The Mother Tongue (19 page)

Even more complicated is Japanese, which is a blend of three systems: a pictographic system of 7,000 characters called
kanji
and two separate syllabic alphabets each consisting of 48 characters. One of these alphabets,
katakana
(sometimes shortened to
kana
), is used to render words and names (such as Dunkin' Donuts and Egg McMuffin) that the ancient devisers of kanji failed to foresee. Since many of the kanji characters have several pronunciations and meanings—the word
ka
alone has 214 separate meanings—a second syllabic alphabet was devised. Called
hiragana
and written as small symbols above the main text, it tells the reader which of the many possible interpretations of the kanji characters is intended.

All this is so immensely complicated that until the mid-1980s, most Japanese had to learn English or some other Western language in order to use a personal computer. The Japanese have now managed to get around the pictographic problem by using a keyboard employing katakana syllables which are converted on the screen into kanji characters, rather as if we were to write
twenty percent
by striking three keys—“20,” “per,” and “cent”—and then seeing on the screen one symbol: “20%.” Despite this advance, the Japanese still suffer two considerable problems. First, they have no tradition of keyboard writing, so that typing is a bewildering new skill to many of them, and, second, each computer must be immensely more powerful than a Western model just to deal with the fact that it takes 7,000 symbols to write Japanese (against a hundred or so for most Western languages) and that whereas Western letters can be represented on computer screens by as few as 35 dots of light, Japanese characters can require up to 576 dots to be clearly distinguishable.

It is a disarming reflection of their determination and ingenuity that they have become such a technological powerhouse with such a patently inefficient system of orthography.

In comparison the Western way of writing begins to look admirably simple and well ordered. And yet in its way it is itself a pretty imperfect system for converting sounds into thoughts. English is particularly hit or miss. We have some forty sounds in English, but more than 200 ways of spelling them. We can render the sound “sh” in up to fourteen ways (
shoe, sugar, passion, ambitious, ocean, champagne,
etc.); we can spell “ō” in more than a dozen ways (
go, beau, stow, sew, doe, though, escargot,
etc.) and “ā” in a dozen more (
hey, stay, make, maid, freight, great,
etc.). If you count proper nouns, the word in English with the most varied spellings is
air
with a remarkable thirty-eight:
Aire, ayr, heir, e'er, ere,
and so on.

Spellings in English are so treacherous, and opportunities for flummoxing so abundant, that the authorities themselves sometimes stumble. The first printing of the second edition of
Webster's New World Dictionary
had
millennium
spelled
millenium
in its definition of that word, while in the first edition of the
American Heritage Dictionary
you can find
vichysoisse
instead of
vichyssoise.
In
The English Language
[page 91], Robert Burchfield, called by William Safire the “world's most influential lexicographer,” talks about grammatical prescriptivists who regard “innovation as dangerous or at any rate resistable.” It should be
resistible.
In
The Story of Language,
Mario Pei writes
flectional
on page 114 and
flexional
just four pages later. And in
The Treasure of Our Tongue,
Lincoln Barnett laments the decline of spelling by noting: “An English examination at New Jersey's Fairleigh Dickinson University disclosed that less than one quarter of the freshmen class could spell
professor
correctly.” I wonder, for my part, how many of them could spell
freshman class.

Just as a quick test, see if you can tell which of the following words are mispelled.

supercede

conceed

procede

idiosyncracy

concensus

accomodate

impressario

irresistable

rhythym

opthalmologist

diptheria

anamoly

afficianado

caesarian

grafitti

In fact, they all are. So was
misspelled
at the end of the preceeding paragraph. So was
preceding
just there. I'm sorry, I'll stop. But I trust you get the point that English can be a maddeningly difficult language to spell correctly.

Some people contend that English orthography is not as bad as all that—that it even has some strengths. Simeon Potter believed that English spelling possessed three distinguishing features that offset its other shortcomings: The consonants are fairly regular in their pronunciation, the language is blessedly free of the diacritical marks that complicate other languages—the umlauts, cedillas, circumflexes, and so on—and, above all, English preserves the spelling of borrowed words, so that people of many nations “are immediately aware of the meanings of thousands of words which would be unrecognizable if written phonetically.” We might dare to quibble with the first of these observations. Potter evidently was not thinking of the
c
in
bloc, race,
and
church
or the
s
in
house, houses,
and
mission,
or the
t
in
think, tinker,
and
mention,
or the
h
in
host, hour, thread,
and
cough,
or the two
g
's in
garage
and
gauge,
or indeed most of the other consonants when he praised their regularity of pronunciation. On the other hand, English does benefit from the absence of diacritical marks. These vary from language to language, but in some they play a crucial, and often confusing, role. In Hungarian, for instance,
tőke
means capital, but
töke
means testicles.
Szár
means stem, but take away the accent and it becomes the sort of word you say when you hit your thumb with a hammer. David Crystal in
The English Language
observes that there are only 400 or so irregular spellings in English (only?), and, rather more persuasively, notes that 84 percent of English spellings conform to a general pattern (e.g.,
purse/nurse/curse, patch/catch/latch
) while only 3 percent of our words are spelled in a really unpredictable way.

A mere 3 percent of our words may be orthographically troublesome, but they include some doozies, as we used to say. Almost any argument in defense of English spelling begins to look a trifle flimsy when you consider such anomalies as
colonel,
a word that clearly contains no
r
and yet proceeds as if it did, or
ache, bury,
and
pretty,
all of which are pronounced in ways that pay the scantest regard to their spellings, or
four
and
forty,
one of which clearly has a
u
and the other of which just as clearly doesn't. In fact, all the “four” words—
four, fourth, fourteen, twenty-four,
and so on—are spelled with a
u
until we get to
forty
when suddenly the
u
disappears. Why?

As with most things in life, there are any number of reasons for all of these. Sometimes our curious spellings are simply a matter of carelessness. That is why, for instance,
abdomen
has an
e
but
abdominal
doesn't, why
hearken
has an
e
but
hark
doesn't.
Colonel
is perhaps the classic example of this orthographic waywardness. The word comes from the old French
coronelle,
which the French adapted from the Italian
colonello
(from which we get
colonnade
). When the word first came into English in the mid-sixteenth century, it was spelled with an
r,
but gradually the Italian spelling and pronunciation began to challenge it. For a century or more both spellings and pronunciations were commonly used, until finally with inimitable illogic we settled on the French pronunciation and Italian spelling.

The matter of the vanishing
u
from
forty
is more problematic. Chaucer spelled it with a
u,
as indeed did most people until the end of the seventeenth century, and some for half a century or so after that. But then, as if by universal decree, it just quietly vanished. No one seems to have remarked on it at the time. Bernstein suggests [in
Dos, Don'ts and Maybes of English Usage,
page 87] that it may have reflected a slight change in pronunciation—to this day many people aspirate
four
and
forty
in slightly different ways—but this begs the question of why the pronunciation changed for the first word and not for the second. In any case, it would be most unusual for the spelling of a word to change to reflect such a minor adjustment of pronunciation.

Usually in English we strive to preserve the old spelling at almost any cost to logicality. Take
ache.
The spelling seems desperately inconsistent today, as indeed it is. Up until Shakespeare's day,
ache
was pronounced
aitch
when it was a noun. As a verb, it was pronounced
ake
—but also, rather sensibly, was spelled
ake.
This tendency to fluctuate between “ch” and “k” sounds was once fairly common. It accounts for such pairs as
speech/speak, stench/stink,
and
stitch/stick.
But
ache,
for reasons that defy logic, adopted the verb pronunciation and the noun spelling.

English spelling has caused problems for about as long as there have been English words to spell. When the Anglo-Saxons became literate in the sixth century, they took their alphabet from the Romans, but quickly realized that they had three sounds for which the Romans had no letters. These they supplied by taking three symbols from their old runic alphabet: w, þ, and ð. The first, literally double
u,
represented the sound “w” as it is pronounced today. The other two represented the “th” sound: þ (called thorn) and ð (called eth and still used in Ireland).

The first Norman scribes came to England and began grappling with what to them was a wholly foreign tongue—a fact clearly evident in many of the spellings from the Domesday Book. In just one small parish in Yorkshire, Hanlith was recorded as Hagenlith, Malham as Malgham, and Calton as Colton—all spellings that were probably never used locally. Many such errors can be attributed to carelessness and unfamiliarity, but others clearly reflect Norman orthographic preferences. The Normans certainly did not hesitate to introduce changes they felt more comfortable with, such as substituting
qu
for
cw.
Had William the Conqueror been turned back at Hastings, we would spell
queen
as
cwene.
The letters
z
and
g
were introduced and the Old English ð and v were phased out. The Normans also helped to regularize such sounds as
ch
and
sh,
which in Anglo-Saxon could be rendered in a variety of ways. They substituted
o
for
u
in certain words such as
come
and
one,
and they introduced the
ou
spelling as in
house
and
mouse.
These changes made things more orderly and logical for Norman scribes, but not necessarily for later native speakers of English.

As we have seen elsewhere, the absence of a central authority for the English language for three centuries meant that dialects prospered and multiplied. When at last French died out and English words rushed in to take their place in official and literary use, it sometimes happened that people adopted the spelling used in one part of the country and the pronunciation used in another. That is why we use the western England spellings for
busy
and
bury,
but give the first the London pronunciation “bizzy” and the second the Kentish pronunciation “berry.” Similarly, if you've ever wondered how on earth a word spelled
one
could be pronounced “wun” and
once
could be “wunce,” the answer in both cases is that Southern pronunciations attached themselves to East Midland spellings. Once they were pronounced more or less as spelled—i.e., “oon” and “oons.”

Even without the intervention of the Normans, there is every reason to suppose that English spelling would have been a trifle erratic. Largely this is because for the longest time people seemed emphatically indifferent to matters of consistency in spelling. There were exceptions. As long ago as the early thirteenth century a monk named Orm was calling for a more logical and phonetic system for English spelling. (His proposals, predictably, were entirely disregarded, but they tell scholars more about the pronunciation of the period than any other surviving document.) Even so, it is true to say that most people throughout much of the history of the English language have seemed remarkably unconcerned about niceties of spelling—even to the point of spelling one word two ways in the same sentence, as in this description of James I by one of his courtiers, in which just eight words come between two spellings of
clothes:
“He was of a middle stature, more corpulent though in his clothes than in his body, yet fat enough, his cloathes being ever made large and easie. . . .” Even more remarkably perhaps,
A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words
by Robert Cawdrey, published in 1604 and often called the first English dictionary, spelled
words
two ways on the title page [cited by Crystal,
The English Language,
page 204].