Why isnt phonetic spelt the way it sounds

English spelling is so strange because English pronunciation is so particular, with minute variations and nuances. I'm always amazed to find that people don't see that. The list of words that people think they could simplify by changing the spelling is vast - yet in every case it would result in the changing of the pronunciation.

JB, London English spelling reflects its history England conquered by many before going on to conquer many and thereby coming across and absorbing many languages.

This is also reflected in its highly attractive flexibility and basic weirdness, e. Huw Roberts, Caerdydd Cymru For the same reason that "dyslexia" is a pig to spell and not being able to pronounce "r" correctly is called rhotacism. There is no truth in the claim that ph is pronounced 'more softly' than f. If it was and there may be slight differences in the pronunciation of this phoneme in different words, particularly as regards its place in the sequence of phonemes this has nothing to do with the spelling.

Ask any phoneticist. David Shariatmadari, London UK.. Rachel, USA Because the Ancient Greeks were weird, the Romans nicked anything they could get their hands on Gods, culture, language etc , and the English are too stubborn to change anything! And why should we, by God!! Simon Evans, London, UK In Ancient Greece, words such as "phonein" to hear , or "thanatos" death actually were pronounced "p-h", "t-h". We know this because in some very old Greek inscriptions the letters are spelled out separately: Pi followed by the H-shaped Eta, which came to be used as a vowel in Classical times.

This is why Roman writers, many of them Greek speakers, do not spell Greek ph- words using a Roman F - which was itself, incidentally, a discarded Greek letter Digamma - two Gammas once used to denote a vowel of interminate quality, between O and U.

Joihn Bennett, Glasgow, Scotland For the same reason that abbreviation is such a long word. L Smith, Edinburgh, Scotland Why is dyslexic such a tricky word to spell would be a better question He also had a career in curing horses and carrying off the dead, and Wednesday is his day. Woden's day has gone through various spellings—wodnesdaeg, Weodnesdei, Wenysday, wonysday, Weddinsday—but even though Shakespeare tried to match pronunciation with his very reasonable "Wensday," it didn't stick.

Woden got to keep his 'd' and his day. The Romans helped get the Anglo-Saxon language into writing, but when the French arrived with William the Conqueror in , they brought their own words with them.

English vocabulary was never the same again. One of the expressions they brought was iu parti jeu parti , "divided game" which became Iupartye, ieoperde, and yeopardie before settling into its current form.

The 'eo' reflects the gist of the original French vowel as it does in "people" and the location of the 'r' was already fixed in the spelling by the time it wandered over next to the 'p' in pronunciation.

The roaming habits of the 'r' have gotten a lot of word spellings into trouble. See: different, temperate, separate. Those sneaky 'r's also like to disappear completely, especially when there are two of them near each other see: surprise, berserk, governor. February also came into English from French. The French feverier first became English feverere, or feverell. But in the 16th and 17th centuries, a craze for all things classical caused writers to start re-Latinizing their spelling—making words look more like their ancient language sources, whatever their current pronunciation.

English spelling is ridiculous. Kernel and colonel do. The English spelling system, if you can even call it a system, is full of this kind of thing. Admittedly, for a non-native speaker, such mastery usually involves a great deal of confusion and frustration. Part of the problem is that English spelling looks deceptively similar to other languages that use the same alphabet but in a much more consistent way.

Your pronunciation might be terrible, and the pace, stress and rhythm would be completely off, and no one would mistake you for a native speaker — but you could do it. Even French, notorious for the spelling challenges it presents learners, is consistent enough to meet the bar.

French has plenty of rules, and exceptions to those rules, but they can all be listed on a reasonable number of pages. English is in a different league of complexity.

The most comprehensive description of its spelling — the Dictionary of the British English Spelling System by Greg Brooks — runs to more than pages as it enumerates all the ways particular sounds can be represented by letters or combinations of letters, and all the ways particular letters or letter combinations can be read out as sounds. From the early Middle Ages, various European languages adopted and adapted the Latin alphabet.

So why did English end up with a far more inconsistent orthography than any other? The basic outline of the messy history of English is widely known: the Anglo-Saxon tribes bringing Old English in the 5th century, the Viking invasions beginning in the 8th century adding Old Norse to the mix, followed by the Norman Conquest of the 11th century and the French linguistic takeover.

The moving and mixing of populations, the growth of London and the merchant class in the 13th and 14th centuries. The contact with the Continent and the balance among Germanic, Romance and Celtic cultural forces. No language Academy was established, no authority for oversight or intervention in the direction of the written form.

English travelled and wandered and haphazardly tied pieces together. But just how does spelling factor into all this? The remnants of the Roman Empire comprised Germanic, Celtic and Slavic communities spread over a huge area. Various conquests installed a ruling-class language in control of a population that spoke a different language: there was the Nordic conquest of Normandy in the 10th century where they now write French with a pretty regular system ; the Ottoman Turkish rule over Hungary in the 16th and 17th centuries which now has very consistent spelling rules for Hungarian ; Moorish rule in Spain in the 8th to 15th centuries which also has very consistent spelling.

True, other languages did have official academies and other government attempts at standardisation — but those interventions have largely only ever succeeded at implementing minor changes to existing systems in very specific areas. T he answer to the weirdness of English has to do with the timing of technology. If the printing press had arrived earlier in the life of English, or later, after some of the upheaval had settled, things might have ended up differently. The Latin alphabet had spread throughout Europe with the diffusion of Christianity from the 4th century onward.

A few European vernacular languages had some sort of rudimentary writing system prior to this, but for the most part they had no written form. For the first few hundred years of English using the Latin alphabet, its spelling was pretty consistent and phonetic. Monks and missionaries, beginning around CE translated Latin religious texts into local languages — not necessarily so they could be read by the general population, but so they could at least read aloud to them.

Most people were illiterate. The vernacular translations were written to be pronounced, and the spelling was intended to get as close to the pronunciation as possible.

In those cases, they might use an accent mark, or put two letters together, or borrow another symbol. They later settled on the two-letter combination th. For the most part, they used the Latin alphabet as they knew it, but stretched it by using the letters in new ways when other sounds were required. We still use that sound, with the th spelling, in English today. English was at home in the kitchen, the workshop, the marketplace, but less sure of itself in other registers.

Writing was a specialised skill handled by dedicated scribes. They were trained by other scribes, who in turn passed on their spelling conventions. Different monasteries might have had different styles or habits for representing English sounds, and there were dialects and variations in pronunciation in the spoken language as well — but a written standard and eventually a whole literature emerged.

That tradition was broken after the Norman invasion in For the next years or so, with a few exceptions, written English disappeared entirely. French was the language of the conquerors, and became the language of the state and all its official activities. Latin remained the language of the Church and education. Students in Auckland and Waikato are set to return to the classroom for face-to-face learning from November Some schools around Australia, and elsewhere, have replaced individual desks with circular booths and shared tables for collaborative work.

News Opinion Why phonetic spelling isn't effective.