In our previous article we talked about ‘Conspicuous Consumption through English Spellings’. We quoted Veblen, the 19th century sociologist, to show how dense English spellings were always felt to be:
English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection.
In this article we talk about why English spellings are ‘cumbrous’.
It is well known that some European languages, chiefly, German, Spanish, Dutch and Italian, have, what is called ‘shallow’ or ‘transparent’ orthography. This means that there is a one to one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes. Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound in a language and grapheme is how this smallest unit of sound is represented in writing.
On the other hand, writing in the British Journal of Psychology, Spencer, Llinos, Hanley and Richard assert “…. some alphabet systems, including English and French are said to be ‘deep’ and ‘opaque’. This means that individual graphemes represent a number of different phonemes in different words, and there are many exceptions to grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules. As a consequence, English orthography contains many irregular or exception words such as ‘have’, ’shoe’ and ‘one’. In a transparent orthography, the mappings from letters to sound are much more consistent, and there are very few irregular words.”
Consequent to this out of step mapping – or worse, no-mapping – the average English learner takes three times longer to internalize the basics of reading and writing English. The problem in English spellings is often attributed to the fact that there are different spellings for identical English sounds. For example, the ‘ee’ sound is embedded equally in the words ‘leap’, ‘deep’ and ‘chief’. Similarly, the sound ‘oo’ is embedded in the words ‘mood’ ‘rude’ and ‘shrewd’.
It turns out there are over 3500 words in English with inconsistent spellings. And further, half of English spelling woes are owing to what Marsha Bell calls in her book Understanding English Spelling, the four problems of English spelling difficulty. These are:
(a) Consonant doubling
(b) EE-sound
(c) Long O sound
(d) Two OO sound
We give some examples of each.
Consonant Doubling: There is no predictive rule to double a consonant, although the consonant was doubled to show that the vowel was short rather than long: for example, ‘bitter’ and not ‘biter’. Though cabbage has a double b, cabaret has only one. Similarly, although giddy has double d, hideous has only one.
EE sound: This one is unfortunately absolutely without a pattern. The following dissimilarly spelled words have ee sound embedded:
agree, belief, fatigue, bean, conceit
Long O sound: While the regular pattern of ‘o’ as in, ‘nose’ and ‘no’ is fine, the many exceptions as in ‘coal’, ‘though’ and ‘toe’ do foul up things a bit.
Two OO sound: The problem here is that sometime oo gives a long oo sound and sometime it gives a short oo sound. For example, in troop and tool we have the long oo sound while good, book and hook give the short oo sound.
We have given an overview of why learning English spellings are so ‘cumbrous’. In our next article we will search for any grand design in the English speaking world that attempts to mitigate this cumbrousness.