Wheel of Fortune

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The Flemish “h” in “ghost” is one of Crystal’s many examples that show that the development of English spelling has been both random and unsystematic. The original monks who tried to write down Anglo-Saxon English in a Latin alphabet, he says, did a pretty good job. Every word was pronounced phonetically – so the “g” in gnome would be pronounced, as would the “k” in “know”. But the alphabet they devised didn’t have enough letters to represent all the sounds in spoken English and that was where the problems started. Scribes started to double vowels to represent different sounds, such as double o for the long /u/ sound in moon, food, etc. But then in some words like blood and flood, the pronunciation changed in the south of England, shortening the vowel, so that now, as Crystal puts it, “these spellings represent the pronunciation of a thousand years ago.”

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Fashion and snobbery have played as big a part in spelling as they have in other parts of English life. After the Norman invasion, Anglo-Saxon spellings were replaced by French ones: “servis” became service, “mys” became mice, for instance. During the Renaissance, scribes looked to Latin for guidance – take the word “debt”. In the 13th century this could be spelled det, dett, dette, or deytt. But 16th-century writers looked to the Latin word “debitum”, and inserted a silent b-linking the word to its Latin counterpart, but making it much harder to spell.

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For a long time, there was no stigma attached to variant spellings. Shakespeare famously wrote his name several ways (Shaksper, Shakspere, Shakspeare), but, by the 18th century, an English aristocrat was writing to his son that “orthography … is so absolutely necessary for a man of letters, or a gentleman, that one false spelling may fix a ridicule upon him for the rest of his life.” Dan Quayle, the former US vice-president, never recovered from spelling “potato” with an “e” on the end when he corrected a pupil’s writing in front of the cameras at a junior school in 1992.

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Even today, spelling is more fluid than we might think. “Moveable”, for example – The Times style guide keeps the “e”, The Guardian prefers “movable”. And on line there are no guides-the internet is the ultimate spelling democracy. Take “rhubarb”, with its pesky silent “h”: in 2006 there were just a few hundred instances of rubarb in the Google database; they have now passed the million mark. ‘If it carries on like this,” Crystal notes, “rubarb will overtake rhubarb as the commonest online spelling … And where the online orthographic world goes in one decade, I suspect the offline world will go in the next.” Reading this book made me thankful that English is my native language; the spelling must make it so fiendishly hard to learn!