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Recent Article from Spring 2006:

As If It Weren't Bad Enough Already

In the article “The Contradictions of Reading Content”, we occasionally refer to the English Language as crazy. English is spelled so inconsistently, it can be extremely frustrating for both students and teachers. Along those lines, we thought we would share an interesting - and frustrating - historical fact we encountered in “The Story of English” (McCrum, Cran and MacNeil, Viking, 1986). You may already know that English spellings are inconsistent primarily because our language is a mongrel with a lively past. It carries the historical traces of quite a few other languages spoken by the different groups who occupied the British Isles from before the Romans until the Renaissance. One section of the book discusses the state of the English Language shortly before Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote his famous dictionary. Both usage and spelling varied tremendously from location to location and from author to author. While reading about this period, we encountered the following sentence: “The situation had become further complicated by the work of bad scholars who, convinced by false etymologies, had changed words like iland, sissors, sithe, coud, and ancor into island, scissors, scythe, could and anchor.” Before we read this passage, it seemed bad enough that generations of students and teachers have had to suffer because the Norse attacked the Celts and the Normans attacked what was left of the Norse - not to mention the Angles and the Saxons getting into the act. Now it seems that a bunch of 17th century “scholars” made the whole thing worse. Sumtimes wee wunder - woodn’t it just be eezier to rerite the hole langwij?

 

 

 



 

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