British Association for Applied Linguistics

British Association for Applied Linguistics

Linguistics Association of Great Britain

COMMITTEE FOR LINGUISTICS IN EDUCATION

The Synchronic Organization of English Spelling

Michael Stubbs

CLIE WORKING PAPERS Number 10 1986

CLIE (the Committee for Linguistics in Education) is sponsored by the British Association for Applied Linguistics and the Linguistics Association of Great Britain. CLIE Working Papers and other publications are published to encourage systematic debate on matters of educational linguistics. The views expressed are those of individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of CLIE, LAGB or BAAL. Copies of CLIE publications are available from the Editor. Proposals for publications should also be submitted to the Editor:

EDITOR: Thomas Bloor ' LanguageStudiesUnitAstonUniversityBirmingham B4 7ET

CLIE Working Paper No 10 Michael Stubbs The Synchronic Organization of English Spelling 1986 (reprinted May 1989; original editor R A Hudson) ISSN 0964-8275

This is a report of a meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain in Norwich in April 1986. There have now been several such sessions at LAGB meetings. Their aim is to take a topic of potentially wide interest and importance in language in education; and to try to find out what current thinking is amongst linguists: whether there is a consensus; whether linguists' views actually differ from what their view is assumed to be; and so on.

Acknowledgements

The discussion was chaired by Michael Stubbs (University of London Institute of Education). Three people were invited to constitute a panel and to help draft and consider in advance a series of questions. They were: Gillian Brown (Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex), TedCarney(Department of General Linguistics, University of Manchester) and Richard Coates(School of Social Sciences, University of Sussex). In the session, they commented on each question before comments were invited from the fifty or so other linguists present.

The list of those contributing to the discussion was:

Gillian Brown, University of Essex (panel)

Keith Brown, University of Essex

Ted Carney, University of Manchester (panel)

Joanna Channell, University of Nottingham

Richard Coates, University of Sussex (panel)

Margaret Deuchar, University of Sussex

Anthony Fox, University of Leeds

Steve Harlow, University of York

Richard Hudson, UniversityCollegeLondon

Marion Owen, Acorn Computers

Michael Stubbs, University of London Institute of Education (chair)

Christopher Upward, University of Aston

This report does not attempt to give a literal account of the discussion. In particular, I have altered the sequence of much of the discussion to try and bring together related points which were made at different times. I have, however, done my best to attribute points to the individuals who made them. A draft of the report was circulated to all the individuals who spoke and their corrections were used to produce an improved version. I received written comments from G Brown, Carney, Coates, Deuchar, Fox, Hudson, Owen and Upward.

Definition of the topic

There are clearly a large number of possible directions from which one might approach English spelling: how it should be taught; whether and how it might be reformed; prescriptive attitudes towards it; etc. For the purposes of this discussion, however, such topics were excluded, and the discussion was restricted quite severely to the synchronic description of English spelling. Topics such as teaching and reforming spelling are important. But any rational discussion of them depends, at least partly, on a prior synchronic description. This is how the topic was defined in detail before the discussion.

In this session we will try and discover what the current view of linguists is on the nature of the English spelling system: that is, what the relation is between letters and phonology, morphology, lexis, syntax and semantics (and anything else).

We will concentrate on the synchronic organisationof how the system functions now (for although all features of English spelling have, by definition, diachronic explanations, many of these have, in turn, synchronic motivatiuns).

We wi1l not discuss questions of how spelling should be taught (though some of the things we say may have implications for how children can come to understand the system).

We should also avoid discussion of spelling systems used for other languages, unless a precise example illuminates some principle which is relevant for English. It may be useful nevertheless to discuss briefly the typOlogy of spelling systems (eg it is widely stated that Spanish and Finnish are more consistently phonemic than English). cf question 1.

Nor will we directly discuss questions of spelling reform, since this could take us away from linguistic analysis into questions of printing and publishing technology and economics (though some of the things we say may well provide the basis for any coherent reform, as opposed to superficial tinkering with the system, on the assumption, for example, that the system must be phonemic).

We will not directly discuss other aspects of the writing system such as punctuation: the relations between punctuation, phonology and syntax are so complex and under-described, that they could probably form the subject of another Ed Ling session at some time.

Spelling is obviously a topic of central interest to many educationalists, though there is still a lot of confusion about it and some very simplistic ideas around. For example, the DES/HMI document English from 5-16 (1984) says that 11 year old pupils should "know the rules of spelling". There is no further comment at all: no indication of what this actually involves.

From the point of view of our discussion, we will also assume that we are concerned primarily wi th native speakers of English; and that "knowing the rules of spelling" means relating established and familiar phonological forms to orthographic forms. Other problems could arise with ESL or EFL speakers.

General points

The discussion certainly showed that the English spelling system deserves considerable attention from linguists. There are clearly many outstanding descriptive problems concerning what would be the most consistent overall synchronic account. In addition, the discussion made problematic several concepts which are often taken for granted by linguists, for example: the concept of rule; the distinction between prescription and description, which becomes problematic, more generally, in discussions of standardized varieties of language; the locus of the system, within social institutions or within the usage of individuals; and therefore the notion of linguistic competence - whether the system is learned explicitly (as a foreign language might be) or acquired naturally (as a native language is).

Such points may reinforce the argument above that any question of reform would be premature, before the system is much more systematically understood than it is at present.

Which spelling system?

A question which came up throughout the discussion was: what is meant by the concept of the English spelling system.

A widespread assumption is that it is what is represented in dictionaries and current printed books. However, the status of the English spelling system is very different from that of the English pronunciation system. First, obviously, because it is standardized in a way that the pronunciation system is not: there are only a couple of major dialectal variants (British and American) and the variation between them is very small. Second, more interestingly, because many individuals appear to have a much greater personal variability in performance and in competence in spelling than they have in pronunciation. Most people appear to have some areas of spelling where they quite frequently do not know what the correct form is: eg - ent/ant or - ible/able endings. If we are here concerned with the institutional status of English spelling, it is relevant to point out that the current regularity of spelling is a rather recent phenomenon, perhaps 150 years old, and is perhaps shared productively only by a small minority of the population.

We would get a very different view if we looked at ordinary people's actual spellings, eg in Shops, where we find examples such as

Leave your trolley's here; Property's in your area

and, in fact, the almost ubiquitous use of's for plural (though it does also occur in other contexts, eg, it's or whose, who's confusions). (G. BROWN.)

Spelling may be a case, however, where linguists have to take a totally prescriptive attitude: the spelling system is clearly dictated by publishers, and it is perfectly reasonable that this should be the case. Individuals clearly do spell in their own way, but on the whole this is out of ignorance of the institutional system. (HUDSON.) Nothing seems to be lost by individuals spelling in their own way, and correction may become mere pedantry. (G. BROWN.) Such pedantry may, however, have severe social consequences.

The system is prescriptively defined, and one can therefore talk about individual divergence from what is in dictionaries. The spelling system is transmitted through authorities, and this system serves as a focal point for those who come into contact with it. There are therefore different strategies open to someone unsure of a spelling: they can look it up in a dictionary, which gives a guarantee of correctness; or they can analogize. Linguists are very punctilious about avoiding condemnation of spoken language forms which are just different from the standard. But exactly the same is going on as far as spelling is concerned: individuals extract the most salient principles from their partial knowledge of the whole system. (HARLOW.)

In summary, it is necessary to distinguish clearly between (a) the institutional system which is largely the creation of publishers, and the associated standardizing apparatus of dictionartes, etc; and (b) the system which is acquired by individual users. The discussion which follows largely concerns (a); however individual usage does introduce further complexity into the system; and. in particular, makes the concept of spelling "rules" a difficultone. (STUBBS.)

The distinction between institutional and individual is related to the distinction between prescriptive and descriptive. (UPWARD) But it is not the same distinction, since it is possible to give a descriptive account of the institutional system which, in historical terms, has been prescribed. Seen in a historical perspective, linguists' demands for a strictly descriptive stance were formulated as a reaction against ill-formed or naive
prescriptivism. It is easier to defend an informed prescriptivism: ie where prescription is based on description. The real objection is to the reverse of this: ie where description is based on prescription. (STIJBBS.)

Question( l )

As a starting point, can we agree that the English spelling system is alphabetic and therefore basically phonemic; but that it is clearly not a purely phonemic system? It is often described as a mixed morphophonemic system. Is this accurate? What does it mean?

English spelling is alphabetic in the sense that words are represented by a series of letters which relate to phoneme-sized chunks rather than, say, to syllables. It is clearly not simply phonemic in that there are complex one-many relations holding between phonemes and letters, and between letters and phonemes. It is morphophonemic in so far as some morphemes are consistently represented in the orthography, in spite of phonemic/stress variation when spoken, for example:

-s in regular plurals;

-edin regular past tense forms;

photoand graph in forms like photograph, photography:

president in forms like presidentand presidential (though presidency).

It is, however, not consistently morphophonemic in that other morphemes are variably represented in conformity (at least to some extent) with their phonological forms:

impossible, indefinite, irregular, illegal

leaf, leaves; knife, knives

To that extent at least the system is mixed. Morphemes may be differentlyrepresented despite similar pronunciation: mou~e, mi~e: speech, speak. It is of course further mixed by special orthographic considerations, features of the orthographic system itself, which have nothing to do with morphology or
phonology (as we shall see in later discussion): eg standardly words (asopposed to morphemes) in English are not written with v in final position, so that give, have, loveetc. are all written with a final e which has no
implications for vowel-quality, but makes the written form conform to English orthographic requirements: thus Molotov, lav, luv, are marked as non-standard spelling forms. (Note that many writers write havn't rather than haven't).(G. BROWN.)

The question assumes, however, that there is a choice between just two polar terms: phonemicand morphophonemic. In fact, there is a third definitional term missing: morpholexical (Matthews 1972, Sorrroorstein 1975). An alternation is morphophonemic if and only if there is phonological
conditioning. A morpholexical alternation is controlled by some other conditioning: either gramnatical or due to individual lexical items (eg homophones such as way, weigh).

It is a valuable starting point to assume a synchronic description. But a diachronic description is never far away in English spelling. As a language, English has a strong tendency to borrow from other languages, and
when such languages are written alphabetically, there is a tendency to take over spellings intact in borrowed words. It is therefore necessary to study speakers' sense of which words are borrowed: speakers' beliefs about the source of words influence how spellings are chosen. English is not consistent in this respect, but it does behave differently with reference to what are broadly etymological sub-components of the vocabulary.

The Germanic vocabulary, more accurately stems of Germanic lexical words, is spelled largely phonemically. (There are many exceptions to this generalization amongst grammatical words, and it is often pointed out that the impression of extreme irregularity in English spelling is partly due to relatively few such high-frequency words.) Germanic affixes are spelled morphophonemically: eg -ed, -s, un-. That is, the negative prefix un- always has the same spelling despite variable pronunciation.

The Latinate vocabulary behaves in different ways. The words are largely spelled morpholexically:

eg divine, divinity; serene, serenity: profane, profanity.

That is, the same vowel letters are retained despite differences in pronunciation. The vowel letter is a morpholexical cover symbol for alternating long and short vowels. However, in the Latinate vocabulary, the
consonants are largely phonemically spelled, with the exception of etymological spellings (eg ti in nation etc).

A preliminary conclusion is that there is no overall typological consistency in the system, but pulls from various directions.

The system has to be looked at historically, because one of its characteristics is inertia. Spellings which were fluid before the seventeenth century are now fixed. One cannot simply talk of the present-day system,
because some forms were in their present shape before certain changes in pronunciation took place. (UPWARD.) However, all features of language have diachronic explanations: this is a tautology. An important issue is whether features of English spelling which are apparently due to historical accident, alsonow have synchronic motivations. It is a fact that English spelling has been very resistant to change, and this stability requires explanation, not dismissal as mere inertia. One obvious explanation is that morphology and
lexis are more stable than phonology, and that English spelling relates to levels other than phonology. (STUBBS.)

In general, the ability to assign a word to an etymological class affects the interpretation of the spelling. For example, chore would be pronounced [k] if interpreted as Greek (cf choral), or [tʃ] if interpreted as Romance. Similar problems arise with words such as chiliasm, chiropody, though suffixes may show the Greek origin. In epoxy, a Germanic origin would give stress on the initial syllable, a Romance origin would give stress on the second syllable. In fact, most native speakers have no knowledge of etymology, and this provides a strong reason for restricting discussion to synchronic description in most cases. Nevertheless, speakers do take account of non-native spellings, and have some notion of foreign origins (and therefore of etymology) at least in cases of recent borrowings. (COATES.)

There are many more etymological categories than previously due to diachronically recent loans from a wide range of languages. Both pronunciations and spellings tend to be retained from the original. language, and every time this happens, the complexity of the system increases. (HUDSON.) However, retention of pronunciation is a difficult notion, and spellings from languages which do not use the Roman alphabet are highly variable when anglicized: cf various spellings for tandoori, Hindu, etc (COATES) , or for Koran, Quran, Gaddafi, Kaddafi, Qadhafi (STIJBBS).

A lack of etymological knowledge may lead individuals to misinterpret some forms. For example, vigesimal could be given various pronunciations; but the knowledge that it is derived from Latin would affect the interpretation of the spelling. This is particularly the case with words which are likely to be met first or only in their written forms. In extreme cases (egsyntagm) there may beno appropriate pronunciation at all. (COATES. )

The tendency to preserve the spelling of morphemes is an indication that phonological information is a very secondary requirement in a writing system. The traditional Chinese writing system obviously conveys very little phonological information indeed: the main function of the characters is to identify morphemes. It may be convenient or economical in some ways for a system to give phonological information, but it is not necessary and not a prime function. (FOX.) More generally, it is dangerous to say that a writing system must have certain properties. A survey of the world's writing systems demonstrates that one can get by with almost anything. The Japanese writing system seems hideously complex to us, but literacy rates are very high in Japan. The complexity of a system is not necessarily an obstacle to its efficient use. (HARLOW.)

In English, there is much more variation in the system than is usually recognized, even by those arguing that the system needs reform, etc. The following was seen on a houseboat in Little Venice in London:

£30K + VAT. xxx

Note that this comprises largely logograms (eg. K = "thousand"); that the order of the written symbols is not the order of its spoken form (not 30); and that VAT is now a spoken back-formation from a written abbreviation (STUBBS. )

Question(2)

Presumably a synchronic description of English spelling must include rules of various kinds. Could we agree the following terminology and elementary conceptual framework?