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Spell it out Also by David Crystal The Cambridge encyclopedia of language The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language The stories of English The fight for English Think on my words: an introduction to Shakespeare’s language Txting: the gr8 db8 By hook or by crook: a journey in search of English A little book of language Evolving English: one language, many voices Begat: the King James Bible and the English language Internet linguistics Just a phrase I’m going through: my life in language The story of English in 100 words Spell it out: the singular story of English spelling David Crystal First published in Great Britain in 2012 by PROFILE BOOKS LTD 3A Exmouth House Pine Street London EC1R 0JH www.profilebooks.com Copyright © David Crystal, 2012 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays, Bungay, Suffolk The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 1 84668 567 5 eISBN 978 1 84765 822 7 The paper this book is printed on is certified by the © 1996 Forest Stewardship Council A.C. (FSC). It is ancient-forest friendly. The printer holds FSC chain of custody SGS-COC-2061 Contents Introduction 1 The nature of the problem Pooh and his friends on spelling 2 The beginning 3 The size of the problem 4 Building the alphabet Letter origins 5 The basic weaknesses Hope for us all 6 Keeping things long More than letters 7 Keeping things short Spelling as tragedy 8 The first exceptions 9 Seeing the link Forensic spelling 10 Know your Latin and French Spelling as reputation 11 New letters for old 12 Old letters in new words Tarzan learns to read 13 Old sounds in new positions Spelling as stratagem 14 New sounds in old places 15 More exceptions Avoiding the vulgar 16 Showing the difference Charles Dickens and his characters reflect upon spelling 17 Noting the similarity Silent letters 18 New sounds in old letters 19 A printer’s practice Mark Twain on spelling 20 The urge to reform George Bernard Shaw on spelling 21 Remembering Latin 22 More etymologies A word I always mispell 23 Famous spellings 24 Spelling ‘rules’ Mrs Malaprop on reading and spelling 25 The role of personalities 26 Another personality 27 Printers and publishers Spelling wars 28 Changing practices Roger McGough on spelling 29 The Internet Lower case only 30 Showing identity 31 Unpredictability Ogden Nash on names 32 Exotic vowels Disenvowelling 33 Exotic consonants The spread of education 34 Spelling noises Unspellable noises 35 Abbreviating 36 Learning the system George Crabbe on learning 37 The future of English spelling A teaching appendix I Avoiding isolation II Towards a linguistics of spelling Further reading Illustration credits Index of words General index

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Why is there an 'h' in ghost? William Caxton, inventor of the printing press and his Flemish employees are to blame: without a dictionary or style guide to hand in fifteenth century Bruges, the typesetters simply spelled it the way it sounded to their foreign ears, and it stuck. Seventy-five per cen