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It may be best to approach this historically. English is
a difficult language to spell because of a series of
events which altered the way it was approached--our orthography went
through stages and our pronunciation
went through somewhat independent stages, so that today things are
pronounced one way, but spelled
another. Because of this, we must learn to spell--while children
who speak many other languages need only
place the letters they hear on the page, since for them all words are
spelled exactly as they sound, spoken
precisely as written. It is not so in English.
English has not always been this way. Hundreds of years
ago, words were written exactly as they were
pronounced. Each letter had a specific sound, with a very few
letter combinations creating unique sounds
(most of these involving the letter "h", as in ch, sh, gh, th).
As you wrote the word, you represented each sound
with a letter on the page; when you read it, you reproduced the sound
of each letter in sequence. Two t's were
different from one, two consecutive vowels were each pronounced, whether
the same or different.
We know this is so because of some of the work of those who spoke
this language. Chaucer, especially, is
known to have commented on this. In his poems, he would often
rhyme an English word to a foreign word,
especially something French or Latin. He complained in writing
on one occasion that the spelling of his scribes
was atrocious--but he attributed this not to some failure in their
education or upbringing, but to the fact that they
did not pronounce the words as he did--a serious matter for him, since
the way they spelled the words,
representing the way they spoke them, the words didn't rhyme.
This is very important to the story: Chaucer
perceived the letters on the page as a representation of the sounds
which would be made by the speaker; he
did not expect that his readers would pronounce words he wrote in their
own way, but in the way they were
written, and so he required that those words be written as he spoke
them.
Why did it change? It was certainly the combination of
three events, three influences, which changed the way
English-speaking people viewed--and learned--their own language.
They are listed here in no particular order.
The first of those was the work of Shakespeare. "The Bard"
wrote prolifically and emotively and creatively,
and left a stamp on the world of English unlike any writer before or
since. In his time, it was still the case that
words were pronounced as they were written, written as pronounced--not
at all the way we pronounce them
today. Although it was probably not his intention to write something
which would last the ages, his works and
his words were revered, and preserved with great accuracy--not, indeed,
as the Masoretic text of the ancient
scriptures, but with something of that attitude. They were viewed
as great and important writings, which to
change would be paramount to sacrilege. And they didn't have
to be so preserved for so long, for the next event
was close at hand.
The second was the invention of the printing press. Printing
captured language in a form more fixed than it
had been before; it did so for two reasons. First, the use of
printing plates meant that the preservation of the
written word no longer depended on the life of a single sheet of paper.
Now what was written was nearly etched
in stone--it was recorded on a rack of metal letters and reproduced
hundreds, possibly thousands, of times on
many sheets of paper. Printers who had what they considered important
or valuable pages would often save
them so that they could rebuild the rack and reprint them later--and
sometimes would save the rack itself, so that
they could print more at need. Suddenly, more people were exposed
to far more written material than ever
before, more began reading, more began writing. There was an
explosion of written communication. But also,
words were no longer recorded on the page by carefully educated and
trained scribes and monks. They were
recorded on the page by technicians--people trained in the use of the
new technology. A scribe will read--or
hear--a word, and then write the word. He writes it the way he
spells it--in those days, the way he said it. But a
technician will not rely on his own meager abilities to tell him how
to spell. He will copy the work before him
exactly as it appears. Thus the words of Shakespeare were printed
the way he wrote them, and, in the main,
continue to be so printed, despite the fact that perhaps not a single
word (perhaps "O!") is pronounced as it
was. And these words to some degree became standardized:
if you spelled a word as it was spelled by The
Bard, it could not be wrong, and it could not be misunderstood.
The third event or influence was the creation of the King James Bible.
As a theologian I could discuss the strengths and weaknesses
of this--it was the first "modern committee
translation", that is, the first time a group of scholars were gathered
to compare multiple copies of the ancient
text to determine what the original words must have been, the first
time several experts in the ancient languages
had to agree on the correct translation of each passage. For
this methodology, it deserves great praise.
Unfortunately, they had no means of dating their documents or understanding
the concept of "text families". In
their New Testament work, they had five complete copies of the Greek.
Four of these were all copies of the
same earlier version, and the fifth, far older and far more accurate,
was often overruled by comparison to "the
majority" of available authorities. The inaccuracies are not
in any way heretical; but they are unacceptable to
the modern scholar. (This is complicated by the fact that the
meanings of many words used by those scholars
have changed. One need look no farther than the concept of the
Holy "Ghost". To them, a ghost was not more
nor less than a spirit being; to us, it is invariably a haunt, the
spirit of a departed person which fails to rest. As a
child, I once imagined that the "Holy Ghost" was the ghost of the dead
Jesus, and that somehow Jesus was
alive again, but that because he died and his spirit remained here,
that was his ghost--nonsense, but a good
illustration of the confusion which results from teaching children
in another language which seems so much like
their own.) But it was not the historical, theological, or scholarly
influences of the King James Bible which made
the difference. It was its impact on education.
Very quickly, the King James Bible became revered above the writings
of Shakespeare; by the beginning of
the 20th century, it was in many quarters revered above the ancient
texts of which it was intended to be a
translation. Parents read it to their children; and they taught
their children to read from it. Nary a jot nor a tittle
would be altered for centuries: the text was holy, the words
were sacred, and no change could be tolerated.
Words would be spelled as they were spelled by King James, or they
would be wrong.
But English was still a young language undergoing transitions.
Centuries before, the Angles had conquered
the Celts, and the two languages melded into a new tongue; then the
Saxons brought their Germanic words,
which created what we call Anglo-Saxon. In 1056--not at all so
long ago in terms of language history--the
Normans conquered. These Normans spoke French--although not exactly;
they were early descendants of the
Norsemen who attacked France; their social structure was built on the
concept that the world was immeasurably
large, full of places to conquer: the eldest son would inherit
his father's lands and castle, and all other sons
would go out into the world and conquer their own lands and build their
own castles. But the peace treaty with
the kings in Paris prevented them from taking more of France; so from
Normandy, Anjou, and Brittany, they
attacked England--and infected the tongue of the natives with their
hybrid French/Norwegian language. You
had a composite language which still included many sounds from many
languages. It may be that English is the
most eclectic language spoken. It took many years for it to become
the language we speak.
But as books became more basic to our lives, new concepts were
developed. Webster published a
dictionary--in part because he believed that Americans should record
the correct way of pronouncing and
spelling their own language. The transistion was made:
there were now correct spellings and correct
pronunciations, and to speak or write otherwise was to be ignorant
and uneducated. It was now possible to
teach spelling as a subject, because there were correct answers to
the obvious questions.
Linguistics began to come into its own. I won't go into
details on the contributions of the Brothers Grimm,
Lewis Carroll, Noam Chomsky, or the many others who added significantly
to our understanding of language
and its development. As scholars, we gradually realized that
our language was an anomaly. Language did not
remain the same from generation to generation. Speakers were
lazy; they slurred sounds into different sounds,
eliminated those which were too difficult. At the same time,
they mispronounced things for hearing them
incorrectly. In the days when people were geographically isolated,
languages would diversify as local speakers
listened to each other and took their cues on grammar, pronunciation,
and structure from each other. In China,
the language fractured into dialects so diverse that they would be
considered different related languages--much
as the romance languages of Europe--were it not for the common almost
hieroglyphic orthography which held
together the structure. That is, throughout China, the same symbolic
representations had the same meanings,
and they were written in the same order to form sentences with the
same grammatic structures; the fact that the
words were pronounced so differently as to be entirely unrecognizable
from one part of the land to another did
not alter the ability of all to communicate on paper. The same
would have happened in the English-speaking
world, but that the English were extremely mobile--through their empire,
they constantly sent those who spoke
the current version to be respected governors of their provinces throughout
the world, and the current version of
the language was so promulgated to all; the American version did not
have time to divert adequately from its
sire before the next step in technology--radio--created a tendency
toward universal agreement in pronunciation,
as the printing press had in spelling.
But linguists recognized that language was fluid, constantly
changing; and that the primary way language
changed was through the "mistakes" of its speakers, the tendency of
localized and isolated groups to invent
their own way of speaking. Suddenly, the usage of the undereducated
was as valid as the usage of the
educated; it became socially incorrect to suggest that someone spoke
incorrectly--he only spoke differently.
Today, you cannot as a teacher teach a child that he speaks improperly.
His grammar, pronunciation, syntax,
and vocabulary are all learned from his family, and therefore representative
of a valid version of the language.
He uses it to communicate with those in his neighborhood, those in
his life--whether it is "Black English", "Valley
Talk", or any of a number of other "dialects" which approach incomprehensible
to those outside the community,
it must be regarded as "correct", because it is the language learned
by those people, a segment of the
English-speaking population.
