Orthography facts for kids
Orthography is all about the correct way to write a language. It includes the rules for spelling words. Orthography also covers things like punctuation (commas, periods), capitalization (using big letters), and diacritics (special marks like accents on letters). In English, spelling is often tricky for everyone learning the language. It's the biggest part of English orthography.
Some languages have special groups, like the Académie française for French, that decide the official spelling. But English doesn't have one of these groups. English spelling was mostly shaped by early printers. They had to choose how words would look in their books. Slowly, the many different ways to spell words started to become more consistent. For example, the word "merry" was spelled in about 30 different ways between the 9th and 16th centuries!
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English Spelling Rules
English orthography, or English spelling, shows how the 26 letters of our alphabet are used to write down the roughly 36 different sounds in English. The first writings in Old English used the Latin alphabet, which had 24 letters.
Vowel Sounds
No alphabet perfectly matches all the sounds in a language. One reason is that there are always more sounds than letters. In English, we have many more vowel sounds than we have vowel letters (A, E, I, O, U). The ancient Greeks were the first to use letters for vowels. They chose to use only a few letters for their vowel sounds. This choice influenced all alphabets that came after them.
English would need about 20 vowel letters to show all the different vowel sounds we use. Some languages, like Georgian, have many more letters (41 in total). A shorter alphabet works by using two or three letters together for one sound, or by having one letter represent several different sounds.
Consonant Sounds
The English alphabet has about 22 to 26 different consonant sounds. Only a few consonant letters, like 'n', 'r', and 'v', almost always make one sound, aren't made by other letter combinations, and are never silent.
Language Differences (Dialects)
Another reason alphabets don't perfectly fit languages is because of dialects. A spoken language changes from one place to another and over time. This is very clear with English, as people pronounce words so differently around the world. A written language, however, is less flexible than the spoken one. It has a different job: it needs to serve everyone who speaks the language. It does this by keeping the spelling similar over time and across different places.
Because of this, all alphabets have sounds that are hard to show with the letters they use. English also has other challenges: sounds that can be written in many ways, and spellings that can be pronounced in different ways. All these things lead to spelling problems.
British vs. American English Spelling
Differences between American English and British English spelling mostly came from one person: Noah Webster (1758–1843). He wrote a Grammar book, a Spelling book, and eventually an American dictionary of the English language. In his dictionary, he suggested many simpler spellings.
For example, Webster chose 's' instead of 'c' in words like defense. He changed 're' to 'er' in words like center. He also removed one 'L' from words like traveler. At first, he kept the 'u' in words like colour or favour, but he dropped it in later versions. He even tried to change tongue to tung, but that change didn't last! His main goal was to make it easier for children to learn to read and write. Webster's dictionary had 70,000 words, and 12,000 of them had never been in a published dictionary before.
Webster did create a slightly different style for American English. But his changes didn't fix the biggest spelling problems. For example, the word ending -ough can be pronounced in many ways: tough, bough, cough. The main reasons for spelling differences are historical. Also, words borrowed from other languages often keep their original (foreign) spelling.
Many people since Webster, like George Bernard Shaw, have suggested changing English to a more phonetic spelling system. This would mean words are spelled exactly as they sound. In some cases, Webster's changes have been adopted in Britain too. For instance, the spelling programme came from French, but the US program is simpler and fits better with other English words. English spelling is still a challenge today. Unlike some countries (like France) where a national committee gives spelling advice, English has been free from such control for a long time.
- Spelling is important, but how the language is used in real life is even more important. The main differences between British and American English are more about idioms (phrases), slang, and vocabulary than about spelling. Spelling in writing is a bit like pronunciation in speech. They are the necessary outer layers, but the inner meaning is more important.
- On Wikipedia (notice the spelling!), articles can be written in either American or British English, but they should stick to one style throughout the article. You can find more details at Wikipedia:Manual of Style.
Dictionaries and Sounds
Modern British spelling was greatly influenced by two big English dictionaries: Samuel Johnson's A dictionary of the English language (1755) and James Murray's Oxford English Dictionary. Johnson's dictionary was very important, both in Britain and other countries. It was even sent to America.
For Americans in the late 1700s, Johnson was the expert on language. The way American dictionaries developed later was shaped by his fame. America's two main dictionary writers in the 1800s, Noah Webster and Joseph Emerson Worcester, argued a lot about Johnson's work. Webster felt that Britain should no longer be the standard for language, saying its writers' tastes were "corrupted." But Joseph Worcester praised Johnson. In 1846, Worcester finished his own dictionary, Universal and critical dictionary of the English Language.
Some people wonder which language is the easiest to spell. People learning a second language often think their first language is the easiest. However, for a learner, languages with clear, well-defined rules are easier to start with than English. English spelling is one of the most irregular of all alphabetic spellings, making it very hard to learn. English originally came from Germanic roots. But since its early days as Anglo-Saxon, it has borrowed words from many other languages. French (a Romance language) and Latin have given the most words to English.
Languages that use phonetic spelling are easier to learn. With phonetic spelling, words are spelled exactly as they are pronounced. For example, the Italian word "orologio" is pronounced oh-ro-LO-jo. In English, you might see the word "knife." The 'k' in "knife" is silent, even though 'k' is usually pronounced in other English words.
How English Spelling Changed
One problem we have is that words that sound similar might be spelled very differently. Think of "rough" and "ruff," or "meet" and "meat," or "great" and "grate." Words with complicated spellings can be pronounced simply. For example, "Leicester" is pronounced 'Lester'. Even the spelling rules we have are often broken. The rule "i before e except after c" has over 100 exceptions! Almost all these problems happened for historical reasons. English has been changing for over a thousand years. As the language changed, some parts of its spelling got "stuck" in older forms.
Here are some reasons why English spelling is the way it is:
- Originally, Old English used a 23-letter alphabet for about 35 different phonemes (sounds). More letters were added later.
- After the Norman Conquest, French scribes (people who copied books) introduced new spellings.
- Printing became popular. Many early printers came from other parts of Europe and brought different spelling rules to England. Printing helped make spelling more stable, but pronunciation kept changing.
- Printing happened around the same time as the Great Vowel Shift (late 1300s to 1400s). During this time, the pronunciation of all the vowel sounds changed. This means the spelling of thousands of words still shows how they were pronounced in Geoffrey Chaucer's time.
- In the 1500s, scholars tried to show a word's history through its spelling. That's why the silent 'b' in 'debt' is there – it comes from the Latin word debitum.
- More words were borrowed from other languages in the late 1500s and early 1600s, like pneumonia, idiosyncrasy, epitome, and cocoa.
English has a huge number of words, but its spelling comes from many different places. This means English spelling has become very diverse.
How Languages Differ in Spelling
Some languages have a very close match between their sounds and their letters. This means they are close to having one letter for each sound. If there was a perfect match, that language would have phonemic orthography. English is very far from being phonemic. It has almost every kind of spelling problem you can imagine:
- Different letters can make the same sound.
- Two or more letters can make a single sound.
- A sound can change depending on the letters next to it.
- Many words sound different depending on the dialect.
- A huge number of words are borrowed from other languages and keep their original spellings.
- It's "defective" because it doesn't show some important sound differences. For example, the difference between the voiced 'th' (like in the) and the unvoiced 'th' (like in thin).
This area of study is called "orthographic depth." The orthographic depth of an alphabetic writing system shows how much a written language differs from a simple one-to-one letter-to-phoneme match. It tells you how easy it is to guess how a word is pronounced just by looking at its spelling. "Shallow orthographies" are easy to pronounce from the written word. "Deep orthographies" are difficult to pronounce from how they are written. In shallow orthographies, the spelling and sound match directly. If you know the pronunciation rules, you can "say" the word correctly.
Most other international languages have similar problems. In French, Arabic, or Hebrew, new readers find it hard to figure out how to say words. Because of this, children learn to read more slowly. In both Spanish and Italian, there is a more direct link between spelling and pronunciation. These are languages with low orthographic depth, meaning they are easier to spell and read.
See also
In Spanish: Ortografía para niños
