In the 16th century, Latin was held in such high regard that writers started spelling English words as they were in Latin.

Scribes kept the spelling of the root words the same, even though the pronunciation was different. ance, ity, ment, tion) change the pronunciation of the root word by changing the stress pattern.

Additions of suffixes in English (e.g.

After the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the victorious Normans introduced lots of spelling exceptions to basic rules, and even replaced some of the letters of the alphabet including thorn, eth, and wynn (ash – ae – would survive until the 13th century, and can still be seen in the British English spelling of words like “encyclopaedia”, “paediatrician”, and “aednauseum”).

Some first writers in English showed short vowels in content words by doubling the following consonant (e.g.

Various strategies were used by different writers to show long vowels – sometimes double vowels were used, sometimes a “silent e” was added, sometimes additional vowel letters were added (e.g.

English spelling inherited weaknesses of the Old English alphabet: (1) some letters had more than one sound and (2) some sounds were shown by 2+ letters.

Adapting the Roman alphabet to English meant adding what ended up being additional letters, including some Anglo-Saxon letters, including Germanic letters called eth, thorn, ash and wynn.

In Early Anglo-Saxon England, the monks decided to use the 23 letter Roman alphabet to develop the English writing system.

There are only 26 letters in our alphabet, but we have up to 44 different speech sounds in English.

As David Crystal tells us in his excellent book “Spell it Out”, there are actually lots of reasons, including the following: I get asked this a lot – especially by young students. But, more than 30 years after learning the words, I still have pause and think when spelling “occasion”, “embarrass” or “harassment”. For example, most people can write their signature and high frequency words like “the” without thinking about it.

Spelling lacks the automaticity we associate with handwriting or typing.

But there are several ways of writing the sounds /si:p/, e.g. There is only one way to pronounce the word spelt by the letters s-e-e-p.

There are far more spellings for a sound than pronunciations for letters.

In some ways, spelling is harder than reading or writing:

But spelling is an additional, separate skill from reading or writing. Lots of us – including the Oxford English Dictionary – define literacy as the ability to read and write. But many literacy programs focus only on reading and writing. Literacy involves three skills: reading, writing and spelling.

Spell it out david crystal pdf