Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with Colin Gorey.
Colin runs the popular Dead Language Society newsletter and he teaches Old English, Latin and Old Norse online at the Ancient Language Institute.
You could take Old English from him.
And he has a PhD in linguistics.
Colin, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, we are excited to have you here.
You do all sorts of things, but we have been talking about spelling lately and thinking about it a lot, because the spelling bee is coming up and you have a somewhat contrary opinion, or at least one of your opinions is that English spelling isn't all over the place.
Like a lot of people will say, you say it is actually optimal.
And I just would love to hear more about that.
Yeah, there is actually, despite all appearances to the contrary, a kind of hidden logic in how English spelling works.
It's optimal from a certain point of view.
It's not optimal for someone trying to write a word and know how it's spelled.
But that's only one half of the picture.
And we all, even if we are writers professionally, we all do a lot more reading than writing.
And English spelling is tilted in favor of the reader.
Oh, how so?
So one way is that all these silent letters that we see, things like the K in knight, the W in two, the N in condemn.
This gives us information not just about the pronunciation of the word.
After all, they're silent.
By definition, they don't tell us about the pronunciation of the word.
But they give us information about what other words that word is related to.
And if, say, we have the word to...
That could be three words in English, right?
T-O-T-W-O-T-O-O.
Having this silent W, having a double O in one and a single O in another, gives us information that we wouldn't have already had if everything were, strictly speaking, phonetic.
Was the W in two the number ever pronounced?
It was.
And this is the dirty secret of these silent letters is that most of them were originally pronounced.
And spelling is a very conservative system.
Typically, it holds on to old pronunciations that are no longer current in the language.
So the W in two was once pronounced.
The N in condemn was pronounced at least in Latin.
And there are a few cases in which a silent letter in English was never pronounced and was just added there to make it look fancy like the S in island.
The S in island is put there to make it look more like the word isle, which it is actually not related to, even though they mean roughly the same thing.
Or another good example would be the B in debt.
This was added to make the word look more like its Latin ancestor.
So in English, there's never been a B pronounced in debt.
But people put it in because, well, in Latin, the equivalent word has a B, debitum.
So let's put in that B and, you know, fancy things up a bit.
These people who were reforming spelling, they were educated.
They wrote Latin and they wanted to give English a little bit of that prestige as well.
Did they exist at the same time as the simplified spelling society?
I know that there was also a simplified spelling movement.
And did those overlap in time or were they sort of separate?
So these hyper-educated spellings are features of the Renaissance.
They come in at the Renaissance.
But at that same time there's also a movement arising in English for spelling reform.
As soon as we get the incipient standardization of English spelling.
So we're talking about the area when the printing press is introduced into England.
1476 is the year William Caxton brings the printing press to England.
And you start to get a real force towards spelling a given word a given way.
This is also sort of an ideological thing.
It's a practical thing, because printers are able to mass-produce books, and so you're going to see the same spellings over and over again.
They start to develop house styles as well.
But there's also an ideological component to it, which is that there's an idea that arises in the Renaissance and into the modern period that a word is a thing with a spelling and a meaning.
And there's a proper way to spell, and there's an improper way to spell.
This is very alien to the medieval mindset.
If you read a medieval text one of the things that when I'm teaching say Old English, which is a language of the early Middle Ages you just see the same word spelled five or six different times on the page.
And it's often really strange when you encounter that for the first time.
You think, what are they doing?
Do they not know how to spell it?
No, they just didn't care.
It's such a foreign concept.
It is, but there are hints of it.
We have hints of it.
So think of a word like and.
We can spell and A-N-D, the normal way to spell it, but we can also spell it with an ampersand.
We can also spell it with a plus.
We can also spell it N in texting.
These different spellings sometimes have different social meanings, but they're all valid ways of spelling the word and that we might you know.
In any given case, why did I use an ampersand and not write it out?
I don't know.
I wasn't really thinking about it.
I was just texting.
And so this is the similar kind of thought process in the Middle Ages, but scaled up to the entire language.
That makes sense.
When you look at documents from the Middle Ages, are there some that you would say are Do you look at them and be like that is almost like texting.
In our age, we have formal writing and informal writing.
When you're looking at much older manuscripts, do you have that same equivalent?
Like, oh, well, this is something they would have taken care with.
And this other piece of evidence over here is more like our texting.
There's a bit of a filter effect with these early texts because before printing and the mass production of books and other printed material it's expensive.
It's expensive to produce writing of any kind and to copy it.
So there's a bit of a filter.
It's more of the serious and formal stuff that survives.
Nevertheless, there are kinds of texts that give you a different side of the evidence.
So in Old English, we see lots of poems, theological treatises, philosophical works.
But then on the other side, we see land charters.
And land charters are much more, okay, my farm extends to this river and your farm begins there.
And don't be moving the boundary because we've set it.
And this is much more like the kind of shopping list, everyday language.
And those are really interesting because we see words in those land charters that we don't see anywhere else.
Giving us the indication that these were probably formal or colloquial words that we don't see until hundreds of years later in proper formal written texts.
Dog is an example of this.
First shows up in land charters, you know, hundreds of years before it shows up in literary texts.
Huh.
Why were they talking about dogs in land charters?
It seems that there was one person's farm that extended to the ford of the dogs, where the dogs, you know, crossed the river.
This is, I guess, how they talked about it.
But it's one of those little things that, you know, a linguist looks and says, huh, interesting.
Interesting, because normally what they talk about dogs they talk about hund, like hound or like the German word.
And dog is really this unique thing in English.
That's a bit of a sidetrack, but it's an interesting story.
It just goes to show you that not every text from these early periods is sort of highfalutin language.
You know philosophy and poetry.
There is some earthy stuff too.
Yeah.
And so when you look in the Oxford English Dictionary, I'll often see, you know, a list of I don't know 20 different spellings for a word.
And, you know, so are most of those are pre-printing press because it was all willy nilly then?
Or you know how much.
I guess I'm asking like, how much did it slow down after the printing press?
It didn't slow down immediately, but we were on that march to standardization.
And so this is the other side of it, which is the ideological side, the idea that a language should be fixed in the sense both of pinned, so it can't move, And also repaired.
And the idea is the proper language in say, the Renaissance and early modern period, the proper language is Latin.
We all know the proper language.
That's it.
It's Latin.
That's the model.
Latin doesn't change.
It's a dead language.
English should be more like Latin.
It should have proper ways of spelling things.
It should have established norms.
It should have rules that you shouldn't contravene lest you look foolish or uneducated.
But before that, there was a little bit more of a free-for-all.
And spelling was one area in which that free-for-all reigned supreme.
If we look at the later Middle Ages, so roughly 50s, 1100 to around 1450, around up to the time of that printing press in 1476, we get a real diversity of how things are spelled.
This later Middle Ages period is called Middle English.
This is the period of the English language that culminates in Chaucer.
So if anyone's a fan of the Canterbury Tales and you've ever seen any of the original manuscripts or editions of the text, you'll see the spelling's pretty crazy.
And the reason for that is that English is sort of on the outs, right?
In 1066, we have the Norman Conquest.
A bunch of French speakers come over and take over England.
And that becomes the language of the high class, the nobility at that time.
And English is still written, but not written. by government, not for a few hundred years.
And without government's hand and without the church's hand in matters, people just start to write more how they speak.
And so you get this.
When you look at the Oxford English Dictionary, you see all those forms, all those crazy spellings.
A lot of them are coming from this Middle English, this later Middle Ages period, where you have this real profusion of different dialects and different ways of spelling things.
But it does continue to a certain extent onwards and frankly to this day as well.
Yeah.
And so Caxton, with the printing press, he had to decide, you know, which words to use, which spellings to use.
He was pretty influential, right in sort of setting, in the direction we are today, on how we spell certain things, even though it wasn't like set in stone and we don't spell a lot of things the way they did back then.
There were some pivotal important points then, right?
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes.
The Caxum was a pivotal figure in the printers that followed him as well.
There were moves.
Every few decades you start to see English moving more, a little bit more towards standardization in that period.
It starts before printing.
It starts with the Chancery standard.
So as English starts to become used as a written language for government, then you start to see a kind of standard emerging, one way, centered around London.
Of course that's the center of power, center of population, center of power commerce, center of everything in england at that time, and arguably, you know, not just at that time.
So the, the london dialect, really begins to take over and caxton is also set up shop in that region and that language begets almost all of the dialects of english that we we know today.
Yeah, I have to tell you, about 10 years ago I went on a trip to England and I went to the White Tower and I saw the bust of William the Conqueror.
And then we went to.
I forget what it's called, but there's a little chapel next to Westminster Abbey, I believe.
And there's a stained glass window in honor of Caxton.
So I was dragging my husband along on all these like linguistic adventures.
I'm like, it's William the Conqueror.
And he's like, why do I care?
I had a lot of fun.
Language does have a lot of influence on, well, it's all tied up in social ideas.
And you touched on this a little bit, but can you talk a little bit more about how Language and spelling, like through these times had, you know, social and interpersonal meaning and how that influenced the change as well?
When you start to see the emergence of a fixed and standard ideal for language even though the reality often changes is different.
But there's this ideal that emerges as the centuries go on and we get closer to the modern age, and language becomes a vehicle for social advancement.
If you are able to master the norms of this standard language, you're going to get ahead in the world a lot more easily than if you don't.
And so this has effects on people's accents, has effect on dialects and particular grammatical forms, even to this day.
And it has a huge effect on spelling.
Because if you have a single target to aim for and you don't hit it well, it reflects poorly on you in that kind of a society.
And frankly, to this day, there are still consequences to spelling things in one way or another.
And standardized education or the public education, encourages us to learn the spelling system of the language, which really doesn't admit much variation.
There is a little bit around the edges there from one country to another.
You might spell color O-R. at the end, or O-U-R at the end.
But compared to the variation you see in earlier periods in history, there's very little variation in English spelling today.
So becoming well-versed in the spelling system becomes a socially prestigious and desirable thing.
And this is the movement, this is the milieu in which spelling bees come into being.
Because If you have kids and they're going through school and you know that learning to spell English in the standardized form is going to be important to their lives well, why not set them to compete right?
Give them a prize if they do it well, because it's something that you want them to be able to do.
And it becomes a real project in the United States, especially to inculcate, to teach young students, the standardized spelling system of English which you know, even though I've tried to defend it, it is a bit weird and it's quite chaotic.
So there's work to be done for those poor students.
Right.
We have though, through, and tough.
I loved how you debunked the goaty fish story.
Yeah, the goaty fish story.
This is one that I love because these anecdotes, they attach themselves to the famous wits of their day.
I've written recently about the one that's attributed to Churchill.
This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.
Some of your listeners may be familiar with that story against the rule of never to end a sentence with a preposition.
And this gets put in Churchill's mouth as being transparently obvious.
This is the sort of, I think the phrase is errant pedantry, up with which I will not put.
It varies from anecdote to anecdote, and that's sort of how you can tell it's not real.
Churchill apparently never said it, but it attached to him.
Similarly, this idea that English spelling is so chaotic that G-H-O-T-I is a perfectly valid way to spell fish.
This gets attributed to George Bernard Shaw.
And the reason for this is A he was a famous wit of his day, but B he was also very interested in spelling reform.
And he, in fact, left money in his will to fund the further form of the English spelling.
There's actually an alphabet that's been created called Shavian, which is not based on the Latin alphabet at all.
It's a phonetic spelling system for English, and it's quite nice looking.
That's my point of view, at least.
Some people don't like it, but I think it's quite nice looking.
And it's all online.
You can check it out and learn to write your diary in Shavian, and no one will know what.
Do you know why it's called Shavian?
It's after Shaw.
So the Shavian is the adjective form that people use of Shaw going off of the WV.
There's a historical similarity between the two obviously, in terms of their pronunciation thing too.
Yeah, it is.
So George Bernard Shaw developed the Shavian alphabet and he left money in his will for spelling reform and alternative alphabets.
He left money for someone to do that.
And then someone later created the alphabet that bears his name.
But it bears his name because he funded it, not because he created it.
That's the reason, at least why, in my opinion, this story about Goatee has attached itself to Shaw.
But it actually first appears in writing before Shaw was even born.
And it's a sort of a joke in the letter of one person to another that G-H-O-T-I could conceivably spell fish.
And you think, that's very strange.
It looks like it would spell goatee to me.
But the G-H does make an F sound in fish.
Tough, laugh, cough.
The O does make an I sound in women.
So you got fi.
And then T-I makes a sh sound in nation or any number of those shun words.
So G-H-O-T-I conceivably could spell fish, right?
But if you look at it, you say goatee almost certainly, right?
And the reason for that is that English actually does have rules.
English is not so lawless that goatee, G-H-O-T-I, could spell fish.
The GH spelling an F sound only ever applies at the end of well, never applies, let's say, at the start of a word.
At the start of a word, GH is always G.
I don't think there's any exception to that.
The O, letter O spelling this E sound in women, I think that only occurs in literally that one word.
So, you know, not what you would want to base the spelling system on.
And the T-I spelling sh only occurs when there's another vowel following it.
So nation, you have the O after it, and that allows you to spell it as to pronounce it as sh.
It would never work that way at the end of a word.
So you take these things out of context.
Yes, in theory it could spell fish, but the rules of English spelling actually do have logic which forbid that.
And indeed it's actually a pretty decent spelling of goatee which I learned in researching.
This is a real word.
Oh, what does it mean?
Having the qualities of a goat.
Really?
I bet you couldn't see that coming.
Yeah.
But it's not spelled that way when it's... No, it's spelled G-O-A-T-Y, but it is technically a word.
Amazing.
So it's a fun internet meme, but it's actually not true.
Like so many fun internet memes.
It has a hint of truth, but it's got truthiness.
Exactly, exactly.
And I always hate to, you know, go around and sort of pour water on people's parades and things like that.
But it's still fun.
It's a fun one.
It is.
Yeah.
And then, to finish up, when someone subscribes to your newsletter, one of the things you say in the introduction, the welcome email, is I'm the person who can't stop thinking about why we say went instead of goad and who wants to tell you about it.
So I'm going to give you a chance to tell us about it.
Yeah, this is a really interesting one.
So the verb to go has this very strange past tense went.
And it almost looks like it's a completely separate word.
And in fact, it was a completely separate word.
And we actually use this word infrequently in English today, which is the verb wend.
You can wend your way. somewhere.
You don't really use when in any other contexts, at least I don't.
But, you know, I've been known to wend my way from one place to another.
And it's clearly a verb of motion in the past.
We might say, I wended my way today, if we were so inclined.
But in centuries before that, we would have said, I went my way.
And this past tense of wend starts to attach itself to the verb go.
And it's really strange.
Why would it do that?
Well, the verb go actually had a weirdly unrelated past tense in Old English as well.
So the verb was gone, to go.
And in the past tense it was eude.
Eude which, if it existed in modern English, it would be something like I eed.
So today I go, yesterday I eed.
Oh, which I don't think that one got that one got cut maybe for good reason.
But then what do you do?
Do you innovate something new gold?
Or do you just take another verb of motion that you already have in the language and attach the past tense of that verb to go?
And that's the choice, if you can call it that, that English made.
It just sounded perhaps at the time too weird to say goad.
It sounds weird for us to say goad.
You might expect a small child to say, I goad.
I go to school yesterday or maybe, maybe smaller than that.
I go to the park or something like that.
But it's not something that.
It's something that sort of that we've had, we've heard.
We've never heard that before.
And if someone were to introduce it, it would ring false, because And this is a way of expressing a broader point, which is that irregularity tends to hang out in the most common words of a language, because we don't like doing a lot of work as humans, you know.
We have a sort of drive to efficiency, we might say, or drive to laziness.
And memorizing all of these irregular forms of verbs is work.
And so what we do is we regularize.
And over time, even formerly irregular verbs will become regularized.
For example, help, to help.
This used to have a past tense.
It was...
Holp.
Now we say helped.
We've regularized that verb.
But in the past, people talk about having been holpen.
I was holpen.
You can even hear this in some Christmas carols if you know where to look.
But we've regularized that because it's work to maintain all of this irregularity.
But we tend not to regularize the most common verbs in the language because we hear them so often that it doesn't really feel like to our minds.
It's not work to really keep those forms in.
We hear them thousands of times a week, so there's no chance that we won't learn them.
Whereas the less common verbs.
You may never hear that past tense of this particular verb, and so your mind will just come up with a regular past tense.
Because why not you do that around your kids?
Suddenly they've never heard the irregular one at all and to them it's just a regular verb.
So this is how languages sort of regularize over time.
That's one tendency, at least in the history of language.
But go is way too common to fall victim to that or to be regularized by that.
Yeah, that's fascinating.
I've never heard that story about Wendt before.
That's great.
Well, thank you so much for being here.
This has been wonderful.
If you're a Grammarpalusian, we're going to have a whole another conversation in our bonus segment.
We're going to talk about whether Americans speak more like Shakespeare than British people do, and we'll get Colin's book recommendations.
He has a book club we'll talk about too.
But for now, thank you so much for being here, Colin.
I know there's a lot of places people can find you online.
Why don't you give people the rundown?
Probably the easiest place to go is Dead Language Society.
That's my newsletter.
Come up with something along the lines of what we've been talking about every Wednesday.
And otherwise, I'm around the internet at Colin Gorey on various platforms.
Wonderful.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
My pleasure.
