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LEXPERT MAGAZINE | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018 87 WORDS | DETOURS | Howard Richler's latest book is Wordplay: Arranged and Deranged Wit. And you can blame that on the history of the language, writes Words columnist Howard Richler SOME WRITERS have shown a hyper- bolic penchant, if not outright chauvinism, in their advocacy of the English language. Typical of these comments is the follow- ing encomium by British novelist Michael Arlen: "English is the great Wurlitzer of language, the most perfect all-purpose instrument." On this side of the Atlantic, language writer Richard Lederer wrote in e Miracle of Language that "English is easy to learn because it has a familiar look to speakers of other languages" due to its myriad borrowings from other languages. English may be relatively easy to learn, but its spelling is irrational and a bane to people learning it as a second language. In his 1982 book e REAL Reason Why Johnny Still Can't Read, Stanley L. Sharp related "there are at least 50 million adults in the United States who do not spell well." Why is English spelling such tuff stough? Many factors account for our largely non- phonetic orthography. Between the 7 th and 11 th centuries, England was invaded repeat- edly by sea-faring marauders who brought with them diverse spelling practices. To complicate matters, when English spelling was evolving in the 7 th century, there were four distinct dialects in England and they oen developed different spelling for the same word. For example, "heaven" could be rendered as heofon, heofen or heofne. Because the ruling class of England was dominated for centuries by the monolin- gual Norman French, there was even a tendency to Frenchify some words. Hence the word cwén (the Old English form of English spelling is atrochüss Another factor that affected spelling was the Great Vowel Shi. When it com- menced in the 15 th century, English speak- ers started to alter the way vowels were pronounced and this sound change was heightened by inconsistencies. Although they have the same oo- spelling, "flood" and "blood" are not pronounced in a simi- lar fashion to "food," which itself is pro- nounced differently than "good." Wald- man relates that during the Great Vowel Shi, "our spelling not only moved away from the sounds of words, as oen was the case in the past, but the sounds of words also moved away from our spelling." Around the time of the Great Vowel Shi, William Caxton introduced the printing press to England. Before printing, spelling tended to be phonetic, was meant to be read aloud and was not standardized. Everyone spelled words in the manner they deemed they should be pronounced. Cax- ton and fellow printers, seeking some regu- lar manner of spelling words, decided on a fairly standardized way of spelling which corresponded to the sound system of Mid- dle English, not Modern English. By contrast, spelling in most other Euro- pean languages tends to be more phonetic, and there were not large sound changes be- tween the medieval and modern versions, possibly because language academies moni- tored this process. e English language, on the other hand, has never had any such monitoring body. And although some languages, such as German and Russian, reformed their spelling in the 20th cen- tury, this is unlikely to happen for English. ose who have mastered traditional spell- ing may be unwilling to learn a new system; and there is no agreement among spelling reform advocates for an optimal system. "queen") was spelled in the Middle English period quene and hús turned into "house." By the beginning of the 15 th century, Eng- lish spelling was a mixture of two systems, Old English and French. Until writers such as Shakespeare proved that English could be as lyrical as any lan- guage, many an Englishman believed his mother tongue to be second rate. When omas More wrote Utopia in 1516, he wrote not in English, but in Latin. is ten- dency to regard Latin as superior extended into the realm of spelling as many felt that Latin's fixed spelling was an improvement over the instability of English orthography. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary shows 23 spelling variations for the word "never" in Middle English. Many an idiosyncratic English spelling bears a Latin imprimatur. e word "debt" was originally spelled phonetically (dett or dette) until the 16 th century, when it was replaced by the spelling "debt" because it was influenced by the Latin spelling debere, meaning to owe. Also, receite was replaced by "receipt" influenced by the Latin recepta, the feminine past participle of the verb reci- pere. At least in these instances, we retain the original phonetic pronunciation; in other cases, we have acquired a new pro- nunciation, such as the word "cors" which decayed into "corpse." e disparagement of English led to oth- er false etymologies. In his book, Spelling Dearest, Niall McLeod Waldman informs us that word "island" was originally spelled phonetically as iland or yland. In the 16 th century, however, scholars incorrectly in- terpreted it as deriving from the Latin word insula and therefore inserted an "s," mak- ing "island" the standard form by 1700. Similarly, the Middle English delit was ren- dered as delight in the mistaken belief that the word was connected to "light." PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK