[ELI5] Why have some languages like Spanish kept the pronunciation of the written language so that it can still be read phonetically, while spoken English deviated so much from the original spelling?
In: Culture
No language has “original spelling”. Languages are oral and evolve based on usage.
Writing systems weren’t introduced until very late in the history of language.
English spelling was standardised in the 1600s in the middle of something called “The Great Vowel Shift” where certain vowels and diphthongs shifted up (yes up, physically) in the mouth.
For instance “House” used to be pronounced exactly as it is spelled “Hoos-uh”. During the great vowel shift the pronunciation changed, but the spelling never did.
English has no central authority, whereas Spanish does, and it has so many dialects now that even if it did have an “English language academy”, which one becomes the “standard” dialect? I’m sure the 67 million people in Britain would *never* accept an “American standard English” spelling reform based on American pronunciation.
English actually did enunciate phonemes that are no longer enunciated. For instance, in night the gh was pronounced, and the e at the end of “silent e” words was said as an “ee” or “e” sound. Many of these much more Germanic enunciation were spoken all the way through to at least Early Modern English, and sometimes even into late modern English. It began as a much more phonetic language, but the incorporation of Latin language aspects into its every day language, along with dialectical phonemic changes over time made it deviate from original pronunciation.
A mix of historical change and language attitudes. English spelling was mostly standardised just before a [major series of sound changes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift)happened, and the spelling mostly reflects the pronunciation from before those changes. Spanish hasn’t had really much of anything quite so disruptive happen – it’s been more a long series of much smaller changes. On the attitude side of things, English speakers have made a huge deal out of the concept of ‘spelling things right’, to the point that major change is largely unthinkable at this point – too many people have too strong of feelings about the current spelling system. (This might also be due in part to English’s more major sound changes! It would take a massive reform to update English spelling, and it would have even if the reform had happened in 1600, thanks to the above-mentioned Great Vowel Shift – updating to account for even just that change would require a major change. Spanish on the other hand has largely been able to get by on a rolling series of small tweaks.)
Plus, now English has different standard dialects in different places, and it would be impossible to achieve a Spanish-like level of one(ish)-to-one(ish) letter-to-sound correspondences in all dialects simultaneously without having different spellings per dialect.
For some other examples, compare Tibetan – which has a worse spelling-to-pronunciation correspondence than English does – and Swedish and Norwegian, where Swedish has much less predictable spelling than Norwegian despite them being basically dialects of the same language (from a purely linguistic perspective). Norwegian has gone through a series of language reforms (not confined only to spelling) since Norway’s independence from Denmark in 1814, in part as a way of asserting a separate linguistic identity from Danish; Swedish just hasn’t ever had the same impetus to change. Tibetan went through a drastic change somewhat like English did, where several kinds of previous consonant distinctions got turned into tone distinctions all in one go; I suspect that’s also part of why Tibetan hasn’t been updated.
English did not originally have fixed spelling. People would spell words however they thought it sounded. This means that spelling varied from person to person and region to region. Also, due to being made of bits of several languages all smushed together often retaining parts of the original language’s rules, there’s no consistency as to how words are pronounced or where you even get the spelling from. A man named Samuel Johnson eventually wrote a dictionary in which he spelled the words however he wanted to and because of how popular it became, that became the fixed spelling. Johson liked stuffy fancy spellings rather than simple phonetic ones and he set the idea of telling people the “correct” way to write instead of telling them how words were normally used. Webster eventually did something similar for American English, although he preferred simplified spellings, hence some of the differences between American and British spelling.
Spanish has an academy whose mission is to standardize and grow the Spanish language, so that helps Spanish to keep its strict pronunciation. English is, and has always been, a total shitshow, linguistically speaking.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Academies_of_the_Spanish_Language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Academies_of_the_Spanish_Language)
English didn’t deviate from original spelling. Spelling adapted to the English language speakers throughout its history. And its why it gives so many secondary speakers a vocabulary pronounciation headache of its own. 😁
I wouldn’t say Spanish has kept pronunciation for the same reasons above and below. It was adapted to its speakers.
But Korean fits this description of being pronounced as written because modern Korean was constructed to be so.
So why isn’t English pronounced the way it’s spelled? As logical as it would seem from convenience and efficiency in learning, languages don’t always evolve that way. They become designed that way once speakers become aware of their sound and written language and try to find ways to standardize it so it’s easier to educate others and make the population literate. This is what happened with Korean. The Chinese characters didn’t exactly fit the pronounced language. So they designed a written language to fit their pronounced language (Korean characters literally tell you how to make the sound in your mouth) to make it easy for everyone to learn and be literate. But for a language to change like this takes strong influences, like an effective government and education system.
But languages don’t always turn out this way because native speakers get used to inconsistencies and inconveniences. People learn to adapt to the ‘logic’ of their language. And in the case of English, you just have to learn those awkward pronounciations ( thought, night, this, house, mice, exam ) because a lot of foreign influences over hundreds integrated into English.
First there was the Celtic languages.
Then the Romans came, left, then came back with Caesar and established some of the latin in our grammar and alphabet.
Then Germanic groups like the Angles ans Saxons brought Old English, which is not too unfamiliar from Modern English.
Then the Vikings raided and gave us some cool words like that start with sk, sky and skill.
Then the Norman french invaded and slowly killed off Germanic Old English after making French the court language for awhile, which is why English has a lot of French vocabulary that trickled to the peasantry. (Colour, battle, castle) Apple used to refer to all kinds of fruit in general rather than just a Red Delicious or Granny Smith.
It wasn’t until around the Tudor era that Early Modern English broke out of the French from court. We also had the Great Vowel shift where our pronounciation of vowels in words went rose in the mouth.
Colonialism and Exploration added some words from Dutch, German, Spanish, and Portuguese into English because of over seas trading.
And by this point the printing press was made so more people started to become literate and read and write in English. But everyone had their own spelling and writing conventions.
Dictionaries and rules of style to standardize English were slowly being established mostly in the 1700s by a lot of educated men who had their own ideas of what proper grammar and spelling for English should be, like Samuel Johnson for the British and Webster for the Americans. (This is why the British spell Colour and Americans Color.)
Hope this explains why languages don’t always pronounce as they’re written.
Ditto to everyone about the random spellings and eventual “uniformity” inspired by dictionaries and an increased number of literate speakers.
I’m a L2 (second language learner) of Spanish and a native English speaker.
Spanish only has 22-24 phonemes while English has 38-45. (World languages like these two have A LOT of speakers spanning a big portion of the globe).
*Phonemes are distinct sounds of speech. We think of these as letters, but English doesn’t have the same amount of letters to match the phonemes.
English also has a lot more phonemes than Spanish so exponentially there are more combinations in English than in Spanish.
Examples- English sound /zh/ or /ʒ/; this sound has no singular letter to represent it. Example words are azure, measure, Jacques (loan words/names from French), casual.
So /ʒ/ can be represented as z, s, j, or s. This variation is confusing so many people believe that /zh/ could be an allophone of /s/ /sh/ /z/ or /j/. S sound, Sh sound, Z sound, or J sound (/dʒ/ for j sound) respectively.
An allophone is a variation of a phoneme because phonemes change based on mouth position and the way your produce the sound (though teeth, throat, nose, etc.,,)
Allophone example- Stop versus top. Say stop and put your hand in front of your mouth to feel if air hits your hand when you say the t (it shouldn’t), but when you say top it should. These are two different sounds of /t/, but we only use one letter for these sounds. The two variations are the same phoneme or base sound.
This happens a lot in any language. Allophones are everywhere, but we don’t notice them because our brains steam line when we’re in diapers.
I could go on. Comment if you want more explanation.
Short version: The Latin-based words in English haven’t shifted much. Ditto, Spanish. The Germanic/Old English words *have* shifted lots, because they’re not used as much by the posh people who controlled Standard English and therefore controlled the pronunciation of English. Also, the spellings *used to be* phonetic but they only reflected the pronunciations that the 1% used. So, from the very start, the spellings were all jacked up.
English was given standardized spelling in the 15th Century by the Chancery, a government agency (king’s court, whatever). The spelling was based on the way words were pronounced within the London-Oxford-Cambridge triangle, a chunk of England where rich, posh, well educated people lived. This led to two problems.
1. Other accents, other dialects (subgroups of English), etc. were ignored.
2. As pronunciation shifted, both inside and outside the London-Oxford-Cambridge triangle, spellings didn’t keep up. Therefore, over time, spellings ceased to reflect the pronunciation.
Spanish is heavily derived from Latin. So are Italian, Romansch, Languedoc, Romanian, French, and … something else. That’s why their spelling and pronunciation didn’t shift all that much. They’re Romance languages, which means they’re balls-deep in Latin. (That’s a technical term.)
English, on the other hand, is primarily Germanic. It uses a lot of French and Latin because of the Norman Invasion and the Catholic Church respectively. Still, there’s always been a tension between the two groups of words. Old English (AKA Anglo Saxon, AKA pre-1066 ‘English’) words tend to be pronounced *very* differently from Latinate (AKA Latin/French/romance) words.
If you look at the posher, more highfalutin’ words, they’re Latinate and their pronunciation hasn’t shifted that much. Check this out. “I desire to inquire as to the propinquity of my artisanal cutlery. Your concomitant reply is appreciated.” It sounds pretentious because it’s all Latinate. The bigger words’ pronunciation hasn’t shifted much because they’re Latinate and share much with Spanish/French/etc.
Now, try the inkhorn (more Germanic) version. “I want to ask where my stuff is. Tell me. Thanks.” Much more casual, much more ‘common’, and much more prone to shifts in pronunciation. ‘Want’ was *vanta*. ‘Ask’ was *ax* or *ascian*. Stuff was *stoppian*. Thanks was probably *tanke* or something.
Compare that to ‘desire’ (French *desirer*, Latin *desiderare*), ‘inquire’ (French *enquerre*, Latin *inquirere*), etc. The Latinate words are so close to Latin that you can almost understand high-register English without studying it, if you know enough Latin.
Now, consider this. The posh folks who controlled English spelling also controlled Standard English pronunciation, either consciously or unconsciously. (Think about Downton Abbey and how influential it is. Then, think about monks, politicians, and aristocrats. They control the schools, which produce the next generation of high-register English speakers, and so on.) So, not only do the 1% control the money, but they also control how high-register English (Latinate English) evolves. Pronunciation won’t shift much, because spelling won’t shift much, because the spelling of Latinate words doesn’t usually *need* to change, because the pronunciation is already set by the Oxford-Cambridge-London triangle. It’s quite circular in reasoning and in feedback.
Common English, AKA inkhorn English, AKA low-register English, can evolve much more and *does* evolve much more. There are 100 dialects, 200 regional accents, etc. and most of them contain words and phrases that pre-date the Norman Invasion. Fore example, Geordie contains a surprising about of Danish. Naturally, those words didn’t make it into Standard English. Still, the spellings of inkhorn English could evolve in those communities because most people spoke two dialects anyway (Standard English and the local dialect of English). The 1% felt no need to regulate non-standard dialects, and hoi polloi felt no need to kiss the 1%’s ass by tweaking their own spellings.
Eventually, as I said, the Chancery did standardize inkhorn spellings, but no one really paid attention to *speaking* in those spellings. The spellings *were* phonetic briefly, but they were standardized about the Oxford-Cambridge-London pronunciation! So, from the very start, the spellings did not reflect the way that most English-speakers talked. Matters worsened as the centuries passed, because English evolves… and whereas Latinate words’ pronunciations stayed true to their roots (because the 1% tried super-duper hard to keep on speaking ‘nicely’), the inkhorn words’ pronunciations shifted all over the bloody shop (because that’s what happens when normal people speak normal English in 200 different ways).
It is important to note that spoken languages always evolve in the way that they’re spoken. Spanish is no exception to this; 1600s Spanish is very different to the Spanish of today, and even among different regions and countries, Spanish is spoken differently.
There are a couple of key differences between Spanish and English that makes it more ‘phonetic’:
* Note that both languages use the *Latin alphabet*. The language for which it was most suited for is, by and large, Latin, which had five vowel sounds and some number of consonants. English has always had more than five; hence why we have to distinguish between the *long* vowel sounds and the *short* vowel sounds, and why two vowel letters like ‘ew’ make one sound. Spanish is also not quite a perfect match to Latin’s sounds: letters like ‘h’ are pretty much obsolete as Spanish doesn’t have this sound, and letters like ‘b’ and ‘v’ actually make the same sound in Spanish. So Spanish isn’t as phonetic as it might seem at first glance.
* Spanish has updated its spelling to reflect changing pronunciations. This is largely thanks to a central body governing – written – Spanish: the Réal Academia, which happens to be highly respected by education and the media, and so any decisions they make happens to eventually make it through to all parts of society. English lacks such a central body, and so it’s much harder to convince people to spell differently. For all the rag that English gets, no one actually seems enthusiastic about a more phonetic variant. Quite a few Commonwealth speakers I know seem to scoff at the idea of adopting even American English spelling, even though it was born out of Noah Webster’s (failed) attempt to make English a more phonetic language.
* The pronunciation of Spanish has changed in a way that doesn’t seem contradictory to the way it’s written. For example, ‘g’ and ‘d’ have evolved to a much softer sound than we would say them in English. When a Spanish speaker says ‘de nada’, it’s closer “de natha”, but since Spanish originally had no ‘th’ sound to begin with, d just becomes associated with that ‘th’ sound; same with ‘g’, whose pronunciation is closer to the soft Dutch ‘g’. Contrast this with English; the ‘ea’ in ‘meat’ and ‘ee’ in ‘meet’ where once pronounced differently, but these two sounds merged a few centuries ago to give the modern pronunciation.
This, on top of no one being able to convince speakers to spell them the same when they started to be pronounced the same, creates a very much ‘fossilised’ version of English; a spelling of English that largely reflects its old pronunciation, while Spanish has, for the most part, managed to keep up the way it writes with the speaking populace.
Side-note:
There exists this big misconception that language use is dictated by the way it is written; this is very much false. In all regards, the way a language is written is subservient to the way that the people speak it. Written English (or written Spanish) is not the ‘ideal’ nor ‘correct’ way to use or speak the language; this is just a by-product of the way writing evolves: the elite and educated use writing, therefore how they do it must be somehow ‘correct’. This is, of course, not at all reliable. When the French Revolution occurred, the way the bourgeois used French immediately became stigmatised, and the language of the revolutionaries became the ‘correct’ way. The point being, what happens to be considered the ‘correct’ way of writing or using a language has no objective reason; it’s just that that version happened to be in vogue.
English is a MESS.
The languages spoken in the British Isles first are various versions of Pict and Celtic. Britain was then invaded repeatedly. first invasion with a written record was by the Romans (and the Greeks tagged along). Various place names show signs of it, including any town called -caster, which suffix is derived from the Latin word ‘castrum’, which is a fort or castle.
Eventually, the Romans left (the Roman Empire was in decline), and then various tribes of Germanic peoples migrated, taking their languages with them. This includes the Angles (where the word ‘English’ eventually formed), the Saxons, the Jutes, and probably a few other tribes. Eventually the Angles and the Saxons intermarried and mostly won out for the moment, hence the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’.
The Danes and other Norse peoples were a constant pain in the English backside, leaving behind all sorts of words (including most that start ‘kn-‘ with the k being silent). In fact, the Norse invasion of 1066 drained the English King Harold’s army’s reserves badly, so when the Norman Duke William decided he wanted to force Harold to give up the throne (there was a lot of brute force politics involved), Harold’s exhausted army couldn’t withstand William’s fresh one and Harold was slain. The Normans spoke French, and a lot of the ‘fancy’ English words are originally French.
This whole mess has led to English being a mess, phonetically. It’s also led to a pair of fun sayings.
1. ‘English is the product of Norman knights wanting a little fun with Saxon barmaids, and is no more or less legitimate than any of the other results.’
2. ‘English doesn’t just borrow words from other languages. It follows them down dark alleys, knocks them out with a club and goes through their pockets looking for loose vocabulary.’
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