3. English spelling is extremely conservative, as we saw in connection with [7.6]. While pronunciation
has kept changing, spelling has remained more or less fixed since the fifteenth century. Nowhere is this
more evident than in the case of vowels. As a rule, long vowels are not written phonemically. This is
because in the fifteenth century the pronunciation of vowels underwent a tremendous upheaval. As you can
see in [7.12] something akin to a game of musical chairs was played in the phonology of vowels, but
scribes, and later on printers, took no notice of these changes and went on spelling words as they had
always done. The examples on p. 133, in which the Modern English forms are written in parenthesis,
illustrate how Old English vowels have evolved.
[7.12]
a
as in habban
(have)
i
as in
ridam (ride)
a
as in
ham (home)
o
as in
moððe (moth)
æ
as in
æt (that)
o
as
in foda (food)
æ
as in
dæl (deal)
u
as
sundor (sunder)
e
as in
settan (set)
u
as in
mus (mouse)
e
as
in fedan (feed)
y
as in
fyllan (fill)
i
as in
sittan (sit)
y
as in
mys (mice)
(from Pyles and Algeo 1982:106)
Questions, Quistions & Qhoshtions
Daddy
how does an elephant feel
When he swallows a piece of steel?
Does he get drunk
And
fall on his trunk
ENGLISH WORDS 91
Or roll down the road like a wheel?
Daddy what would a pelican do
If he swallowed a bottle of glue?
Would
his beak get stuck
Would he run out of luck
And lose his job at the zoo?
Son
tell me tell me true,
If I belted you with a shoe,
Would you fall down dead?
Would you go up to bed?
—Either of those would do.
Spike Milligan
92 SHOULD ENGLISH BE SPELT AS SHE IS SPOKE?
Before examining the data, a word needs to be said about the notation. In the Middle Ages there was a
convention of using a macron (little line) over a vowel to indicate that the vowel was long. Later, doubling
of vowel letters was used for this purpose. The vowel letters had a phonetic value similar to that they have
in Italian or Spanish. The letter
y represented a front rounded vowel—a sound similar to that found in
French
tu ‘you’ (sing.)
or German Güte ‘goodness’.
To illustrate the conservatism of the English orthography, let us take a closer look at the vowel in the
word
mouse which most speakers of English pronounce as /maUs/. How did the pronunciation come to
diverge so much from the spelling? This is how. In the early Middle Ages this word had the orthographic
form
mus. This spelling is reflected in the pronunciation in conservative nonstandard Scottish dialects where
this word is still pronounced
mus. Two things happened which explain the divergence of the pronunciation
from the spelling.
First, 1066 and its aftermath. As already mentioned, after the Norman Conquest, French scribes came
over. They did not always respect Anglo-Saxon spelling conventions for English—not an untypical attitude
for a conquering power. They just spelt the
/u/ sound as
ou (as they did and still do in French in words like
vous, mousse, fou, coup
etc. If this spelling was good enough for French, it was also good enough for
English.). So, /u/ of
mus came to be spelt with the diagraph /ou/. Later, in the fifteenth century, the vowel
u
changed to /eU/ and so they said
/mUs/ (which sounded quite similar to the modern Canadian pronunciation
of this vowel). Later still, the /eU/ pronunciation was changed to /aU/, the pronunciation that is used in most
varieties of Modern English. But because the spelling had atrophied in the late Middle Ages, none of these
changes in pronunciation is reflected in the spelling.
Conservatism is also to blame for the silent word-initial letters
k and
g before
n as in
knee, knock, knife,
knight;
and
gnaw, gnat, etc. Neither the phoneme
/k/ nor the phoneme
/g/ can be combined with /n/ at the
beginning of a word but at one time these consonants would have been sounded. Today, pronouncing
knock-
kneed
as */knZ kni:d/ rather than /nk ni:d/ sounds very strange. This
k was dropped from the pronunciation
a long time ago but it lives on in the spelling.
4. Vowel pronunciation may vary depending on whether a vowel is stressed or unstressed. Cf. the
pronunciation of stressed and unstressed
o and
e in the following:
[7.13]
a.
allergy
a`ll
ergic
/`ældI/
/æ`l :dIk/
b.
education
educative
/edju:`k
eI n/
/`edju:ktIv/
Vowels get their full, clear value when stressed but are muffled and pronounced as /e/ (schwa) when
unstressed. There is no letter in the orthography to represent schwa. This is unfortunate since it is the
commonest vowel in English speech.
5. We noted above that the same vowel letter may represent different sounds. This is not to say that it is
all chaotic. Often, the vowel has predictable phonetic values if it occurs in the vicinity of certain
consonants. For instance, the data in [7.14] exemplify the pronunciation of
a in a variety of phonological
contexts:
ENGLISH WORDS 93