English Words

7.2
IS THE ENGLISH ORTHOGRAPHY MAD?
The English orthography is still basically phonemic and reasonably regular, although it does have
irregularities. I realise that the suggestion that English spelling is at all regular may come as a surprise
because for almost 800 years it is the absurdly irregular aspects of English spelling that have been in the
limelight in most discussions of the English orthography. Those aspects that are regular have for the most
part tended to go unnoticed; the regularities are just taken for granted.
You can test for yourself the claim that English spelling is to some degree regular and phonemic by
considering the relationship between the letters and sounds in words like nap and pan; nip and pin; keel and
leek
. It is clear that the match of sounds with letters is quite systematic. The consonant letters have the same
values that they have in the phonetic alphabet; the letter a corresponds to phoneme /æ/, i corresponds to /I/
and ee corresponds to /i:/.
With this in mind, examine the relationship between spelling and pronunciation in the following extract
from The History of an Apple Pie written by Z:
[7.3]
A Apple Pie,
B Bit it,
C Cried for it,
D Danced for it,
E Eyed it,
[7.2]
84 SHOULD ENGLISH BE SPELT AS SHE IS SPOKE?

---

F Fiddled for it,
G Gobbled it,
H Hid it.
(from Opie and Opie 1980:20–1)
In this rhyme, which is not at all unrepresentative of the language as a whole, spelling is reasonably
phonemic. This is intentionally put in the limelight since the point of the rhyme is to teach children the
alphabet. In almost every line, the first letter corresponds predictably to the appropriate sound. A is
pronounced as /æ/, b is pronounced as /b/ etc. Internally in words, the letter i corresponds to the sound /I/ (in
bit, it, fiddled
and hid) while the DIAGRAPH (i.e. the letter combination) ie represents the sound /aI/ (as in
pie
and cried).
Rumours of English spelling being absolutely chaotic are grossly exaggerated, if not totally baseless.
Nevertheless these rumours have persisted since the beginning of the thirteenth century when the first
spelling reformer, a monk named Orm, proposed innovations intended to ensure a one-to-one
correspondence between sound and letter (Scragg 1973).
Accusations that English spelling is on the whole arbitrary are based on quick impressionistic surveys of
a relatively small number of problem words like through, though, enough, thigh, this, write, rite and right.
Many careful, thorough studies give a totally different picture. I will quote Crystal (1988:69–70):
A major American study, published in the early 1970s, carried out a computer analysis of 17,000
words and showed that no less than 84 per cent of the words were spelt according to a regular pattern,
and that only 3 per cent were so unpredictable that they would have to be learned by heart. Several
other projects have reported comparable results of 75 per cent regularity or more.