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 -6" in more than a dozen ways [(go, beau,
stow, sew, doe, though, escargot, etc.) and "a" 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 millennium 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 gi], Robert Burchfield, called by William Safire
the "world's most influential lexicographer," talks about grammatical
prescriptive 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.
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, toke means capital, but toke means
testicles. Suit-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 s in
English (only ?), and, rather more persuasively, notes that 84 percent of English
spellings (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 trouble-some, 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 ofwhich 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.