Tomorrow I’m going to try to convince you that the English spelling system is actually… good.
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10.03.2026 13:09
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Tomorrow I’m going to try to convince you that the English spelling system is actually… good.
www.deadlanguagesociety.com
There’s a famous joke: English spelling is so broken that “ghoti” can spell “fish.”
‘Gh’ as in “enough,” ‘o’ as in “women,” ‘ti’ as in “nation.”
It’s meant to show that English spelling makes no sense. But it actually shows the opposite.
You may hear “shoo” in West Yorkshire, or “hoo” in the northwest Midlands.
But London chose “she,” so we're stuck with it.
As a result, one of the most common words in English is a mystery nobody can fully explain.
So London, the basis of most varieties of English today, ended up with “she.”
Another possible explanation: “scho” turned into “she” on analogy with the masculine “he.”
You can still hear descendants of other Middle English forms in rural dialects:
Here's what may have happened: people in the East Midlands took the “sh-” (spelled “sch-”) from the North and grafted it onto the “-e” vowel from the South. Two dialects, stitched together into one Frankenstein pronoun.
Many East Midlands speakers migrated to London in the wake of the Black Death..
The key to the change happened in the North. A sound shift, the same one that makes “huge sometimes sound like “shuge,” changed “hēo” to “scho.” Different enough from “he” to be unmistakable.
But the word we use today is “she,” not “scho.” And no straightforward line of descent can explain it.
For a stretch of medieval England, “he” and “she” were the same word.
The two words started out separate: Old English “hē” (he) and “hēo” (she). But around 1100, they merged into identical “he.”
In parts of England, they stayed that way.
But not in the dialects that became Standard English.
This might be the only conversation ever recorded in both Old English and Ancient Greek
youtu.be/2sSS5YxMnbQ?...
You can read the full story of this ill-timed technological innovation here:
www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/the-invent...
“Bite" sounded like "beet." "Beet" sounded like "bate,” and “bate” sounded like a lengthened version of “bat.”
The printing press froze the spelling as it was before this game of musical chairs began. If it had arrived just a generation later, English spelling would look completely different.
If you've ever studied Spanish, you know that their vowel letters are pronounced consistently: A is ‘ah,’ E is ‘eh,’ I is ‘ee,’ O is ‘oh,’ and U is ‘oo.’
English vowels used to work the same way.
When printing arrived in England in 1476, it started to standardize spelling.
The timing could not have been worse: English was in the middle of a massive upheaval called the Great Vowel Shift, in which many vowels in the language changed.
The spelling froze, while the pronunciation kept moving.
This week I wrote about how the printing press triggered a panic over Latin loanwords in the 16th century.
But the printing press did something else to English: it caused much of the chaos that haunts English spelling to this day.
All because it arrived just a little too early.
Most great English sentences draw on both Germanic and Romance/Latin layers of the language. If you start pulling at the Latin threads, the whole thing comes apart.
Here's the full story of what the purists were fighting about, and why it echoes today:
www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/em-dash-ai...
(I don't mind "mooned", for instance.)
The cause of this panic was ultimately technological change: the printing press had made it easy to flood English with Latin vocabulary.
But in the end, the purists lost. And English is probably richer for it.
"It is a truth everywhere acknowledged, that a onefold man in ownership of good wealth must be in want of a wife."
These 16th-century purists coined words like "mooned" for "lunatic," "fleshstrings" for "muscles," and "endsay" for "conclusion."
Some of these coinages were better than others.
"Question", after all, comes from Latin quaestio.
"Outrageous fortune"? No. Both French words. They'd be banned.
Hamlet would have raged against "unmeetly weird" instead (from Old English "unġemetlīċ" and "wyrd").
Jane Austen's most famous line would have been much altered as well...
Almost 500 years ago, a group of English writers decided Latin and French loanwords were corrupting the language. They wanted to replace them all with "pure English" alternatives.
If they'd won, Hamlet would have wondered "To be or not to be, that is the asking."
You can read it over at the Dead Language Society, where every em-dash is lovingly placed by human hands.
www.deadlanguagesociety.com
Leave the em-dash alone.
Are you editing em-dashes out of your prose? Leaving “artisanal” typos in your articles as proof of humanity?
No one wants their writing mistaken for “AI slop.”
But in avoiding that charge, we risk surrendering some of the best tools in the literary tradition.
Full story out tomorrow.
Why the worst idea in linguistics won’t die: Why the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is mostly wrong (mostly)
open.substack.com/pub/colingor...
I did not know that... truly bizarre. Thank you!
And the purists couldn’t even follow their own rules: Cheke alone used dozens of Latin loanwords in his own writing.
One of the few words championed by purists that's still in common use is “naysay,” probably because it was already used in Scotland before the purists ever got to it.
“Negation” was first attested before 1425, “logic” had been used by English writers since 1362, and “resurrection” since about 1300. “Prophet” was first used before the Norman Conquest!
The purists were pulling up roots, rather than pruning new growth...
One purist, Sir John Cheke, proposed “gainrising” for resurrection and “foresayer” for “prophet.” His colleague Ralph Lever gave us “witcraft” for logic and “naysay” for negation.
But these Latin-derived words had been used in English for generations.
In the 1550s, a group of purists decided Latin loanwords were corrupting the English language. Their solution was to coin “pure English” replacements.
Some of their proposals were pretty weird.
The whole system seems to have been built around brightness rather than hue.
So how did the modern system evolve? How did English go from six basic colours to the eleven we have today?
I wrote up the full story here: www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/history-en...
Old English colour words are genuinely strange.
First, there were only six basic colour terms, and they each covered a lot of the colour space.
The word brūn, the ancestor of "brown," could mean brown, purple, dark red, or the gleam of a polished sword.
And "blue" was barely in the picture.
This week, I wrote about how Greek and Russian speakers process blue differently than English speakers do, because their languages carve it into two colours.
But English has its own version of this story.
Speaking of good stories, if you'd like to read the full account of the long debate how language affects thought, it's up today on my newsletter:
www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/sapir-whor...