It was June 2010.
Inside the Scripps National Spelling Bee,
contestants between 8- and 15-years-old
wrestled words
like brachydactylous and leguleian.
Outside, a crowd protested the complexity
of English spelling conventions.
Indeed, spelling reformers have
been around for centuries,
advocating for overarching changes to make
English spelling more intuitive.
The English language is chock-full
of irregularities.
One commonly used example of this:
take the “g-h” sound from “enough,”
the “o” sound from “women,”
and the “t-i” sound from “action,”
and you could argue that
“g-h-o-t-i” spells “fish.”
So, how did English get like this?
English arose from old Germanic
tribes that invaded the British Isles
more than 1,500 years ago.
Their languages coalesced and evolved
into Old English.
When Roman missionaries arrived
around 600 CE,
they devised ways to write it
down using the Latin alphabet,
supplementing it with some Germanic runes
for sounds they didn’t have letters for.
Then came the Norman invasion of 1066
when French speakers conquered England.
French became the language
of authority and high society.
But English remained the dominant
spoken language.
Over time, those descended from French
speakers also became English speakers,
but some French words snuck
into the language.
Some English speakers were also familiar
with Latin through the church
and formal education.
By the mid-1400s, people were writing
in English again—
but it was unstandardized.
They used a mix of influences to determine
word choice and spelling,
including the French they knew,
the Latin they studied,
and the English they spoke.
So, things were already pretty messy.
Then, in 1476, the printing press
arrived in England.
Some of the people working the presses
may have mainly spoken Flemish—
not English.
And they were given manuscripts
that varied widely in their spelling.
Without standardization, different writers
went with various spellings
based in part on what they happened
to encounter while reading.
Many words had a multitude of spellings.
The word “dough,” for instance,
used to be spelled in all these ways
and was originally pronounced “dach.”
The guttural Germanic sound it ended with
was one the Latin alphabet didn’t cover.
It eventually came to be
represented with “g-h.”
But, for some “g-h” words,
English speakers eventually dropped
the guttural sound altogether;
for others, they ended up pronouncing
it as “f” instead,
as exemplified in “dough” versus “tough.”
Printing presses memorialized
the spelling
even though the pronunciation
eventually changed.
And this wasn’t just the case with “g-h.”
Some letters in other words
also fell silent:
words like knife, gnat, and wrong
all contain the vestiges
of past pronunciations.
But while the printing press
was solidifying spellings,
the English language was also undergoing
what scholars call the Great Vowel Shift.
Between the 14th and 18th centuries,
the way English speakers pronounced
many vowels changed significantly.
For instance, “bawt” became “boat.”
This displaced the word for “boot,”
which had up until then
been pronounced “boat,”
and pushed it into the high “u” vowel
position it maintains today.
Words that already had this high “u”
often became diphthongs,
with two vowels in a single syllable.
So, “hus” became “house.”
As with so many linguistic matters,
there's no clear reason why this happened.
But it did.
And how the vowel shift affected a word
depended on various things,
including the other sounds in the word.
The word “tough” was once “tōh,”
among other variations.
“Through” was once “thruch”
and “dough” “dah.”
These words all started
with different vowel sounds
that were then affected differently
by the vowel shift.
The “o-u” spelling they all adopted was
a haphazardly applied French influence.
So, eventually they wound up with
still distinct vowel sounds,
but similar spellings
that don’t really make much sense.
All this means English can be
a difficult language
for non-native speakers to learn.
And it reveals the many ways history,
in all its messiness,
acted upon English,
making it especially tough.
