English spelling is a bit of a mess. Often, spelling a word seems unintuitive compared to its pronunciation. Why “Wednesday”? (What’s that first “d” doing in there?) Why “onomatopoeia” and not “onomatopia”? Why “ingenious” and “minuscule” instead of “ingenius” and “miniscule”?
A Brief History
There are seemingly endless examples of this sort of inconsistency between spelling and pronunciation that make English, in particular, difficult to master. One reason can be traced back to the language’s birth.
English is a Germanic language, sharing its roots with, among others, German and Dutch. But a look back at the Norman Conquest in the eleventh century shows how English got its Latin influences. It has a uniquely close relationship with Romance languages like French and Spanish, which are all similarly descended from Latin.
So modern English was born at the meeting of two languages. However, that only reveals part of the story. The Great Vowel Shift, along with regional variations, made English spelling less and less of an accurate reflection of how speakers actually pronounced words. Scribes often tried to maintain etymological accuracy by remaining faithful to a word’s Latin roots, ignoring changes in pronunciation. Meanwhile, scribal errors in early English texts may very well have made it into proper English.
Now
This leads us to the present, where the English—along with every other language—we speak and write today is a natural result of millennia of linguistic history. Words are spelt weirdly because that’s just how it’s always been spelt.
Very few languages have ever been “designed”; even fewer are widely used today. This shows the difficulty of directly dictating changes to a language. And even if we were able to correct a language’s spelling, it’s still likely that in the future, the pronunciation will have shifted and the spelling will again be outdated. There really is no permanent solution. The inertia of tradition continues to carry us forward, and backlash against changing this tradition keeps reformists at bay.
Similarly, linguistics often remains descriptive instead of prescriptive, meaning that linguists aim to describe a language rather than propose what the language should be. The progression of a language is largely left alone as an organic process.
In the end, there isn’t much we can (or perhaps even should) do about confusing spelling. Language—spelling, pronunciation, grammar, colloquialisms, and so on—like everything else, changes over time. Perhaps it’s best to just be thankful that we have spell-check and have already, in a sense, moved away from tradition and history in our daily lives.
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