Making Sense of English Spelling

I’ve used this title for workshops and conference presentations and professional developments — and I’m using it again for exciting work next month in Portland! But it’s also what I do for kids and families, on a daily basis: Make Sense of English Spelling.

While schools and schoolteachers bask in the ignorance of lists and quizzes, I take those lists and make sense of them. Word sums. A matrix, maybe. Word histories. Patterns that are the same. Patterns that differentiate.

Last week, I made sense of a spelling list for a dyslexic 6th grader I’ve studied with a handful of times. He got 100%. I don’t really care about that grade, but I do care about what it reveals: that dyslexics are not phlawed people who need to be phonemed to death; they are liberated by the truth about their own language. After only about 6 or 7 meetings, he’s self-reporting that reading is “easier” and “makes more sense.”

Today, one of my favorite Mother Bears posted her kiddo’s silly spelling list:

Screen Shot 2018-02-15 at 10.01.20 AM

Eyeroll.

Not a single one of these words is a native English word. What, praytell, makes papaya a bigger challenge than macaroni? These are abritrarily grouped according to “Spelling Words” (which are somehow not challenging?) and “Challenge Words” (which also have to be spelled?). How totally random.

Instead, how about if we grouped them into Non-English Foods and Non-English Natural Phenomena? Or New World Words and Old World Words? Or How Imperialism Stole Words and Butchered Them Before Handing Them Over to English?

Native and nativized English lexical words do not end in single syllabic vowels other than <y>. A final <e> is non-syllabic; English doesn’t end words in <i> or <u>, and polysyllabic lexical words that end in <o> or <a> are not native. Sofa, aroma, banjo, bongo, tacohaikucaribouplateau, all adopted.

Really, there are so many ways to make sense of these. Here’s one:

Not English because it ends in <i>:

khaki ~ From the Persian word for ‘dust.’ Besides the <i>, the <kh> is also foreign. We find it in words we’ve adopted from Persian, Hindi, Arabic, Turkish, sometimes Greek, and former Soviet-block languages. Also non-English: the <k> after a single vowel letter. Like yak or anorak.

safari ~ From the Arabic word for ‘journey.’ Picture a dusty journey through the desert sands and you’ve got khaki and safari. The vowels are all <a>s outside of that final <i>.

macaroni ~ From Italian, of course, in which the <i> on the end of pasta marks them as plural (in Italian only. In English we would say macaronies and spaghettis).  The word was probably originally Greek, but it denotes paste or pasta or dough and is related to macaroon and macaron — two different kinds of sweet (pasty) treats. I could go on about that <on> in there, so I will: it’s all over Romance languages. In French, it’s <on>. We anglicized it to <oon>: saloon (compare salon), spitoon, balloon, cartoon (carton)… In Italian it’s <one>, and when that’s pluralized, it’s <oni>. Like Patrone. Note the single <c>.

Just for fun:

spaghetti: ‘little strings’
linguini: ‘little tongues’
orichetti: ‘little ears’
radiatori: ‘little radiators’
ditalini: ‘little thimbles / little digits’
penne: ‘feathers‘ (plural of penna

tsunami ~ From Japanese, in which it is a compound: tsu ‘harbor’ + nami ‘wave.’ In Japanese, /ts/ is an affricate / cluster phoneme. In English, sometimes we pronounce the [t] and sometimes we don’t.

Not English because Imperialism:

succotash ~ Corn and lima beans. Native New World foods. Note the <cc> double. Native American loanwords are one of the few places we see that non-English <cc>: raccoon, tobacco, moccasin, yucca.

papaya ~ The same thing as a pawpaw. This is the Spanish / Portguese version of the New World word.

barbeque ~ Also spelled <barbecue>, because it’s not English. It’s also a Spanish / Portguese rendering of a New World word.

tomato ~   also a Spanish / Portguese rendering of a Native American word.

banana ~ Spanish / Portguese version of a native Mande (Niger-Congo) word.

Not English because food (in addition to the above):

yogurt ~ Also spelled <yoghurt> or <yoghourt>, because it’s not English. Turkish. That <gh> is sometimes in there? It’s like the <kh> that we saw above. Why are words that can be spelled multiple ways even on spelling tests? Duh.

artichoke ~ from Arabic via Spanish & Italian. A handful of food words from/through Arabic start with <a>: alcohol, alfalfa, apricot, aubergine, because of the Arabic article al.

sauerkraut ~ The <kr> sequence is foreign. A German compound: sauer ‘sour’ + kraut ‘cabbage.’ People have called Germans ‘Krauts’ since the 19th century, but the morpheme just means cabbage. That <au> as /aʊ/ is German: frau, ablaut, umlaut.

Not English words because not English things:

karate ~ Japanese. The <ka> sequence is foreign. The syllabic final <e> is foreign. The CVCVCV is very Japanese (also in tsu.na.mi).

koala ~ From an Aboriginal Australian word for the animal, of course. The <ko> sequence is foreign, as is a final <a> in a polysyllable (see also banana, papaya).

stampede ~ Another Spanish contribution to the English of the New World, this used to be stampedo, and it’s related to stamp; they are both historically Germanic and have a denotation of ‘press, pound.’

The red words have European origins. The purple ones are Japanese. Green are New World. Maroon and brown and orange are Middle Eastern and African and Aboriginal. At least give kids an idea that words, like people, are diversely storied. Their foreign origins make them more interesting, not something to be avoided.

*                          *                       *

This is the time of year when many of my linguist friends are reading (and often groaning) through piles of urgent and tender and cloying personal statements from would-be linguists and speech pathologists applying for university admission. Many years ago, I wrote something like that, a statement of purpose for my application to graduate study in linguistics at the University of Chicago. My stated interest, at the time, was admittedly lofty: I wanted to build a career on teaching tolerance through the study of foreign language.

I had no idea then that my career would orbit around English, let alone around English spelling. I’d argue that my experiences with foreign languages equipped me uniquely to make sense of English spelling; would-be linguists who are not polyglots lack a broad enough linguistic vision to be able to do so. It wasn’t my plan, but everything I ever studied in earnest prepared me for this life: languages, logic, set and number theories, writing, and linguistics.

Good thing I worked so hard then so I can explain spelling lists now.

Someone ought to.

*                          *                       *

This next point may sound like I am politicizing things, and I am.

In a time of rising nationalism and xenophobia, in an era in which immigrants are demonized and widely and falsely associated with crime, in a day in which it is increasingly hard to Dream, for crying out loud, can we please at least talk to kids about the very real and very cool things that can and do happen when different peoples and languages and cultures contribute to each other?

Like karate and barbecue and macaroni. Hold the succotash, though. I can’t make sense of lima beans.

 

10 Comments

  1. Adrienne says:

    If a word is from Japanese, more of a pictorial language, why didn’t someone convert the spelling to letters that follow the English language’s rules? The word had a fresh start in our language.

    Sent from my iPhone

    >

    • Japanese is not “more of a pictorial language.” There is no such thing as a “pictorial language.” There are pictographic ways to represent human thought, like stop signs or disabled symbols on parking spaces. And the earliest known writing systems were pictographic. But save “pictorial” for photo shoots and illustrations.

      Japanese has three writing systems: hiragana and katakana are both syllabic (not pictographic or even ideogrammatic), and the kanji (see that? Kanji, with an ‘i’, not congee, which is something different) are historically Chinese and thus ideogrammatic or logogrammatic. That’s not the same as pictographic.

      As far as “why didn’t someone convert the spelling to letters that follow the English language’s rules” goes — I gotta call that out as pretty ignorant. For starters, um, that’s exactly what they DID. The “rule” in English “letters” is that a final /i/ in words of Japanese origin is spelled with an ‘i’. By taking a Japanese word and spelling it in Roman letters, also known as transcribing it, someone DID exactly as you suggest. Japanese vowels are rendered in English as single vowel letters. Easy peasy.

      Moreover, did you ever consider that there is value in *preserving* the foreignness of a thing, in not Anglicizing everything so that it’s impossible to tell anything about its origin? Why assume that that it is both always possible and desirable to make everything assimilate to English (if that were even possible). Did you ever consider that there is value in *preserving* the foreignness of a thing, in not Anglicizing everything so that it’s impossible to tell anything about its origin? Did you ever consider that the language of origin has pronunciations that English doesn’t, and thus there are no English ways to spell something? Like the /ts/ in tsunami.

  2. Brilliant post and I don’t use that word lightly.

  3. I’ll second that! Bravo! Thank you so much for this.

  4. As always, great information, so well presented. I have tried to get Western Australia’s five teacher training universities to arm teacher trainees with even basic knowledge on the reasons behind English spelling, to no avail. The general public are always delighted to get a deeper understanding. As for encouraging curiosity and logical thinking in the class room, the basic duty of all teachers, that is disregarded from day one, from the first reading lesson. Keep up the good work. You are a light shining in the darkness.

  5. Pat says:

    Another corker. Fascinating (facts in nating – I made that up, don’t get mad, please) to read, apart from anything else.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *