webster] where there was not the same sort of powerful gentry class resisting such changes. But even Webster had rather limited success -- most of his suggestions were NOT accepted.)

By the way, ONE thing to keep in mind about "odd spelling". Many assume that the writing of words is ONLY for the purpose of indicating how they are PRONOUNCED. But that's not necessarily so! The point of writing is to indicate WHAT the word is. Presumably the speaker of the language will know how to pronounce it properly. Meanwhile, the spelling can convey OTHER information, such as how the word is related to OTHER words, whether in English or Latin, or whatever other language those first writing the words also knew or worked with.

Simple example -- the word "soft" is has a simple, phonetic spelling. But "soften" has a "silent t". Disadvantage -it doesn't match the pronunciation; advantage - it makes clear the relationship to the word "soft" from which it was derived. (Ironically, people ignorant of how this all works, may CHANGE the pronunciation of a word based on its spelling, which is why many Americans began to pronounce the silent t in "often".)

Another case - grammatical endings -(e)s [for singular verbs, plural nouns] and -ed (for past tense verbs) are not pronounced the same way in all words (the s often uses the voice to become a /z/ sound, the d may be 'de-voiced' to a /t/ sound), BUT having most words use these standard endings makes the GRAMMAR clearer.

Answer 2

Basically, English has such hard spellings because it's roots deep in the Latin language, which has many odd rules. I would know, because I currently take Latin in high school. Nothing makes sense, you just have to memorize the spellings. For example, the word "labor" in Latin means "work", and some derivatives include belabor, collaborate, collaboration, collaborator, elaborate, elaborately, elaboration, laboratory, laborer, laborious, laboriously. Also, the word "melior" means "better" and some derivatives include ameliorate, amelioration.

There are a few rules in the English language that are quite consistent among many words, but otherwise there are exceptions here and there that just make everything confusing. You are lucky! Imagine trying to learn English as if it wasn't your native language -- quite scary.

Answer 3

I believe most words difficult to spell are derived from another language that does not follow the same phonetic rules as English. Such as bouquet. Seems it should be pronounced bow-Qwet but when spoken sounds like boo-Kay. If spelled as it sounds in English, it will be wrong. English is rooted in Latin with influences from many other languages.

Answer 4

There is so much history behind the English language. English came from French and German. French is a Romance Language, meaning it originated from Latin. Eventually, English changed over time from saying Ye Ole to how we say it today. However, spelling still originates from those languages.

Answer 5

I proposal Ray Nagin was once constructing a "chocolate town". All he did was once rebuild the superdome and I knew the Saints would not convey in sufficient income to rebuild town. F*** New Orleans. Tell Ray Nagin I mentioned that. He will have to've used chocolate it could've been less expensive.

Answer 6

yes, i always used to wonder that because of all the silent letters but i learnt that the reason why some words are spelt weird is because they originated from Latin or another language

Answer 7

because the smart people like to laugh at the not so smart people when they try to pronounce it