This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 33: Why spelling is hard — but also hard to change. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 33 shownotes page.
[Music]Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics. I’m Gretchen McCulloch.
Lauren: And I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about why spelling is so hard and also hard to change. But first, Gretchen, it’s almost time for your book to be out in the world, and I am very excited.
Gretchen: I am also very excited for people to finally get to read it. But you have already read my book about internet linguistics.
Lauren: I have. This is why I get to be excited, because I know people are in for a treat.
Gretchen: In fact, you are featured a little bit in my book about internet linguistics, which was very funny because as I was talking about everybody else in the book, I was referring to everybody by their last names, and when I got to you, I was like, “I’m guess I’m calling her ‘Gawne’ for this book.”
Lauren: Oh, my gosh. Really?
Gretchen: Despite the fact that, of course, I normally call you “Lauren.”
Lauren: That is gonna be so amazing. I may have to listen to the audiobook just to laugh at that.
Gretchen: Just so you can laugh at how I don’t have a cot/caught distinction and so I can’t actually do the vowel that you do in your name.
Lauren: That’s okay. I’m just really excited. The book is great. People can pre-order it now. And its out on the 23rd of July?
Gretchen: That’s correct.
Lauren: You were explaining to me why pre-orders were so important. I’m learning a lot about books from you. It’s an interesting world.
Gretchen: Pre-orders are really important because, first of all, they help the publisher decide literally how many copies to print because they have a sense of how much people are interested in the book. Also, because when they’re trying to count book sales for whether something ends up as a bestseller or is on some sort of list, all of the pre-order sales count towards that first week of sales. So, if you’re likely to end up on a bestseller list, it’s gonna be the first week, and the pre-orders all count towards that. It’s huge. If you’re excited for any book, really, you should pre-order it. And you should definitely pre-order mine!
Lauren: Excellent. There’ll be a link to that in the show notes.
Gretchen: It is called “Because Internet” and is available where good books are sold. But there’ll be a link to that.
Lauren: This month’s Patreon bonus episode is an interview with Alice Gaby, which is all about how we use directions in language and her work with an Australian language, Kuuk Thaayorre. It was from our November liveshow in Melbourne.
Gretchen: Alice’s research is so interesting. It was really fun to do in the liveshow because we got to have a whole room of people in an auditorium point where they thought north was and see how good people are at telling different directions, and whether linguistic or cultural factors affect how good you are at directions or what types of directions you pay attention to or you notice. I also got to quiz her on some Canadianisms.
Lauren: That was pretty great. We returned the favour by quizzing you on some Australianisms that Alice chose.
Gretchen: Yes. That was very fun. You can listen to that and many other bonus episodes by going to patreon.com/lingthusiasm, which we’ll also link to in the show notes.
[Music]Gretchen: Why is spelling so hard, Lauren? Why do we spend years and years learning how to spell and then we still mess it up?
Lauren: When you say “we,” I think you mean me. I am definitely the more prone to misspelling out of the two of us. Let’s just get that out of the way.
Gretchen: I misspell things, but then I also notice them before the post goes up. Whereas, you put a post up and then I message you being like, “Hey. I wanna reblog your post. Can you just fix this typo?”
Lauren: I would like to just say that I have a medieval manuscript approach to spelling, which is gonna be really important, and we’ll explain why in this episode. But part of the reason that English spelling is hard is that it is a long and storied history. Every word is like this great little time-capsule nugget of linguistic information.
Gretchen: I like to think of English spelling not so much as a phonetic approach to spelling – we don’t spell based on how something sounds – we spell based on where a word comes from. So, if a word comes from Old English versus if a word comes from French, or from Latin, or from Greek, or from one of the many other languages that English has borrowed words from, English tends to keep each word’s original spelling conventions or older spelling conventions, and then those come into conflict with each other. That’s what makes it really difficult.
Lauren: But it makes it so great as well.
Gretchen: Yeah! It also makes it really interesting. I think of spelling systems across languages as kind of like living in a house. When you first move into a house, you unpack everything and you hopefully say, “Okay. I’m gonna be organised this time.” And you say, “This is where everything’s gonna go.” But the longer you’ve lived in a house, the more random boxes of stuff in the attic you have.
Lauren: English has lived in the house of the Latin alphabet for a very long time.
Gretchen: Yeah. And so having a spelling reform is like saying, “Okay. We’re gonna pull everything out of the boxes. And we’re gonna Marie Kondo this spelling system and make sure that all of the symbols are actually doing what we want them to do. And if they don’t spark joy, we’re gonna reform them.” But English has not really Marie Kondo-ed its spelling system in a very long time. That’s one of its problems.
Lauren: It’s one of its benefits too. I’m gonna be pro-the-wacky-spelling, even though it is a major hindrance to me in my daily life. It’s worth pointing out that the house of the Latin alphabet that English lives in wasn’t necessarily a given. English has been written at various times with runes and other writing systems.
Gretchen: That’s true. The Latin alphabet was much better at spelling Latin than it was at spelling English, for example, because Latin actually only has five vowel sounds, and so it has five vowel symbols. That makes it a pretty easy correspondence. Whereas, English has five vowel symbols but does not have five vowel sounds. It has 14-ish depending on the dialect.
Lauren: That’s a really important thing with early English manuscripts where everyone borrowed this Latin alphabet in, but they borrowed it in to fit their dialect. There wasn’t necessarily a standard of spelling. It means that there are four main dialects when you look at Old English manuscripts, where, if you read them, they give you a really good idea of what the sounds were in different regions of English. So, we normally think of the Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish, and West Saxon, so there’re kind of four large areas of English. You can see some of those sound distinctions still in modern English varieties. The difference is that we had them in the writing system as well as in speech, but the writing system became standardised.
Gretchen: Yeah. The writing system became standardised, and even if you don’t have a pronunciation distinction – for example, the word “gone” as in the past of “go” and the word “Gawne” as in Lauren’s surname, I say them the same way but I still have to spell them differently because some people pronounce them differently.
Lauren: Yes. Some people would say something like “Lauren /gɔn/ has /gɑn/ out to buy ice cream.”
Gretchen: That’s what you’d say, right?
Lauren: That is what I say, often.
Gretchen: It’s an important part of your life.
Lauren: Whereas, if we were making this podcast in the 1100s, we might choose to represent those distinctions, or lack of distinctions, in the writing system. But what happened was that English became standardised – and people talk about this as being part of the success of internationalised English is that we agreed on a standard and it got “fixed.” It got “fixed” around 1490, which is a weirdly specific time. In the late 1400s, a guy name William Caxton brought the first printing press to England. And a printing press obviously deals with words in a very different way to manuscripts. If someone’s handwriting stuff, they’ll make different changes each time they write something out. Whereas a printing press is just making lots of copies of the same thing. Caxton had to decide what spelling he was gonna use in all of these copies.
Gretchen: He was a lot more standard about it. He has this great anecdote, right, about trying to figure out what word to use or what spelling to use because of all the different varieties of English that were spoken in different regions there. And you can’t please everybody. It’s about “eggs,” right?
Lauren: Ah, yes. Caxton’s egg story, as people often refer to it. We know that there are dialects now, but at various points people felt like the dialects weren’t even mutually intelligible. People couldn’t understand each other in different parts of England. And there’s a very famous story. Caxton was travelling in the north of England with a friend of his, and they were at a market, and his friend was like, “Can I get some eggs, please?” And she was like, “What is this ‘eggs’ you’re talking about? I don’t speak French. I don’t know that word.” Another person came in and said, “Ah, he actually wants some eyren,” which is a northern dialect word for “eggs.” And she was like “Ah, yes. Yes. Now that you’ve used that good English word for them, I know what you mean.” Caxton tells this story and it neatly encapsulates this idea that English was very disparate. It is still regionally distinct as well. But Caxton had to decide what words he was putting in books. Famously, in a way that has influenced English ever since, he chose the southern dialects from around the London area.
Gretchen: Yeah. So, he decided to write down “eggs,” which is why “eggs” is standard in English now. But eyren is still very similar to the German word for eggs. It could’ve ended up that way for us as well.
Lauren: Yeah. So, it’s just because the printing presses were brought to London and not York that southern English is more strongly codified.
Gretchen: One of my favourite examples of this is also that the printing presses started writing down English at the point at which we still pronounced the K before N that has become silent now in words like “knee” and “knight” and “know” that have the silent K. They were once pronounced /kne:/ and /knixt/ – and /knɔ/ or something like that? I don’t know about the vowel there. That silent G-H in “knight” was once pronounced /knixt/. And that double E was once pronounced as literally like a longer version of the vowel, which at the time was /kne:/.
Lauren: That’s because the printing press came in just before the big vowel shift happened and became standardised, which we talked about in our episode on vowels.
Gretchen: Yeah. So, we’re not gonna get into the details of the vowels, but there’re all these sound changes that happened in English. At one point, these spellings were a lot more logical than they are now, which is part of this – some of the discarded boxes up in the attic of the English language are like, “Oh, yeah. Actually, we changed how to pronounce all the vowels. Sorry.”
Lauren: This box just has a label called “Silent E Used to Sound Like Something,” and I don’t even know what’s in it.
Gretchen: Yeah. Like “Silent K Before N was Once Pronounced” – oh, no. We put that away in a box. Sorry.
Lauren: Yeah. Don’t need that. Up in the attic.
Gretchen: But some languages have actually done more rearranging and Marie Kondo-ising of their orthography houses than English has.
Lauren: Which takes a very top-down approach. You need the equivalent of a Marie Kondo for language in your language’s life for that to happen.
Gretchen: Yeah. Once you’ve started writing a language, and once people are getting literate and so on in the language, and you have books and stuff, it gets really hard to change a writing system because people, once they’ve learned it, they’re like “Yeah, well, it’s fine. It’s got some silent letters – whatever.” The people that would benefit from the change are the people who haven’t learned to read yet, and they tend to have less power.
Lauren: There’s that issue. There’s also the issue of you can do a full spring clean of the spelling house, but no matter how good you are at doing that, you’re gonna end up having more boxes. It just means that spelling freezes now. But the language is gonna keep moving on in terms of how it’s pronounced and what words are used.
Gretchen: Yeah. You need to clean out your spelling house every couple of centuries, at least. Maybe every century. Maybe every 50 years if you wanna be able to do it more gradually.
Lauren: Could you imagine having to relearn spelling twice every lifetime?
Gretchen: This is why it’s not always very popular. Then it creates problems with reading older books, too, because you go back and read a book that was published 200 years ago, and if you do that in English, that book is pretty easy to read. But if you do that in a language like German, which has a spelling reform every 10 or 50 years – they’ll release, like, “Here’s a few new spellings” – it gets harder and harder to read your older literature. One of my favourite examples of spelling reform is from French because they did this really great thing, which was, “Okay, let’s have a spelling reform to get rid of some of the silent letters,” but instead of just completely getting rid of the silent letters, they replaced them with an equally silent accent mark to indicate that there had once been a silent letter here.
Lauren: That is so great. I like that because it speaks to my interest in keeping that history of the word in the spelling.
Gretchen: Yeah. If you know the history of the word, you’re like “Ooo! There was a silent letter here. This is great.” And if you’re a school child, you’re like, “So, I just write this? Fine?” This is what the primary function of the French accent circonflexe, which is the one that looks like a little hat – I’m making the little hat sign with my hands as I say this because that was how we always talked about it in school is you have to make the hat sign with your hands.
Lauren: That’s very cute.
Gretchen: When you talk about that, you have to make a little pointy hat with your hands. There’s a bunch of words in French that a lot of them get borrowed into English before their S had dropped. And then their S dropped in French, and then eventually the silent S got replaced with the little hat. If you have a word like “forêt” in French, which is spelled F-O-R-E-little hat-T – oooh! You don’t speak French. I’m gonna make you guess what the English word was that was there.
Lauren: Do I just stick an S in there? Is that what you said?
Gretchen: You stick an S in after the E with the hat.
Lauren: So, it becomes “forest.”
Gretchen: Yes! Forest!
Lauren: I know this one because of my ongoing interest in listening to The History of English podcast because you’ve put “hôtel” there. And “hotel” and “hostel” are historically the same word. We borrowed into English the French “hostel” back when it had an S. And then we re-borrowed it as “hotel” when it didn’t have an S. And we’ve borrowed it to have slightly different meanings about the type of accommodation.
Gretchen: And “hôpital,” which in English was borrowed as “hospital,” was borrowed before the H became silent in French and also before the S became silent. So, it’s now pronounced /œpital/, but it’s spelled like /hapital/ but with the hat on the O.
Lauren: When dictionary makers are doing etymologies – which is the histories of words in a language – this is the kind of clue they can use to tell when something was borrowed into English from French, even if there’s no written record of it.
Gretchen: Yeah. Because if you know when something became silent, you have this additional clue. There’s a whole bunch of parallels between French and Spanish as well. A word like “fête” which has the hat on the E there –
Lauren: Oh, it used to be “fest”!
Gretchen: Right!
Lauren: “Fête” and “festival” are kinda from the same root.
Gretchen: And “fiesta.”
Lauren: Oh, my gosh.
Gretchen: They’re all the same. They’re a party.
Lauren: It’s a party of parties.
Gretchen: “Bête” with the accent, T, and then there’s a silent E, but we’re gonna ignore that…
Lauren: “Best”?
Gretchen: “Best.” The additional clue that I’ll give you is that there’s a fairy tale called “La belle et la bête.”
Lauren: Ah. “Beast.”
Gretchen: “Beast.”
Lauren: Excellent.
Gretchen: This was something that I figured out midway through high school French, and I was like, “Oh, my god! All these words actually have parallels in English as well and I just never realised! And that’s how I can remember whether to use this.” I remember telling my brother after a few years of French as well, and he was like, “Wow! This is so great.” It’s one of my favourite little –
Lauren: Spelling actually helps you remember the words are related.
Gretchen: Yeah. It’s weird because the circonflexe doesn’t really help French speakers that much, but it weirdly helps English speakers more than it helps French speakers.
Lauren: That’s very un-French in terms of spelling reform.
Gretchen: Yeah. It’s like, “Thanks Académie Française for helping out the English, which I’m sure you really wanted to do.” French has a reputation for being a language that’s fairly difficult to spell because it’s got a lot of silent letters. Spanish has a reputation for being a language that is fairly easy to spell because it doesn’t have a lot of silent letters and it has had fairly regular spelling reform. Spanish doesn’t use the P-H in a word like “telefono.” They’ve put an F there because why do you need a P-H? That’s just a sign it came from Greek. I said to a native Spanish speaker once, “Yeah. I’m so jealous. Your language has such a great, logical spelling system.” And they were like “Actually, you know what, I’m dyslexic. And there is this huge problem for me in the Spanish spelling system despite it being my native language,” because Spanish still writes its words as if there’s a distinction between B and V.
Lauren: Right.
Gretchen: But it doesn’t actually pronounce its words as if there’s a distinction between B and V anymore.
Lauren: So, you just have to know for the spelling.
Gretchen: So, you just have to know. If you’re an English speaker, this is actually pretty easy for you because you look at B and V and you think that they should be pronounced differently. And so you go into Spanish and you try to pronounce them differently, which gives you an English accent in Spanish, but does let you easily remember which one is which. Plus, a lot of them have cognates or related words in English that let you remember which one’s B or V because you have an English word to pin it on. So, they had to rename the letter of the alphabet because they used to be called /βe/ and /βe/, which is the exact same sound. For a while, some people said, “/βe/ grande” and “/βe/ pequeña” – the big B and the little B – or “/βe/ corta,” the short B. Or sometimes they use keywords like “/βe/ de burro” – “burro” is “donkey” – and “/βe/ de vaca” – “vaca” is cow. So, one has a B – burro – and “vaca” has a V, just to kind of remember. Eventually, the Spanish Academy changed the name of the letter V to /ɤβɛɪ/ instead of /βɛɪ/. So, now you have /βɛɪ/ and /ɤβɛɪ/, which helps you remember. But they’re still completely useless for speakers. You could just pick one and spell all the words with it. And yet, they have not. On the plus side, the fact that they’re pronounced the same way in Spanish means that the city of Baltimore is pronounced the same as the evil guy in Harry Potter, Voldemort, if you say them with a Spanish accent.
Lauren: Oh, my gosh. But, you see, this is why spelling becomes really important so that people don’t, in 500 years’ time, be like, “This is the city named after an evil character in Harry Potter.” It’s the spelling that’s gonna make it clear.
Gretchen: But wouldn’t that be great?
Lauren: That would be a great miscommunicated etymology.
Gretchen: I support this folk etymology. Let’s make it happen.
Lauren: A reason that sometimes keeping the history and the historical spelling has really good benefits for a language, as in the case of Tibetan, where different dialects actually pronounce the same word very differently, but both rely on that historical spelling because they’ve forked off. English has changed a lot since English spelling was started. Imagine if there was a whole other dialect of English, which was almost mutually unintelligible for us, but also relied on those same spellings. A variety where maybe it was the N in “knee” that got dropped. And so people say /ki/ in that language. But they know K-N = K. Whereas, we have K-N = N. If you read Tibetan – and I don’t actually. For someone who has spent years working with the Tibetan language, I work on the Nepal side and people choose to spell, often, with the Nepali alphabet, which is that Devanagari from India that has the line across the top. So, I can speak a Tibetan language, but I don’t read Tibetan. Thank you to Ruth Gamble and Gerald Roche for helping me with this example. It’s just full of silent letters. It’s like English. You have a lot of letters that you write but you don’t pronounce, but they’re important for the spelling and the history of words. If you were to say something like “It is good to speak Tibetan,” you would write that as, to do a very terrible literal pronunciation, something like /bɑd skiæd lɛɪ la yɔd/. But in the variety of Tibetan spoken in Lhasa, which is the capital of Tibet, the /bɑd/ would be /pə/. And that /skiæd/ would be /kɛ/, which you can see how all those letters have become silent or you’ve got a vowel shift as well like you’ve had in English.
Gretchen: Yeah. So many changes. And yet you can kind of trace them. The S drops. And the D drops.
Lauren: Yep. So, you know that if you see that B written like that, you pronounce it more like we pronounce a P. And if you just spoke Lhasa Tibetan, you might be like, “Why don’t we reform this?” because it has the same kind of history as English. It started being written in the 7th century and codified by the 9th century, which is a very similar time-depth to English. But if you go to the Amdo region, which is a completely different area where they speak Tibetan, that /bɑd/ gets pronounced like /wɑd/.
Gretchen: Oh, whoa. Okay. They did something different with the B and then the D stays.
Lauren: And the D stays. And they don’t have the same vowel shift. That /skiæd/ becomes /kæl/. The D becomes more like an L.
Gretchen: The S still drops, but instead of the D dropping, it becomes like an L?
Lauren: Yes.
Gretchen: And you don’t have a vowel shift?
Lauren: And you don’t have the vowel shift.
Gretchen: This kind of historical alphabet lets them both read and write to each other or each other’s literature and stuff even though –
Lauren: Yeah. It means they can read the same newspapers and the same historical writings, but they pronounce it in their own way.
Gretchen: That’s really interesting. Another language with a similar time-depth, actually, around the 7th century to the 9th century, is Arabic.
Lauren: Looks like you need a good millennium to bake in some great language change and orthographic conservatism.
Gretchen: That’s how long it takes for your spelling house to get really messy. Classical Arabic is from around this period and that’s the Arabic that’s in the Koran, so it’s very prestigious among Arabic speakers. It’s got a lot of stuff that is not necessarily reflected in the pronunciation anymore. One of the things that I noticed when I was studying Arabic for a couple years in undergrad is that there are four kinds of Aleph in Arabic. Aleph’s the first letter of the alphabet. It’s got a common origin with the Greek Alpha and with our letter A. There are four of them in Arabic. There’s your regular Aleph, which is just written like a straight line, and that just makes the /a/ sound. So, that’s pretty easy.
Lauren: You’re starting at the start and you’re like “Well, this is easy and straightforward,” right?
Gretchen: Yeah. You’re learning the Arabic alphabet and you’re like, “Great. Okay. So, there’s all these letters and they make these sounds.” And I’m like, “This sounds fine.” This was pretty straightforward. There’s a one-to-one correspondence. And then they’re like, “Actually, here are some letters that there are exceptions for.” Aleph is one of them. Part of this is because, historically, Aleph wasn’t actually an A sound. Aleph was a consonant sound, which is the glottal stop. That’s the sound in between “uh-oh” – that catch in the middle of your throat. Historically, that’s what Aleph was.
Lauren: We talked about this really briefly in the nothings episode, but I didn’t realise Aleph had a complicated history outside of that use.
Gretchen: Yeah. Aleph was adapted to make the A sound or the /a/ sound by the Greeks because they didn’t have a glottal stop. But it also got adapted to make versions of the /a/ sound by Arabic speakers, even though they did still have a glottal stop, because a glottal stop at the beginning of the word sounds a lot like just starting to talk. If you say the word “Alpha” itself, you can say that with a glottal stop at the beginning – /ʔalfə/ – or you can say it without a glottal stop at the beginning – /alfə/ – and they really sound the same.
Lauren: Especially if you’re like us and you don’t have a glottal stop as part of your sound system.
Gretchen: Exactly. That’s why there’s been some kind of complicated confusion. Arabic reintroduced a new letter, which is called Hamza, to actually stand for the glottal stop. But because glottal stop had this weird and complicated history where it used to be this other letter, Hamza’s like a semi-letter in Arabic, which means that when it shows up, it always has to have, what they called in my class, as “host.” It has to have another vowel that it goes on top of, but that vowel’s actually sometimes silent.
Lauren: Right.
Gretchen: Because it’s not a real enough sound for it to be there by itself. It’s one of these interesting historical complications.
Lauren: It’s a bit like spelling “cough” O-U-G-H. That G-H is just kind of along for the ride.
Gretchen: Yeah. Or like the difference between “through” and “though” and “thorough.” The vowel sounds get affect by the consonants even though it’s actually the vowels that are changing. Spelling is weird.
Lauren: It’s always funny when I hear these examples in languages I don’t speak, and it’s just like, “The Aleph is there when it’s only got a host” and it’s very trying to think about it in my head. And then I spell English relatively proficiently every day, which has equally crazy and complicated rules.
Gretchen: Exactly. It’s all what you’re used to. But that’s Hamza, which is like its own thing. There’s still three more Alephs to get through. This kind of explains – one of the Alephs is “Aleph Maddah.” And that’s a double Aleph. It expresses both a glottal stop and the long vowel together as two Alephs – one of top of each other. Like one vertical and one horizontal.
Lauren: It’s doing all the work.
Gretchen: Yeah. But you don’t actually use a Hamza in that case, which you should use with a glottal stop. Instead, you write a double Aleph, but that’s because Aleph used to be a glottal stop and sometimes it still is.
Lauren: Right.
Gretchen: And then you also have “Aleph Maqsurah,” which is a totally different shape and not straight up and down like a normal Aleph is at all. It’s kind of like an S-shape – ish. But it looks a lot like the dot-less version of the letter Ya, which makes the /y/ or the /i/ sound, depending on context. That’s the Aleph that only appears at the end of the word for fun, basically. The Aleph Maqsurah is often a feminine marker, so it’s got grammatical functions. I don’t know. Historically, maybe it was a Ya. I don’t know why it’s there – why it’s a different shape. But it’s a different shape. And then the last Aleph, which is possibly my favourite Aleph because it’s very rare and it’s got a really good name, which is the “dagger” Aleph.
Lauren: I like that you have a favourite Aleph.
Gretchen: Look. If there are four different Alephs, I think one is duty-bound to pick a favourite of them.
Lauren: I wish we had letters that were called cool names like “dagger.”
Gretchen: Yeah. We have “Double-U.” That’s the most interesting name. A lot of the Romance languages call the letter Y, the Greek /i/ – the Greek I – like in French you say, “ee-grek.”
Lauren: Oh! That’s why in Polish it’s called “ee-grek.” I’ve never thought about that.
Gretchen: Yeah! It’s the “ee-grek.” It’s the Greek /i/ – Greek I – because it comes from upsilon.
Lauren: Gonna go around calling Y the “Greek I” now.
Gretchen: Yeah. That’s my favourite letter name in the Latin alphabet is the Greek I because it really encodes the origin of it in so many European languages.
Lauren: I mean, it took me a very long time to think about Double-U being two Us. So, sometimes you’re very complacent about what you’re used to, I think, is really just the discussion of these characters.
Gretchen: Yeah. Exactly. So, the “dagger” Aleph looks like the regular Aleph, so it’s a straight line up and down, but it’s shorter. And it’s written a little bit superscript. It’s written a little bit up. And it’s still pronounced the same way. It’s only found in a few modern words, but those are some very common ones. For example, the word “Allah,” meaning “God,” has the “dagger” Aleph in it. It’s generally specially encoded so that it’s produced automatically by font and coding programs.
Lauren: Right. Fairly visible.
Gretchen: Because it’s pretty important. There’s just so much going on with what happens with Aleph that, again, you’ve got this kind of, “Here’s a history tradition. All of these made sense at some point. They still make some kind of sense if you look at the history of them. But they’re no longer as active a distinction to modern speakers as they were when they were originally written down.”
Lauren: A lot of spelling is a bit complicated, and it has good reasons why it’s complicated, and sometimes it’s very helpful either for etymologists or for people learning to spell. But there are a lot of calls to reform spelling – particularly of English.
Gretchen: Because so many spellings are weird and have historical reason for them. I came across this great post on Tumblr, which we’ll link to, which was a proposal to reform English spelling even more etymologically and say, “Okay. If a word comes from a language that traditionally uses the Latin alphabet, yeah, sure, we can keep using the Latin alphabet for it. But if a word comes from Greek, we should keep using the Greek alphabet.”
Lauren: Right. So, we should be spelling “tsunami” using Japanese characters.
Gretchen: Exactly. You see where this is going, right? Or like “vodka” using Cyrillic because it’s from Russian – and “etymological” using Greek letters because it’s from Greek. The whole post is written in this proposed spelling reform. It is very difficult to read – and delightful.
Lauren: I like a good spelling reform. Lots of people have tried to reform spelling. You’ve made a proposal for a spelling reform for English.
Gretchen: Yeah. I have more fun with spelling reform when it’s kind of treated as a joke, because at this point, you’re never gonna get all the English speakers to agree on some sort of actually good, or logical, or consistent spelling reform. I decided to say, “What if we took advantage of this proliferation of competing standards and just made something that was completely out to lunch?” I did this as a talk for the Festival of Bad ad Hoc Hypotheses, which is a joke science competition – talk.
Lauren: Which is great because it means I get to link to the video for people if they wanna see your full proposal.
Gretchen: Yes. I have a full proposal. It’s a video. It’s been put online. It was at MIT a couple months ago and you can watch it. It’s a lotta fun. What I said was, “Given that there’s some evidence that reading something in a harder font makes you retain it better because you had to put more effort into doing that – or reading something in a language that’s not your first languages makes you reason more logically because, again, you had to put more effort into that – and so what if we made all English speakers expend more effort and made the spelling system completely ridiculous?” I propose let’s just replace letters with weird Unicode equivalents and let’s replace things with stuff from other languages and other orthographies so that we learn a whole bunch of other orthographies and so on and so forth and just keep going.
Lauren: And that we all have to spell with other people’s dialects, right? So, I would have to have a Gawne/Gone merger, and you would have to make that distinction every time.
Gretchen: Yeah. Exactly. Because that helps foster cross-dialectal and cross-linguistic understanding if you have to confront the unfamiliar every time you go to write. I’m very fond of this proposal. I was very delighted. Once we put it online, some people commented on the YouTube video and on my Tweet about it in Tweets that had this revised, illogical spelling – used it. It was very gratifying.
Lauren: Excellent. It’s already starting.
Gretchen: It’s catching on, right?
Lauren: I want a full return to dialect variation in English spelling.
Gretchen: Exactly. We need to go back to the days before the printing press and just spell everything completely as we want to. That sounds like fun to me.
[Music]Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm, and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. And you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, esoteric symbol scarves and ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.
Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. To listen to bonus episodes, including our latest one about direction words with Alice Gaby, and help keep the show ad free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Other recent bonus topics include animals, a very cool linguistics job, which is figuring out how to pronounce the names on the radio, and the question of whether you talk differently when you’re speaking to someone who has a slightly different accent from you. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.
Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our editorial manager is Emily Gref, our music is “Ancient Cities” by The Triangles.
Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!
[Music]This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
