English spelling

English orthography is the writing system used to represent spoken English, allowing readers to connect the graphemes to sound and to meaning. It includes English's norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.

Like the orthography of most world languages, English orthography has a broad degree of standardisation. This standardisation began to develop when movable type spread to England in the late 15th century. However, unlike with most languages, there are multiple ways to spell every phoneme, and most letters also have multiple pronunciations depending on their position in a word and the context.

This is partly due to the large number of words that have been borrowed from a large number of other languages throughout the history of English, without successful attempts at complete spelling reforms, and partly due to accidents of history, such as some of the earliest mass-produced English publications being typeset by highly trained, multilingual printing compositors, who occasionally used a spelling pattern more typical for another language. For example, the word ''ghost'' was previously spelled ''gast'' in English, until the Flemish spelling pattern was unintentionally substituted, and happened to be accepted. Most of the spelling conventions in Modern English were derived from the phonetic spelling of a variety of Middle English, and generally do not reflect the sound changes that have occurred since the late 15th century (such as the Great Vowel Shift). As a result of this, many words are spelled the way that they were pronounced more than 600 years ago, instead of being spelled like they are pronounced in the 21st century.

Despite the various English dialects spoken from country to country and within different regions of the same country, there are only slight regional variations in English orthography, the two most recognised variations being British and American spelling, and its overall uniformity helps facilitate international communication. On the other hand, it also adds to the discrepancy between the way English is written and spoken in any given location.

Function of the letters

Phonemic representation

Letters in English orthography usually represent a particular phoneme. For example, ''at'' consists of 2 letters and , which represent and , respectively.

Sequences of letters may perform this role as well as single letters. Thus, in ''thrash'' , the digraph (two letters) represents . In ''hatch'' , the trigraph represents .

Less commonly, a single letter can represent multiple successive sounds. The most common example is , which normally represents the consonant cluster (for example, in ''tax'' ).

The same letter (or sequence of letters) may be pronounced differently when occurring in different positions within a word. For instance, represents at the end of some words (''tough'' ) but not in others (''plough'' ). At the beginning of syllables, is pronounced , as in ''ghost'' . Conversely, is never pronounced in syllable onsets other than in inflected forms, and is almost never pronounced in syllable codas (the proper name ''Pittsburgh'' is an exception).

Some words contain silent letters, which do not represent any sound in modern English pronunciation. Examples include the in ''talk'', ''half'', ''calf'', etc., the in ''two'' and ''sword'', as mentioned above in numerous words such as ''though'', ''daughter'', ''night'', ''brought'', and the commonly encountered silent (discussed further below).

Word origin

Another type of spelling characteristic is related to word origin. For example, when representing a vowel, represents the sound in some words borrowed from Greek (reflecting an original upsilon), whereas the letter usually representing this sound in non-Greek words is the letter . Thus, ''myth'' is of Greek origin, while ''pith'' is a Germanic word.

Other examples include pronounced (which is most commonly ), and pronounced (which is most commonly or )—the use of these spellings for these sounds often mark words that have been borrowed from Greek.

Some researchers, such as Brengelman (1970), have suggested that, in addition to this marking of word origin, these spellings indicate a more formal level of style or register in a given text, although Rollings (2004) finds this point to be exaggerated as there would be many exceptions where a word with one of these spellings, such as for (like ''telephone''), could occur in an informal text.

Homophone differentiation

Spelling may also be useful to distinguish between homophones (words with the same pronunciation but different meanings), although in most cases the reason for the difference is historical and was not introduced for the purpose of making a distinction.

For example, ''heir'' and ''air'' are pronounced identically in most dialects, but, in writing, they are distinguished from each other by their different spellings.

Another example is the pair of homophones ''pain'' and ''pane'', where both are pronounced but have two different spellings of the vowel . Often, this is because of the historical pronunciation of each word where, over time, two separate sounds became the same but the different spellings remained: ''pain'' used to be pronounced as , with a diphthong, and ''pane'' as , but the diphthong merged with the long vowel in ''pane'', making ''pain'' and ''pane'' homophones ( ''pane''–''pain'' merger). Later became a diphthong .

In written language, this may help to resolve potential ambiguities that would arise otherwise (cf. ''He's breaking the car'' vs. ''He's braking the car'').

Nevertheless, many homophones remain that are unresolved by spelling (for example, the word ''bay'' has at least five fundamentally different meanings).

Marking sound changes in other letters

Some letters in English provide information about the pronunciation of other letters in the word. Rollings (2004) uses the term "markers" for such letters. Letters may mark different types of information.

For instance, in ''once'' indicates that the preceding is pronounced , rather than the more common value of in word-final position as the sound , such as in ''attic'' .

also often marks an altered pronunciation of a preceding vowel. In the pair ''at'' and ''ate'', the of ''at'' has the value , whereas the of ''ate'' is marked by the as having the value . In this context, the is not pronounced, and is referred to as "silent e".

A single letter may even fill multiple pronunciation-marking roles simultaneously. For example, in the word ''ace'', marks not only the change of from to , but also of from to . In the word ''vague'', marks the long sound, but keeps the hard rather than soft.

Doubled consonants usually indicate that the preceding vowel is pronounced short. For example, the doubled in ''batted'' indicates that the is pronounced , while the single of ''bated'' gives . Doubled consonants only indicate any lengthening or gemination of the consonant sound itself when they come from different morphemes, as with the in ''unnamed'' (''un''+''named'').

Multiple functionality

Any given letters may have dual functions. For example, in ''statue'' has a sound-representing function (representing the sound ) and a pronunciation-marking function (marking the as having the value opposed to the value ).

Underlying representation

Like many other alphabetic orthographies, English spelling does not represent non-contrastive phonetic sounds (that is, minor differences in pronunciation which are not used to distinguish between different words).

Although the letter is pronounced by some speakers with aspiration at the beginning of words, this is never indicated in the spelling, and, indeed, this phonetic detail is probably not noticeable to the average native speaker not trained in phonetics.

However, unlike some orthographies, English orthography often represents a very abstract underlying representation (or morphophonemic form) of English words.

In these cases, a given morpheme (i.e., a component of a word) has a fixed spelling even though it is pronounced differently in different words. An example is the past tense suffix -, which may be pronounced variously as , , or The vowel of the suffixes - and - may belong to the phoneme of either or depending on dialect, and is a shorthand for "either or ". This usage of the symbol is borrowed from the ''Oxford English Dictionary''. (for example, ''bath'' , ''bathed'' , ''pay'' , ''payed'' , ''hate'' , ''hated'' ). As it happens, these different pronunciations of - can be predicted by a few phonological rules, but that is not the reason why its spelling is fixed.

Another example involves the vowel differences (with accompanying stress pattern changes) in several related words. For instance, ''photographer'' is derived from ''photograph'' by adding the derivational suffix -. When this suffix is added, the vowel pronunciations change largely owing to the moveable stress:

Other examples of this type are the - suffix (as in ''agile'' vs. ''agility'', ''acid'' vs. ''acidity'', ''divine'' vs. ''divinity'', ''sane'' vs. ''sanity''). See also: Trisyllabic laxing.

Another example includes words like ''mean'' and ''meant'' , where is pronounced differently in the two related words. Thus, again, the orthography uses only a single spelling that corresponds to the single morphemic form rather than to the surface phonological form.

English orthography does not always provide an underlying representation; sometimes it provides an intermediate representation between the underlying form and the surface pronunciation. This is the case with the spelling of the regular plural morpheme, which is written as either - (as in ''tat, tats'' and ''hat, hats'') or - (as in ''ass, asses''). Here, the spelling - is pronounced either or (depending on the environment, e.g., ''tats'' and ''ays'' ) while - is usually pronounced (e.g. ''asses'' ). Thus, there are two different spellings that correspond to the single underlying representation , , of the plural suffix and the three surface forms. The spelling indicates the insertion of before the in the spelling -, but does not indicate the devoiced distinctly from the unaffected in the spelling -.

The abstract representation of words as indicated by the orthography can be considered advantageous since it makes etymological relationships more apparent to English readers. This makes writing English more complex, but arguably makes reading English more efficient. However, very abstract underlying representations, such as that of Chomsky & Halle (1968) or of underspecification theories, are sometimes considered too abstract to accurately reflect the communicative competence of native speakers. Followers of these arguments believe the less abstract surface forms are more "psychologically real" and thus more useful in terms of pedagogy.

Diacritics

English has some words that can be written with accents. These words are mostly loanwords, usually from French. As they become increasingly naturalised, there is an increasing tendency to omit the accent marks, even in formal writing. For example, ''rôle'' and ''hôtel'' originally had accents when they were borrowed into English, but now the accents are almost never used. The words were originally considered foreign—and some people considered that English alternatives were preferable—but today their foreign origin is largely forgotten. Words most likely to retain the accent are those atypical of English morphology and therefore still perceived as slightly foreign. For example, ''café'' and ''pâté'' both have a pronounced final , which would otherwise be silent under the normal English pronunciation rules. However, ''café'' is now sometimes facetiously pronounced /kæf/, while in ''pâté'', the acute accent is helpful to distinguish it from ''pate''.

Further examples of words sometimes retaining diacritics when used in English are: ''Ångström'' (partly because the scientific symbol for this unit of measurement is "Å"), ''appliqué'', ''attaché'', ''blasé'', ''bric-à-brac'', ''Brötchen'',Included in Webster's Third New International Dictionary,1981 ''cliché'', ''crème'', ''crêpe'', ''façade'', ''fiancé(e)'', ''flambé'', ''jalapeño'', ''naïve'', ''naïveté'', ''né(e)'', ''papier-mâché'', ''passé'', ''piñata'', ''protégé'', ''résumé'', ''risqué'', ''über-'', and ''voilà''. Italics, with appropriate accents, are generally applied to foreign terms that are uncommonly used in or have not been assimilated into English: for example, '' adiós, crème brûlée, pièce de résistance

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