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| In his will, playwright, essayist, and crusader for spelling reform, George Bernard Shaw, left money for the creation of a new alphabet. |
Any idea what that means? British playwright, George Bernard Shaw claimed that there was an English word that could logically be spelled "ghoti."
How is that possible? Shaw reasoned it out by using the following sounds:
• gh sounds like f in "laugh"
• o sounds like i in "women"
• ti sounds like sh in "motion"
Although Shaw constructed an absurd example, his point is undeniable. Spelling in English is not simple. Why?
Our Roots
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| Language and spelling are constantly evolving. See how English looked in the late 14th century with Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. |
These languages combined to create Old English, the source of the 100 most commonly used English words today. Later, when William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066, he brought French. From this mixed brew, Middle English was born. Forty percent of today's English words (including "nourish" and "interrogate") entered the language at this time.
English, as we know it, is an amalgam of all of these languages. It changes, grows, and adapts to reflect the cultural influences of the people who speak it. Every culture with which the English language has ever made contact has added to the mix. For example, the Algonquin language contributed "raccoon," Hebrew added "camel," and Spanish brought "taco" and "adobe".
Each new language brought its own set of spelling rules to English. Spoken language changed rapidly; the written word changed slowly. So, for example, even though people have stopped pronouncing the k in "knight," the letter remains in the written form.
In this way, we inherited a tangled set of spelling rules. What's a person to do?
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| The most famous case of misspelling in history is surely Vice President Dan Quayle's "potatoe" snafu at an elementary school spelling bee. But Mr. Quayle's English mix-ups weren't limited to spelling. |
The Perils of the Spell Checker
Today's tech-savvy writer uses a computer spell checker — a terrific tool, but an imperfect one. You still have to pick the correct word from a list of alternatives. The further off you are, the less likely your spell checker will suggest a correct alternative. Moreover, the spell checker disregards words that are spelled correctly but are wrong in context. After all, it's only a machine. You still need to think for yourself.| This poem has been making the rounds through e-mail and on the Internet. It came with my pea sea. It plainly marques for my revue Miss steaks eye kin knot sea. Eye strike a key and type a word As soon as a mist ache is maid, Eye have run this poem threw it. |
Some Rules of Thumb
About 3,000 base words make up 95 percent of the writing vocabulary of most adults. A lot of words? Not compared to the half a million entries in The Oxford English Dictionary! Many words are formed by adding prefixes or suffixes to those base words."Danger," for example, becomes "dangerous," "endanger," and "endangerment," with the sense and spelling of "danger" constant in all of those words.
You probably know the base words. Keep in mind the rules for expanding them, but remember that there are always exceptions.
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| The spirit of George Bernard Shaw is not dead. NuSpel, an organization on the "cutting edge" of spelling reform, seeks to slash the Gordian knot of illiteracy with the sword of a modified alphabet. |
- A prefix rarely changes the base word. ("danger"/"endanger")
- Drop the final e before a suffix beginning with a vowel. ("hope"/"hoping")
- Keep the final e before a suffix beginning with a consonant. ("hope"/"hopeful")
- When a word ends in y after a consonant, change the y to i before adding a suffix, unless the suffix begins with i. ("happy"/"happiness")
- When a one-syllable word ends with vowel and consonant, double the consonant before a suffix beginning with a vowel. ("hop"/"hopping")
Double Trouble
E-I-E-I ... Uh-Oh ...
Homophones
Your computer spell checker would consider the following sentence perfectly correct. Can you figure out what it says?Eye paws wants every too daze two right sum words. Words such as "eye" and "I" are homophones; they sound alike but look quite different. Because English uses different words that are pronounced the same way, the different appearances of these words make it possible to understand what they mean. But this makes spelling a challenge. To use homophones correctly, you have to become aware of their meanings. Here are some examples:
- finished, tossed [through, threw]
- mountaintop, look secretly [peak, peek]
- piece of corn, officer [kernel, colonel]
- group that gives advice, advice [council, counsel]
Homophones present a terrific opportunity for constructing riddles. For example, what is a just-born African animal? It's a new gnu.
Try to think of the answers to these riddles. The answers are pairs of homophones.
Memorizing rules helps some people, but awareness helps everyone. Stay mindful of how our language builds on the base words. Be wary of homophones. One way many people improve their spelling is through reading and writing. Reading strengthens your awareness of correctly spelled words.
Directions: Correct the misspelled words on these flash cards.
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