The Mysteries of English Spelling

1 Read these sentences aloud:/What is the height of the ceiling? // It’s eight meters.//
What do the words height, ceiling, and eight /have in common?// All these words include the letters ei,/but the letters are pronounced differently.// The same spelling is not always pronounced/in the same way.// Conversely,/some words are spelled differently/but are pronounced the same,/such as eight  and ate.// These examples show/that English spelling can be a challenge/for learners of the language.//

2 There are two main reasons/why English spelling is irregular.// First,/English words come from many different languages,/such as Greek, Latin, and French.// Most of these languages use the same Roman alphabet,/but they had different sounds/and different rules of spelling.// When their words became part of the English language,/their spellings remained/as they were.// One example is the word/from Italian, spaghetti.// In this word,/the sound [ɡ] is spelled gh,/and the sound [t] is spelled tt.// Another example is the letter g,/which is pronounced in different ways.// In the word anger ,/which has a Scandinavian origin,/the g  is a “hard g.”// However,/in the word danger,/which has a French origin,/the letter g  is a “soft g.”// English spelling patterns/show the history/of the language.// English is a mixture/of many different languages/and developed/over a period of hundreds of years.//

3 Second,/the gap between printing technology and language change/created irregular spelling.// In the 15th century,/mass printing of documents/became possible.// Because of this,/the spellings of words became fixed,/and they were recognized by people.// However,/while the spellings remained the same,/the pronunciations of some words/continued to change over time.// For example,/the word know /used to be pronounced as [knóu],/but the sound [k] gradually became silent.// Only the spelling was preserved.//

4 Today,/English is still changing.// Along with the development of social media,/we often see a text message/that reads “Thanx 4 ur help”/instead of “Thanks for your help.”// It is interesting to predict/how the spelling or pronunciation of English/will change in the future.//