Spell It Out: The Singular Story Of English Spelling

[ewx]

Spell It Out: The Singular Story Of English Spelling, David Crystal, ISBN 978 1 84668 567 5

The bulk of this book (and for me most of the interest) is an account of how English spelling got the way it is today. Although superficially a mess, a lot of the steps from the (relatively) straightforward Anglo-Saxon conventions to the present made a reasonable amount of sense in the contexts in which they were made - but the composition of those steps yields a rather complex system, and the context has changed a lot.

For example, the C16th introduction of a silent b into debt wouldn’t have been particularly confusing in an age when many literate people knew Latin, but today most users of the language aren’t likely to have any idea why the word has such a bizarre spelling.

The historical chapters are divided up by quotes from various authors touching on spelling one way or another. The end of the book discusses how detailed knowledge of the history of spelling might be used to improve its teaching.

There aren’t any citations for the specific statements about the develop of English spelling, but there is a “further reading” section.

Well worth a look if you’re at all interested in the subject.

Comments

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

If we weren't so used to English, the whole thing would be deeply confusing.

I was thinking earlier about the whole upper/lower case situation. How the whole concept of having pairs of characters whose meanings are almost (but not quite) identical would be utterly weird for us if it were some other script. And then we end up with ASCII where those pairs are split so far apart.