Beowulf wæs breme – blæd wide sprang –
Scyldes eafera Scedelandum in.

A thousand years ago, if you had read this text (assuming that you were one of the relatively few people in Western Europe who could read back then), you’d know that you were reading about a young hero, and that “this Beowulf was famous – praises of him flew far and wide – the son of Scyld, living in the Scandian lands.” In the intervening centuries, though, words have changed and have been added to the English language, and many of the words that were present in the earliest forms of English are now spelled and pronounced in an entirely different fashion.

Almost immediately after the creation of English as a written language, people started changing its orthography, the way the words are spelled and written. At first, the spelling changed depending on how each person heard the word, using a more phonetic spelling. It was common to have a variety of spellings of common words, but because they matched the way the words were pronounced (more or less) and because the number of written texts and people who could read them was smaller than it is today, the issue of developing a consistent English orthography was not addressed until after the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. As more people started to read, they began to notice that the same words were spelled in different ways depending on where the material was published. However, it wasn’t until the 1800s and the emergence of the field of phonetics (the study of the sounds common and unique to various languages) that people started working towards developing a standard spelling and pronunciation of English words.

Today there are people who want to simplify the rules of spelling, usually on a phonetic basis (for example, making it so that the last parts of the words rough and cough would be spelled differently because they’re pronounced differently). One of the common examples of why the current multiplicity of ways to pronounce the same sequences of letters is not a good thing is the constructed word ghoti – which, as you may have heard, can be pronounced “fish.” Why?

say “gh” as in “tough” (f)
say “o” as in “women” (ih)
say “ti” as in “explanation” (sh)
. . . and you get “fish”

An extreme example of this phenomenon is the word ghoughpteighbteau. Can you guess how it might be pronounced?

say “gh” as in “hiccough” (p)
say “ough” as in “though” (oh)
say “pt” as in “pterodactyl” (t)
say “eigh” as in “neighbor” (ay)
say “bt” as in “debtor” (t)
say “eau” as in “bureau” (oh)
. . . and you get “potato”

In the end, with all of the changes that English has gone through, and continues to go through with newly-developed words and ones that are adopted from other languages, it’s not likely that the debate over spelling reform will be resolved soon.

Cross-posted at the Ultimate Spelling blog.