Why English spelling is so irregular

Blame William Caxton. He was the Englishman who set up the first printing press in England, in 1476. He had been a very successful businessman in the cloth trade, based in Bruges, Flanders. On a trip to Cologne he saw printing presses in operation and immediately recognized that there was a lot of money to be made satisfying the English public’s desire for inexpensive books.

Prior to Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1440, books were all copied out by hand, an extremely laborious process. As a result, books were scarce, expensive, and owned only by the wealthy.

But what to publish? There were very few books available in English, so Caxton set out to translate books himself, mostly from French. (He wasn’t a good translator.) But he was confronted with the problem of which of the many English dialects to choose from in order to be accessible to the largest number of readers. (He wrote about this in a famous and charming preface to one of his books — search for “Caxton egges story” if you are interested.) Not surprisingly, he settled on the dialect that was spoken in London, known as the Chancery Standard, used by the English government for official documents.

Prior to Caxton, English spelling had been phonetic, representing how words were actually pronounced at the time of writing. (The sounds of the letters of the alphabet, particularly the consonants, had changed very little since Roman times.) However, from Caxton’s time onward, spelling would be more or less frozen. We are essentially stuck with how words were spelled phonetically around the year 1500, even though their pronunciation has changed a great deal since then.

For example, in 1500 the word “knife” was pronounced “caneef”. (Even today, the French word for “penknife” is “canif”, pronounced the same way.) “Light” was pronounced “leecht”. “Through” was pronounced “thraucch”. And so on. One can find complaints by 16th century pedants that the young people weren’t pronouncing words properly.

The pronunciation of vowels has changed the most, particularly between approximately the years 1400 and 1700. This 300-year period is known as the Great Vowel Shift, when the pronunciation of vowels changed from that of the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) to the pronunciation we are familiar with today. There are plenty of theories about why this happened, but nobody really knows. This is why, for example, the poetry of Shakespeare no longer rhymes, even though it did when he wrote it at the end of the 16th/beginning of the 17th centuries.

So, when your child is struggling to learn English spelling, you can explain why it is the way it is. It won’t make it any easier, though!