# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The entertainment network where videos and personalities get really big, really fast. Download Vine to watch videos, remixes and trends before they blow up.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Phonology is the link between Phonetics and the rest of Linguistics. Only by studying both the phonetics and the phonology of English is it possible to acquire a full understanding of the use of sounds in English speech.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Phonology is the link between Phonetics and the rest of Linguistics. Only by studying both the phonetics and the phonology of English is it possible to acquire a full understanding of the use of sounds in English speech.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Phonology is the link between Phonetics and the rest of Linguistics. Only by studying both the phonetics and the phonology of English is it possible to acquire a full understanding of the use of sounds in English speech.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Phonology is the link between Phonetics and the rest of Linguistics. Only by studying both the phonetics and the phonology of English is it possible to acquire a full understanding of the use of sounds in English speech.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I don't know why the English alphabet is the way it is, but it shouldn't be. I don't know who I'm supposed to contact to get this happening, so I'll just post it on YouTube, cus everyone goes on YouTube. Support me on Patreon!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
spelling rules five reasons why english spelling is so difficult

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Five reasons why English spelling is so difficult

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Does it sometimes feel like just as you've got to grips with a spelling rule, you are faced with a number of situations where that rule doesn't apply? You're not alone. Here are five reasons why English is such a hard language to learn... English

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As the world's international language, English has a lot going for it. For one thing, it's quite easy to learn for speakers of other European languages.

Nouns only have a single gender, so it is " the little girl", unlike " la niña" (Spanish) or " das Mädchen" (German). The cases are relatively simple (unlike many Slavic languages) and there are hardly any declensions to remember (I walk, you walk, they walk, and so on).

English spelling, on the other hand, is complicated and often illogical. You don't say what you see.

Photo: crdotx

Have you ever wondered why the letters "ough" can be pronounced in so many different ways (/oʊ/ as in "though", /uː/ as in "through", /ʌf/ as in "rough", /ɒf/ as in "cough", /ɔː/ as in "thought", /aʊ/ as in "bough", /ə/ as in "thorough"?

Or why there are so many silent letters like the k in knee and knock, the c in science or the h in ghost? Or why the letters "bow" can mean two different things depending on how they are pronounced? Or why Brits and Americans spell some words differently?

The truth is, people have struggled to spell in English for as long as people have been trying to write English.

First attempts to write English

After the Romans left in the fifth century, various Germanic tribes invaded and settled in England, bringing with them the language that forms the basis of modern English. But the Roman alphabet that we use today didn't arrive until Christian missionary Augustine of Canterbury landed in 597AD.

Augustine's missionaries used the Roman alphabet to write down the language they heard, but the alphabet only had 23 letters while there were around 35 sounds. The Christians borrowed a couple of Runic letters to describe the sounds (like the ð that you still find in Icelandic) but still had to stick Roman letters together in ways they were not designed for.

The trouble with English spelling had begun!

Normans

When the Vikings invaded England in the eighth century, it's very likely they could understand what the Anglo Saxons were saying because the Germanic languages - which included the language of the Vikings - were closer together than they are today.

But when the Normans invaded in 1066, they spoke French. And they had no intention of learning English.

For the next two hundred years, French was the language of the English aristocracy, of the government and the courts. Most aristos didn't bother to learn English. Why would they? But the common people continued to speak English.

When the Normans lost Normandy and became, well, English, they started switching to the English language of the land they ruled. But English had hardly been written for over 200 years; all official text had been written in French and anything related to the universities or clergy was in Latin. So the scribes tried to write down what they heard and were pretty inconsistent.

They applied French spelling conventions to English words, so cwen became queen, cirice became church and c was used instead of s in words like cell and circle. They also struggled with English handwriting, where u, v, n and m all looked very similar. So they replaced u with o in words like done and come.

At the same time, thousands of French and Latin words were entering the English language. The scribes kept the original French spelling for some ( table, double, centre) but changed the spelling of others to reflect their English pronunciation (e.g. beef, battle, government, mountain).

This was a wild time for English spelling as the concept of "correct" spelling didn't really exist. People also spelled according to their local dialect.

The printing press

By the time William Caxton brought the printing press to England in 1497, French and English had become well and truly mixed. English was also filling up with new foreign words to describe the concepts that arrived with the Renaissance, as people rediscovered classical texts and became open to new ideas for which English had no words. Unlike most languages, English happily took words from other languages, often with no attempt to officially anglicise them.

Irregular spelling was a problem for the printers, who wanted consistency but had to appeal to the maximum possible number of readers. Which dialect should they choose as the basis of written English? They chose the London English of Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales was the first book printed in English. You can see a digitised version on the British Library website.

The printing press brought with it the idea of correct spelling. But it also brought some new spelling confusion to English. For example, because many of the printers were Dutch, they used Dutch spellings for words like ghost, aghast, ghastly and gherkin, which keep their silent h to this day. Other words like ghospel, ghossip and ghizzard lost their Dutch h over the years.

What's more, Caxton's timing was unfortunate for future generations of English spellers...

The Great Vowel Shift

The printing press gave English spelling a big push towards standardisation. English pronunciation, on the other hand, was anything but steady and the century after the arrival of the printing press saw major changes in the way English was spoken.

For example, words like he, she, knee, name, fine and be were pronounced as they were spelled when the printing press arrived. Much like a German would pronounce those letters nowadays. But during the next century, the pronunciation changed to roughly what English people use today. No one is really sure why. But spelling did not change to reflect the new pronunciation.

At this point, English was full of unusual pronunciations and silent letters. The situation wasn't helped by...

Scholars

English is unique among the world's most popular languages in that it doesn't have an academy to say how the language should develop.

L'Académie française, for example, seems to spend most of its time nowadays keeping English words out of French. Which is quite funny really, when you consider how many French words came in the other direction

The lack of an official academy is also one reason why English spelling is complicated.

During the 16 th and 17 th centuries in particular, lots of scholars came up with ideas for improving English. One of these was to alter spelling to reflect the classical roots of some words. For example, b was added to the word debt to reflect its relationship to the Latin debitum. Up until this point, it had been spelled and pronounced dette. A b was added to doubt (from dubitare). Rime became rhyme (from the Greek rhytmus). And so on. These letters have never been pronounced in English.

But the scholars didn't always get it right. For example the s in island was added because they thought the word came from the Latin insula, whereas it is really an Old English word.

At the same time, changes were made illogically to other parts of English spelling, for example the ght from night and light was added to delight and tight, but not to spite and ignite.

Scholars tried to make English a neater language but ended up making it messier!

The U S of A

Photo: JimmyMac210

Modern American spelling differs from British English. This is largely due to Noah Webster, whose name you may recognise from the front of American dictionaries. In his first American dictionary in 1828, he listed words such as color, honor and favor, which would all include u in British English.

This was an attempt to remove some of the French influence in the English language! Nowadays, it just adds more confusion for learners.

Find out more about the differences between British and American English.

Why doesn't someone do something about English spelling?

Well, largely because nobody can agree on what to do.

There have been many advocates of spelling reform over the centuries, the most famous of whom were George Bernard Shaw and Teddy Roosevelt. But the issue has fallen off the agenda in recent decades and looks unlikely to resurface any time soon.

Thank goodness for spellcheck!

Contact us to find out more about our language courses worldwide, or join the conversation below.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why is English spelling so irregular? - ESL language studies abroad

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As the world's international language, English has a lot going for it. For one thing, it's quite easy to learn for speakers of other European languages. Nouns only have a single gender, so it is "the little girl", unlike "la niña" (Spanish) or "das Mädchen"... #americanenglish #england #english

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The story of English spelling is the story of thousands of people - some well-known, most totally unknown - who left a permanent linguistic fingerprint on our orthography. It's a story whose events cover the best part of 1500 years. And it's not over yet.

The story starts with the missionaries who first wrote English down as best they could using the Roman alphabet they knew. They made a reasonable job of it - once they'd found extra letters to cope with the pesky Germanic sounds they didn't have in Latin, such as the two th's (as in thin and this). The spelling of Old English was largely phonetic: all letters were pronounced. They sounded the w in write, the g in gnat, and the k in know.

Then the French arrived, with their own ideas about how to spell. Out went some of the old forms, and in came new ones. Cwen became queen; mys became mice. Medieval scribes continued to spell words as they were pronounced; but as English had many regional accents, the result was a huge amount of variation. Over 60 spellings of night are known from the Middle Ages - nite, nyght, nicht, nihte....

Things couldn't carry on like that. As England developed centralized government, the need to develop a standard system became urgent. But whose standard should it be? Widely read authors such as Chaucer? The emerging civil service? The English translations of the Bible? The printers? The modern system emerged out of all of them.

Each new factor brought idiosyncrasies as well as order. William Caxton's Flemish typesetters didn't know English well, so spelled some words in a Flemish way. That's where the h in ghost comes from. It was gost in Middle English. They put it into g oose too - ghoose - but for some reason this didn't catch on. That's the great mystery of English spelling: why some spellings have appealed and others haven't.

There was still a great deal of variation, though, so in the 16th century spelling reformers came up with their Big Idea: etymology. If the word meaning 'money owed' appeared in such varied ways as det, dett, and deytt, people obviously needed help, and this would come from the word's history. The word was debitum in Latin, so they recommended a 'silent' b. You might think such an arcane idea would never catch on. But it did - as did the b in subtle, the l in salmon, the p in receipt, and many more. In trying to simplify the system, the reformers ended up complicating it.

The big dictionaries of later years, such as Johnson's and Webster's, did their best to standardize spelling, but with only limited success. Today, there are many differences between British and American English. And publishing houses vary over such words as realize and realise, judgment and judgement, bible and Bible, flower pot, flower-pot and flowerpot. So do restaurants: next time you go to an Indian restaurant, see how they spell poppadom/papadom/puppodum... I've collected over 20 variants in the past 10 years. Encyclopedias make different choices over foreign names - Tutankhamen, Tutankhamun, Tut'ankhamun... Add up all the variation in a dictionary and we find a surprising 15 percent of the words have alternative spellings.

Then in the 19th century there was another big change. Previously, foreign words that came into English would tend to have their spelling anglicised - so, German nudel gave us noodles, not nudels, in the 16th century. But in the modern era this policy was reversed: strudel arrived at the end of the 19th century, and we don't spell it stroodle. Thousands of words retained their original spelling in this way, and some letter sequences are unprecedented. How do you spell the name of the Irish prime minister? It sounds like 'teeshuck', but we spell it taoiseach. We respect foreign spellings these days - a sign of our more egalitarian times, perhaps.

And we ain't seen nothin' yet. Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries eventually reflect popular choices. And the Internet is allowing more people to influence spelling than ever before. In 2001 there were just a few dozen instances of rubarb (without the h) on Google; in 2006 there were a few hundred instances of rubarb; by 2010 there were nearly 100,000. This month there's over 150,000. People are voting with their fingers. The original medieval spelling without h is reasserting itself. I think it will be a standard alternative one day, and - who knows - may supplant rhubarb entirely. The story of English spelling is by no means over.

My aim in writing Spell it Out was to try to explain this story. Army generals used to say 'know your enemy.' My belief is that the more we understand why English spelling is the way it is, the more we will find its irregularity less off-putting, and the more we will become confident spellers. And this explanatory approach seems to have met a need. I've been amazed by the book's reception, when it came out in the UK a few months ago. It has become my best-selling book - something I never anticipated. How much best-selling? Well, here's a story to die for.

I was asked for interview on one of the popular radio talk-shows at the BBC, the Jeremy Vine show. They asked me to do five minutes, but ended up keeping me for half an hour, as they'd never had so many emails, tweets, and phone calls. 'What is it about spelling?' said the editor, as I left. I shook my head. Then he added, 'Watch Amazon tonight, as every time we do a book there is a sales spike.' I was doubtful, but followed his advice. And indeed, that evening, Spell it Out rose to be number 4 on the best-selling Amazon chart - ahead of Fifty Shades of Grey!! Who ever would have thought that spelling would one day beat sex - even if it was for only a few hours!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The story of English spelling is the story of thousands of people - some well-known, most totally unknown - who left a permanent linguistic fingerprint on our orthography. It's a story whose events cover the best part of 1500 years. And it's not over yet.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Phonology is the link between Phonetics and the rest of Linguistics. Only by studying both the phonetics and the phonology of English is it possible to acquire a full understanding of the use of sounds in English speech.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In linguistics, a phonemic orthography is an orthography (system for writing a language) in which the graphemes (written symbols) correspond to the phonemes (significant spoken sounds) of the language. Languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographies; a high degree of grapheme-phoneme correspondence can be expected in orthographies based on alphabetic writing systems, but they differ in how complete this correspondence is.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Spoken English and Written English are the two forms of the English Language that differ from each other in many ways. When it comes to 'Spoken English' there are different forms in which the language is spoken; the pronunciation of the British is different from that of the Americans. As English is the mother tongue of the 'British' an opinion prevails that 'British English' is the actual form of 'English' language be it spoken or be it written, though in real life we are acquainted with two distinctly different form of both 'Spoken' and 'Written' English.

Almost all or to be precise, a major number of countries in the world are associated with America for different reasons. As a matter of fact, the 'American English' has become a trend and 'British English' has taken a back seat. So our discussion will be based on taking 'American English' as a benchmark for both the 'American Way of Spoken and Written English.' There are quite a few noticeable differences are there. We will discuss the major and most distinct ones.

1) Pronunciation:

This comes first because it is often observed with surprise that a person with a profound knowledge of the 'English Language' does not even know how to pronounce the word he is using in his writing. Many a person pronounce the word 'often' as 'of ten' may it sound stylish, the actual pronunciation is of(t)en. While speaking in English people have often heard to utter 'Pro noun ciation' but the real one is 'Pro nun ciation'. These are mistakes committed due to less exposure to persons with 'Good English Communication Skill'. Faulty pronunciation gets noticed only when a person talks to a 'Native English Speaker' or a person with good command over 'English Communication Skill'. So the difference is visible. However good a person may be in written English, he may not be a good communicator with right pronunciation, and that matters a lot.

2) Knowledge of Grammar:

Here the case is a bit too critical. If you are not good in 'Applied English Grammar,' you neither can be a good writer nor be a good speaker. Well, then what's the difference? If you are not good enough in English Grammar, you have a shallow knowledge but you are habituated in speaking English, you can manage to talk to ordinary persons, (notice it I have written manage to talk) your friends or relative in casual or informal English. Don't get shocked with the statement; I am talking about 'Informal Way' of speaking. Why I have said 'you can manage' to talk? Because in the day to day conversations people often (not of ten) speak in a casual way, using incomplete sentences, avoiding usage of punctuations, indirect narrations and even avoid using a note of interrogation. e.g. "so you're really going to home" instead of asking "So, are you really going to home?". People also speak in a casual way ignoring proper usage of Tenses. Here comes the difference, when one needs to write, say an application letter or an essay in college or a business letter his 'Knowledge on English Grammar' is put to test. Hardly one gets a chance to write something in casual English.

3) Proficiency in speaking:

As we have discussed that 'You can manage to talk' without proper depth of English language and English Grammar, contrary to that you cannot 'manage to talk' when it comes to serious conversation with designated person or 'delivering a speech' or 'participating in a debate', here depth of your English knowledge needs to be sharper than even a writer. You get no chance to think and compose, no chance of speaking then rectifying (damaging for your image), no usage of incomplete sentences. You have to have the sharp skill of 'English Communication' so as to be an eloquent speaker with a profound depth of both English language and English grammar. Your vocabulary has to be strong, your knowledge of 'English Idioms and Phrases' has to be well enough for application where it suits. This is also a difference between spoken and written English, for being an 'Eloquent Speaker' your depth of knowledge has to sharper and stronger.

4) Accentuate on specific words while speaking:

Accentuating matters a lot while speaking or delivering a speech as it provides clarity on your speech, by putting stress on words you make your point clear to the listener or the audience. Needless to be mentioned accentuating is not needed at all while you are writing in English. Its' the reader's job to see through the words and get the meaning accurately, your duty is to write properly and if needed you can underline or make a word or words written in bold, indicating that you are emphasizing on that or them. While speaking your audience will not be able to get a clear message unless you accentuate or put stress on required words. So it makes another big difference.

5) American Accent or British Accent:

When you are writing in English some spellings and styles do differ from American to British English, no matter which style you are following you have to chose either one of the two writing styles and stick to it with a minor swaying, its' easy to adapt. But while you are delivering a speech before a respectable audience i.e. in a seminar or conference you have to follow rigidly one style of accent. If you are an American/habituated in speaking in American English, or if you are a British/habituated in speaking in British English stick to it, no swaying from one to another. Being habituated in British English if you try to please the audience by speaking in American accent you will become a laughingstock and vice versa. The difference here between 'Spoken' and 'Written' English is visibly distinct. You can change your writing style according to the need of the situation, but you have no chance to adjust your speaking style accordingly, you have to be the real 'You' whoever be the audience.

Might be dozens of other examples can be presented, but the distinct differences are discussed here keeping with a view to making people aware that, don't take it to be granted that if you are a good writer you are a good speaker as well and the other way around. Writing good English and Speaking great English are two different arts to be acquired by means of practice. Most importantly, emphasis and tone of voice both are important in conversational English, while impeccable knowledge of English grammar is a must for both the forms. While expressing different expressions like fear, sorrow, disappointment your emphasize on words and tone of your voice are more important than your facial expressions. For being a good communicator or a good writer your skill has to be adequate and you need to know the art spoken English with all its' difference from written form.
Originally posted 2016-09-15 02:52:16.

Comments are closed.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
5 Differences between 'Spoken English' and 'Written English.' - ielts blog

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Spoken English and Written English are the two forms of the English Language that differ from each other in many ways. When it comes to 'Spoken English' there are different forms in which the language is spoken; the pronunciation of the British is different from that of the Americans.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There are many differences between the processes of speaking and writing. Writing is not simply speech written down on paper. Learning to write is not a natural extension of learning to speak. Unlike speech, writing requires systematic instruction and practice.