Adventures in Orthography part I

[gatitoverde]

I believe it may have been Alfonso who recently said that if someone knew how English spelling got so messed up, that maybe they would like to share. Well, I had some idea already, from various readings in my English classes (Beowulf, Arthurian Legend, Chaucer) as well as some broader knowledge of language. And after two days of research, I consider myself informed enough to give a little class on the matter. Not everyone is as big of an etymology head as I, and the three languages I most concern myself with herein are all extinct--at least in the vernacular--so you might quickly bore of what I've written here, but some of you might take interest. And it was mostly an exercise in self-edification anyway.

Personally, our bizarre spelling, or orthography, is one of the things I love most about the language. It gives it a quirky kind of character and allows for a poetic device impossible in Spanish, that of eye rhyme, where two words that look alike but don't sound alike are rhymed, like glade and facade, or rough and through. Also, contained in its awkward orthography is the history of its parent land, England, with her various conquests by Germanic tribes, her merger of two distinctive and competitive cultures, and her rediscovery of ancient sciences and wisdom.

This is my second effort at explaining the spelling of English. The first was based on some studies of etymology, Old English, Old French, and Latin from a few years ago, and I think it suffered from that interim as well as from the lack of a clear outline. In my second attempt, I've made efforts to refresh and update my linguistic knowledge, as well as to better lay out a plan for my writing. I will begin with a brief introduction of the three principal component languages, illustrating some aspects of their respetive grammars and orthographies, and follow with an explanation of their synthesis into modern English. I plan to first upload the three introductions--each as a seperate post, with the preface attached to my synopsis of Latin--and then follow up later with the details of their synthesis. So let's begin.

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The orthography of English is a blend of spelling systems from three fundamental languages--Latin, Old English, and Anglo-Norman, a language closely related to Old French--with some additional flavor from Greek and later French. The good people at Wikipedia have given me a great way of illustrating the language's basic three components. They point out that English has three words meaning roughly of or relating to a king: kingly from Old English, royal from Old French, and regal from Latin. Much is made of the wealth of words in the English language--it has very few competitors in this regard--and this has a great deal to do with its tri-fold engendering.

Latin is an Italic language, with an alphabet evolved utimately from that of the Greeks. It bears a complex system of noun declension and verb conjugation, making for a highly flexible word order with very few smaller articles. Not only do the verbs explain who is doing what, when, and with what likelihood, but also the nouns, pronouns and adjectives bear far more information than they do in Latin's offspring, the Romance languages. They undergo a great deal of formal alteration in order to detail this information, relating gender and number, by what means an action takes place, who the subject, object and indirect object are, etc. Languages that do so are said to be synthetic, and Latin is termed a fusional language as well for its extensive use of prefixes and suffixes serving other roles. It was influenced earlier on by a language not of the same liguistic branch, that of the Etruscans, but it is still very close to Proto-Indo-European, the mutual forefather of it and Old English. The dialect of Latin we're concerned with for the purposes of orthographical discussion is Classical Latin, which varied significantly from spoken Latin, known as Vulgar Latin, a somewhat ambiguous term.

Classical Latin's orthography was basically composed of just letters. There were no spaces in between words, though dots might be used to break things up a little bit, so a sentence would look something like this: CALIGULAERATFILIUSNATUMINIMUSGERMANICIETAGRIPPINAE MAIORIS ("Caligula was the youngest son of Germanicus and Agrippina the Elder.") The sign to sound relationship was even closer than that of Spanish which, though a nearly perfect spelling system, requires accents such as that in vergüenza, as well as certain pairings of letters, such as Q and U, to represent one sound. You all know this. What I want you to note is that no distinction is made in the pronunciations of the G in CALIGULA and GERMANICI. They are both hard. Likewise, the C in each name is pronounced identically, like a K, no matter which vowel happens to follow. We have a one-for-one, perfectly standardized spelling system. I'll get back to why all this is important. And moving on...