English is not known for being very consistent with its spelling-to-pronunciation ratio. For example, take words like thought, though, through and thorough. All contain more or less the same letters, but all have wildly differing pronunciation. What caused this bizarre anomaly, and are there any other languages like it?
Well, first of all, English pronunciation is best described as historically programmed. The vast majority of our words are pronounced the way they are depending firstly on when they entered the language, secondly on their origins (Latin, German, Norse, French, Norman French, etc.), and finally on their relationship to the people using them, e.g. region, class, age group.
To fully understand how we got to today's standards, we need to look at a couple of events in history. The first one was the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg and taken to England by William Caxton in 1476, when Edward IV was on the throne. But it wasn't really until Richard III, who came to power less than a decade later, that it really took off. He was the one who took away the restrictions on the printing of books, and used the printing press for his advantage.
Whereas before, everything had to be hand-written, making royal decrees issued from London mainly spread via word of mouth rather than by written order, it was now possible to send messages en masse to every corner of the kingdom.
This presented a problem: such was the variety of spelling and pronunciation from village to village, that often a local priest or other educated personage had to "interpret" the words from Head Office. Now, though, there was a chance to send mass communication for the first time.
What was known as Chancery English, the principal standard English, was now the main language of state, having superseded French only 7 decades earlier. It was totally different from the Saxon English of previous decades, as it had a lot of French words introduced into it. These were of a generally higher class than the Saxon vernacular, and their pronunciation was still quite French-sounding. The English initially resented the use of French words, as any suppressed people would, but they realised, if these words were going to enter their language, they would be pronounced using English sounds. English people commonly hypercorrected those who used French words not in an English way; a kind of peaceful revolt against the rulers.
So now was the chance to standardise the language, and it was the Chancery in London under the orders of the king that sent out representatives to each and every village within 100 miles of London with a list of words and phrases, and asked local people to pronounce them. The representatives wrote down phonetic transcriptions of those words and reported them to the Chancery. It was a wonderfully enlightening exercise, and led to a massive compromise between spelling and pronunciation, dare I say one of the most important developments in the rise of English.
This is why we have -ough- words - they are the clearest example of the compromise. For example, "through" may have been pronounced more like the German guttural "durch" in the northern parts, the Dutch "door" in East Anglia, maybe a softer "trou" in the south west, and a diphthonged "throw" in the Midlands. by using the "ough" combination here, it could cover every type of pronunciation without making too much difference to people's lives. There are not more than two-dozen -ough- words still in use today, but there are around ten different ways to pronounce them. Apart from those ones above, we have rough, tough, enough, ought, bought, wrought, dough, bough, furlough, trough, cough, hough, lough, and a few others that we still use, but that's it, and look at the different ways they can be pronounced. It is wildly different.
The same could be said of other words, such as "debt". It was actually pronounced in the French way "dette", and spelled various different ways, but by putting the "b" back in it, it highlighted its origins (Latin "debitum") but enabled people to continue to pronounce it the same as they always did. But now, people could refer to the spelling if they didn't understand the way a stranger pronounced the word. Similar things happened to "receipt", "subtle", and "doubt".
Let us tackle the Anglophone propensity for dropping various sounds. For example, why do they pronounce "comfortable" with half the letters unused /'kʌmftǝbᵊl/? Because firstly, by trying to standardise the spelling based on pronunciation, we may lead to excluding various speakers of regional dialects; secondly, by leaving words spelled as they are, people recognise them better; and thirdly, most importantly, English speakers have for centuries been dropping weaker sounds in order to make themselves *more* comprehensible to each other, not *less* comprehensible.
What do I mean? Well, let's go back 800 years. Let's say you come from somewhere like Winchester in Hampshire, and you want to go to Leicester in the Midlands. So you ask someone for the way to Laai-ses-tah. No idea. Lee-ses-terr? Oh, maybe you mean Lester? Yes! Dropping the useless sounds means people in the English-speaking world, when speaking to one another, generally listen to the constellation of consonants, whether enunciated or silent, more than the vowels. The vowels and diphthong sounds are regional; the consonants, whether enunciated or silent, are more or less universal. But the written versions have kept their useless letters for easier identification in reading by all regional dialect users.
It's as simple as that.
Try it on words like "castle" (silent T), "know" or "knight" (silent K), "hour" (silent H), "whistle" (semi-silent H). Look them up on etymonline.com and see what results you get. I'll provide the reasons:
Pronunciation of the T in "castle" was slowly dropped as it made the word too much of a mouthful, but the T remained in the written version to allow comprehension through its origins (castel, château, etc.).
The silent K in "know" and "knight" come about in the same way - enunciating a hard K before another consonant felt uncomfortable, but by keeping the K, we see it comes from "Knecht" in and "Kennen" in various Germanic languages.
There are only a handful of words in English where the H is not pronounced, such as hour/ly, heir/ess, and honour/able. The simple answer to this is because these words came directly into English from French, where the H is always silent.
The "WH" sound in English, until recently, was pronounced as if one was blowing out a candle. Some still do pronounce it this way. The "WH" combination comes from Scandinavian "HV" or "KV", found in many words.
So all-in-all, if you want to know why various words in English are pronounced sometimes very differently from their spelling, look no further than their origins, because we all understand better through historical connotations, rather than thinking we should force English spelling to be phonetic!
- Raymond Goslitski
- Raymond Goslitski
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