The extract below is taken from The Way We Are by by Margaret Visser. (Published by Viking, 1994. ISBN 0-670-86680-6) The book is a collection of brief (5 pages or less) discussions on everyday objects extracted in their entirety from a column Margaret Visser wrote for Saturday Night magazine. The tone is serious, analytic and usually involves an exploration of the historic meaning and use of the object in question. But the information is usually suprising, occasionally confronting and often fascinating.
I recommend the book. I'm fascinated by this sort 'real life is often weireder than fiction' discussion. The format is easy to consume, the topics are interesting. I read the 300 page book, with the exception of a couple of columns on objects I had no real interest in (such as Christmas Pudding) in an evening.
We can all take comfort in the realization that nobody thinks English spelling is easy. For four and a half centuries, those who resented its complexity have fought for simplification and reform. They have wanted to take it upon themselves to regularize patterns, cut out letters, remove exceptions, or replace the alphabet altogether. George Bernard Shaw could not understand why we wish to live with a language in which fish might as well be spelled ghoti (f as in cough , i as in wo men, and sh as in nati on). Taken comes out phteighchound (ph thisic, weigh , sch ool, glamour and hand some).
Yet only two men have ever had any lasting effect on English spelling rules: Samuel Johnson (who got to choose among alternatives when writing his dictionary), and Noah Webster (another lexicographer, who made American change -our to -or , and gave them liter , traveling , and catalog ). English (and American) spelling is now known to rang with Gaelic in complexity- at the other end of the scale form Finnish and Serbo-Croatian, which have the most regular spelling of all. Why then have we not rationalized our spelling system? What are we waiting for?
English spelling is a system, and even English spelling is mostly regular: eighty-four per cent of words are straight-forward, thirteen per cent decently rule-abiding, and only three per cent so weird that we have no choice but to memorize them. But among those three per cent are 400 of the commonest words in the language: gone, done, of, and so on. These weigh heavily against the relative simplicity of the rest. But they are the last words anyone wants to change. The moment a spelling reformer writes ov , we oppose him: English abhors words ending in v .
The assumption most people make is that sound is what spelling expresses. It mostly does so, of course- but the way words are written also gives clues to their meaning . The letters sig in sig n, sig nal, desig n, and desig nate are pronounced differently in each word, but they show the common meaning that relates them.
The English system is extraordinarily sensitive to such meaningful sets of letters; where the pronunciation changes, it often keeps the semantic unit intact. We tend over time even to adjust the spelling of words to provide these clues more clearly: leapt , for instance, is gradually becoming leaped although the last letter is pronounced t . The pronunciation of words may change or revert because of the spelling; examples are housewife , Rome , and certain (which had come to sound like "hussif", "Room," and "sartin"). We even keep odd spellings because they express emotion by visual means alone: look at ghastly, ghost and ghoul .
What this means is that written English is superb for reading silently. Reading silently is a relatively modern skill; ancient Greeks and Romans, for instance, thought of reading as something done out loud. Today, people usually read more swiftly than they could speak, and without sounding the words even to themselves. Writing performs a new and different function: it has to create patterns for the eyes . For example, if in the interests of phonetics we wrote runz but hits , the eyes would not pick up nearly so easily the structural clue which the system presents as the letter s .
It is in fact impossible to spell purely phonetically: writing is nothing like sound, and therefore could not "imitate" it. And pronunciation differs between dialects, and changes over time. If phonetics were made to govern all spelling, which dialect would be represented and so obscure the rest? Consider for example the loss in comprehensibility if "cone" and "conic" were spelled (as one "new system" suggests) kon and kanik ; or if upper-class English usage imposed "hice" for "house."
The use of English, even by foreigners, doesn't seem to have been halted by difficulties in reading and writing it. This is because the spelling system, no less than the grammar and vocabulary, is sensitive, systematic, economical, and able both to resist and to accommodate change. (Usage does change, but gradually, and with the help and consent of everybody; one of the unpleasant aspects of "spelling reform" is the megalomania of the reformers.)
English does have anomalies that are impossible to excuse: one linguistic expert complains, for example, about repair, forty, and questionnaire. Yet we should realize that attempts to "perfect" the system overall could impair the strengths which we are just beginning to appreciate that it possesses.
True, it remains unlikely that most of us could spell the following sentence correctly on the first attempt, without a computerized word-check, and without reading it over first: "We should accommodate the possibility of unparalleled embarrassment occurring in an eccentric physicist who endeavours, though harassed by diarrhoea, to gauge the symmetry of a horse caught gambolling in ecstasy within the precincts of a cemetery wall."