Teacher Discussion Forums

Hello!
Could you please help me to answer to this question:
Why does English have three ways to spell the same sound "f" (e.g. laugh, phonics, fall)?

I vaguely remember there is some history stuff.

English spelling was standardized in the second half of the seventeenth century when there was a great respect for tradition, in reaction to the excesses of the Civil War and Commonwealth.

The result was that it was codified on etymological grounds; that is to say words were spelt as they had been in the language they were imported to Englisf from. That explains the 'f' and 'ph' distinctions. 'Gh' being pronounced as 'f' is a result of phonetic change.

"ph" saying /f/ in a word usually means the word or word part is of Greek extraction.

"f" saying /f/ is the standard spelling in most other words, regardless of word derivation.

"gh" saying /f/ I'm not sure about. It seems to be in mostly those one-syllable, old English/Anglo-Saxon words. Just a guess, but do you think perhaps old English had a lip-rounded pharyngeal fricative (like gh) sound that morphed into just an /f/ sound? I mean, if you think about the words that contain "gh" you have "cough" and "laugh" (I'm blanking on any others at the moment). When you cough and when you laugh you have a glottal constriction going on that is similar to a pharyngeal fricative, so maybe the old English speakers put that sound into those verbs on purpose...? I don't know. I'm babbling.

Cheers,
-EH

I think I remember that words like though and rough (for examples) would have been pronounced the same but then some went one way and some the other. There was the same sound in the ancestors of buy, bring, seek, think, fight, catch, teach and whatever the present of wrought was, which explains their similar past forms.

This thread reminds me of George Bernard Shaw's joke when he was petitioning for a phonetic simplification of English spelling. He proposed (ironically, of course) the following spelling - ghoti. Can you figure it out? See below!
























It's fish! 'gh' from rough, the 'o' from women, and 'ti' from motion!

Which of course shows that Shaw never bothered to understand the principles of English spelling.
'gh' is never pronounced as 'f' is initial position
'o' is only pronnouced as 'i' in 'women' for historical reasons, since the word was originally 'wyfman' (man being the generic word for a person)
and 't' only being pronounced as 'sh' when followed by 'ion'

The significance of the fact that there is only way of pronouncing 'ghoti' seems to have excaped Shaw; evidence for the regulalarity of English spelling wasn't what he was looking for.

Shaw wished English spelling to be regulated by Parliament, and because the Fabian society, of which he was a leading member, was immensely influential in the Labour party when the Socialists came to power in 1945 they siet up a compromise and arranged for a Parliamentary enquiry to look into simplified spelling for teaching in schools. The final result was the ITA (Initial Teaching Alphabet) which came into force in the 1960s and kept secondary remedial teachers in work for the next twenty years dealing with the illiterates it produced.

The Spanish replaced all 'ph's with initial 'f's. We could probably do the same in English, without causing significant grief, but the fact that we are able to do so points to the fact that it is not a real obstacle. The real obstacle to spelling 'reform' on the basis of 'write it like it sounds' is that we have more phonemes than alphabet, and much more importantly, it doesn't sound the same in all varieties of the language. When the number of vowel phonemes varies from the ten I am told standard Canadian English has, through the fourteen of Network English, through to the twenty of standard British English, any spelling reform based on phonetics is bound to cause a schism.

Aw you old spoilsport you, SJ!

I must admit when I first got into teaching the Shaw example was striking and amusing, but yeah, it doesn't take anyone who takes an interest in this kind of stuff very long to figure out that it is in fact a load of old ballarcs (do a search for "ghoti" or "phyti" here on Dave's to find the other thread where it is mentioned).

I picked up an old crusty book on the ITA a few years ago, can't really remember much about what was in it...so it's interesting to hear about the effects it had (I wasn't born until 1970).

But Stones (new nickname SJ), what Shaw indicated, whether he knew it or not, with that statement is that spelling is more consistant in other Germanic and Romantic languages. In Italian for example, there exists absolutely no 'y's or 'k's or 'j's. That remains consistant. Although my level in Italian is pretty low, there were very few if any exceptions to spelling rules.

With English, however, the language is in a position that Italian has never been in. Even French, as an international language, had more influence on other languages than vice versa (thanks to organisations like L'Academie Francaise who protect it) meaning that it was imposed on societies. So, with exception to anglicisms, European languages have remained fairly intact from spelling exceptions. They have them. I know that. But a certain level of competence in Spanish doesn't require you to know very many of them.

English, however, has acted more as a melting pot and the spelling of words can be confusing because we've adopted words from so many languages. I know you're aware of all this Stones, but even if Shaw is known for something that might be perceived as stupid, do you think he had a valid point?

Stephen Jones wrote:

Shaw wished English spelling to be regulated by Parliament.

He did indeed, and didn't like the Latin alphabet at all, trouble is, Shavian really does look terrible. What's Shavian?

The Shavian alphabet is named after George Bernard Shaw and was devised by Kingsley Read. Shaw saw use of the Latin alphabet for writing English as a great waste of time, energy and paper, so in his will he stipulated that a competition should be held to create a new writing system for English and made provision for a prize of £500. The competition took place in 1958 and Kingsley Read's system was chosen as the winner out of the 467 entries.

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/shavian.htm

Omniglot, wow, what a great website! Thanks, Andy!

If you guys have any more really useful general links like that, can you post them on the 'Interesting websites' thread, please!

but even if Shaw is known for something that might be perceived as stupid, do you think he had a valid point?

As I said, the problem with English is twofold.

Firstly it has basically the same alphabet as Spanish or Italian but a much greater number of phonemes.

Secondly the number and variety of phonemes varies according to the geographical dialect.

We see nothing like this in the other languages you mention. If we use the phonetic alphabet to spell English, or a variation of it such as Shavian, we would either have to have spelling fragmented into American, English, Canadian, Scottish, Australian etc or all have to follow the system of a different region, which would make reading as hard or harder than it is now.

It is more than doubtful that the advantages gained would outweigh the problem of not being able to read all prior text, or of using a different alphabet to the rest of Europe.

It is reckoned that English spelling means that primary school English speaking students are up to nine months behind in reading compared to their Italian counterparts. But no proposed solution is going to make it any easier, and all of them will lack the considerable advantages ciurrent spelling provides those who have learnt it (ability to distinguish between homophones, derivations being easily recognizable, greater ease in learning Latin or French or German).

It is reckoned that English spelling means that primary school English speaking students are up to nine months behind in reading compared to their Italian counterparts.

However...

When I lived in Spain, native speakers were forever asking me "Is this word written with or without h?", "b or v?" or "Does this word end d or z?" (word final d is pronounced as a fricative). The fact that I had learned very young to read and write a language that is not phonetic had actually trained my memory and I was better at remembering these things than my Spanish counterparts. It all comes out in the wash.

The Spanish seem very cavalier about the quality fo their spelling in Spanish. I've forgootten the number of times I've corrected the spelling of Spanish students in Spanish; the strange thing is I never had to correct the same students; spelling in English!

Once I was burgled and went to the police station to make a complaint. When they wrote out the thing and gave it me to sign it had over a hundred speilling mistakes including missing accents. Automaticallly, I pulled the red pen out of my pocket and started correcting them. They were furious. "How do you think we can hand it to the judge with all these corrections?" they said. "How do you think you can hand it to the judge without them?" I said. They shooed me back into the waiting room for the next two hours. Every now and then I would venture out to see three or four of them hunched over the typewriter agonizing over the spelling of each word. It still had thirty odd mistakes when they gave it back but it was past midnight and I hadn't eaten for twelve hours so I gave in and signed it.

I think that those who most suffer from English spelling are the weaker readers. People like myself who learnt to read before we went to school might have been atrociuls spellers for much of our lives, but it didn't affect our education too much.

Good afternoon all!

Steven Jones' last comment really hit home. Like him, I learned to read long before teachers discovered that they didn't have to teach me to read, and yet my spelling is only acceptable once it has been run through spellcheck and careful proofreading. It's an interesting observation, anyone else have the same experience? (a note, I was taught "phonics" as a method of learning to read, at that time it was being ushered into the school system with "new math" and there were a lot of doubts about its effectiveness over the old-fashioned "sight reading" that had been going on before that. My mother taught me to read by reading to me, taking me to library, giving me books and teaching me what a dictionary was for....spelling was not taught until second grade, that is, seven years old, the first grade teacher was prohibited from teaching us spelling....)

peace,
revel.

Hmm, I thought whatever misspellings you made here on Dave's at least were simply key mis-hits (from typing at speed, in trying to keep your fingers moving at the same speed as your brain!), Stephen!

I don't think slight inconsistencies or fossilizations in spelling are anything to worry about, even the most voracious reader must have a few words they misspell until such time as they really notice it, become irritated with themselves, and make concerted eforts to learn the correct spelling (being able to go back and read, see and then in a position to correct the misspelling really helps, which is what is possible on Dave's. That is often the explanantion for the 'Last edited on...' messages at the bottom of quite a few of my posts, where I misspelt a word, or sometimes forgot to type a word comepletely!). But obviously, people who read (or write) less than others for whatever reasons are hardly going to develop the better spelling.

Revel, your apparent distrust of newfangled methods (I'm not entirely sure what "sight reading" is, or if it could be called a method at all) like phonics, even though they obviously worked for you to a degree that everyone (apart from you) finds evident and satisfactory, is interesting, because firstly, as I said above, to expect total accuracy in spelling from anyone is silly, and secondly (and more seriously), most of the even halfway thorough (and that I therefore feel is much more trustworthy) stuff that I have read on teaching literacy seems to conclude that "dyslexia" is more often the result of "scientifically" unrigorous ("simply hope and pray" than "offering anything at all to appease the Brain God of Intelligence") approaches such as the "whole word" ones (and with phonics there is usually a whole word beyond the highlighted phonic being concentrated on, to provide the necessary context, anyway); and finally, because thirdly (and almost in contrast to the second reason above), our mothers didn't use stuff like phonics explicitly but rather just read to us - "real books", kind of implicitly a "whole words", "look and say" approach, and I was probably more often looking at the pics and just listening to her voice than following her finger below the words, if pointing like that is indeed what she did (I probably did at some point start following the printed words in relation to the spoken voice, however, and have to presume that this also helped me to read and write)...BUT I presume I had phonics or some kind of "building up to whole words" instruction at school that preceded or complemented any more "holistic" approaches I may have encountered.

I don't think you have that bad spelling, revel, and if it weren't for phonics you might have been an even worse speller, or worse, developed serious reading/decoding problems.

Basically, there is far too much guesswork on the children's part (not to mention the teachers) in a lot of literacy (or should that be illiteracy?! ) "teaching". A serious lack of knowledge coupled with an inflated sense of professional pride (God knows why) is a dangerous mixture that is found in TEFL as well, if not all teaching where anyone given the title of "teacher" is accorded automatic authority and respect (well, okay, nominal respect, in the form of being paid for a job that it is always being purported can be done and will be done well - usually simply to ensure the people higher up and doing the hiring keep their jobs (too), interdependency and all that) - I mean, nobody better is to be found or expected to be around by the students, and worse, the employers.

I suppose the unprofessionalism is excusable in TEFL to some extent, because we are talking about a whole language and the adult learners usually already have one orthography under their belts, but an unprofessional lack of knowledge is inexcusable when it comes to imparting (or not) a skill as basic as reading to native speaker children. Reading is a necessary birthright now in this modern day and age, with its ever higher expectations, and who doesn't enjoy reading for their own personal reasons too?

Hmm even if there wasn't much phonics at my school (and I have to presume there was a sufficient - as opposed to an insufficient - amount...can't remember that far back, obviously, apart from copying/writing letters of short words...), I must have simply been one of the lucky kids who had no problems with attaining literacy.

Unfortunately there are many kids who fall behind their peers and end up being labelled "dyslexic" and put into remedial classes (where they will make little progress if the methods remain the same), but what do you know, give them a little time with an actual reading expert and miraculous transformations more often happen than not, and the kid is soon progressing as fast as if not faster in terms of reading age than his or her peers.

Mentioning "dyslexia" several times above has reminded me, I must read the several-page entry on 'dyslexia' in my Malmkjaer to see what the nature of real dyslexia is (I am presuming there is a difference to specialists between children who have simply been badly taught very little, and those who have a pre-exisiting problem which prevents them from making sense of words as bundles of letters and sounds, even when the apparently more successful of the competing literacy teaching/learning methods is being employed).